Ahmed Najar, Playwright, Director, and Dabke DancerMenu +expandedcollapsed
Media for God’s Promise
Photos Poet Laura Hope-Gill and Writer Ahmed Najar
Ahmed Najar
Media Release
God’s Promise, a play by Ahmed Najar in collaboration with Laura Hope-Gill
Cockpit Theatre, September 16-18, 2021 www.cockpit.org.uk
Tickets: https://www.thecockpit.org.uk/show/gods_promise
Contact: Laura Hope-Gill, Producer
Cast: Ahmed Najar and Dafydd Gwyn Howells
Written and Directed by Ahmed Najar
An exciting collaboration between Palestinian playwright, Ahmed Najar, and Canadian-American writer, Laura Hope-Gill, the play brings to the stage the tension and tragedy of evictions of Palestinians from their homes by Jewish Settlers from the United States and Europe. The most recent rash of evictions in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah drew global attention as protests were met by nearly two weeks of Israeli bombs that killed more than two hundred people in Gaza, nearly half of them children. With the full force of their own courts behind them, settlers funded by non-profit organizations from abroad nonchalantly seize homes for themselves, and with equal nonchalance kill or prompt the killing of Palestinians who lived there.
In the play, God’s Promise, Najar presents the dynamics of this devastating, and ongoing, violation. Mohammed faces the challenge of mapping a route from his house to his grandmother’s house to get to his grandmother to take her to her hospital appointment. Anywhere else, this would not be a challenge. For Mohammed, though the distance is not long, the destiny is almost certain because he knows that there is a settler waiting outside his home to claim it. This predictable situation in Palestine makes it nearly impossible for Mohammed to think about what ought to be a simple act of normality. The dilemma between losing his home and getting to his grandmother becomes irrelevant for him when he can see what could happen to him. Mohammed’s strong belief of his rights to carry on his life normally drives him to face his destiny several times. In the end Mohammed realises that no matter what he does and where he goes his destiny will come to him and that he has to be reborn again and again to change this destiny.
For Najar, who emigrated to London from Gaza in 2003, the stories are much closer to home. During the attacks in May, he lived every day unsure whether Israeli bombs would strike his family. And every day, even when Israel is not bombing his home-city, he hears of these evictions from friends and family. “This is the Palestinian story,” he says. “It is not one week that appears in the news. It is every day. Every year. All our lives.” Najar’s father was one year old when his family was forced from family land in 1948. Najar and his siblings were raised in one of eight refugee camps comprising Gaza. He says, “There is sentimental meaning to this play. It is not just that we have to be, or can be, reborn, but that this is a story that continues across the generations.” As Mohammed in God’s Promises experiences, the situation continues until the story can be changed.
The play will be performed live at Cockpit Theatre September 16-18 with social distance protocols in place. Doors open at 7 pm. A Q&A follows the presentation.
Mohammed faces the challenge of mapping a route from his house to his grandmother’s house to get to his grandmother to take her to her hospital appointment. Anywhere else, this would not be a challenge. For Mohammed, though the distance is not long, the destiny is almost certain because he knows that there is a settler waiting outside his home to claim it. This predictable situation in Palestine makes it nearly impossible for Mohammed to think about what ought to be a simple act of normality. The dilemma between losing his home and getting to his grandmother becomes irrelevant for him when he can see what could happen to him. Mohammed’s strong belief of his rights to carry on his life normally drives him to face his destiny several times. In the end Mohammed realises that no matter what he does and where he goes his destiny will come to him and that he has to be reborn again and again to change this destiny. Najar says, “There is sentimental meaning to this play. It is not just that we have to be, or can be, reborn, but that this is a story that continues across the generations.”
20 years ago, we started a friendship. We are now creative partners writing and producing plays in London, England (his home) and the U.S. (my home.). When we met in London in 2001, Ahmed was on tour performing dabke (Palestinian traditional dance). I was in London to read at Paddington Poetry Festival. We were both staying with poet, Agnes Meadows. Upon my return to the U.S. the Office of Homeland Security cut off my phone service after I called his cell phone, a Gaza number, to tell him I made it home safely. He returned to Gaza. We lost touch but reconnected on Facebook ten years later and maintained contact as we each engaged in creative endeavors, for him Al-Zaytouna, for me, Asheville Wordfest.
The U.S. continues to fund Israel without admonishing its treatment of Palestinians and violations of international and Human Rights law. So many people I know and respect won’t talk about Israel and Palestine for fear of sounding anti-semitic, while 400 Jewish scholars speak out and while Jews around the world, including in Israel, do the same. As I have used poetry to address injustice, I am, with Ahmed, now creating plays. Our creative partnership is grounded in friendship and takes form in plays that speak to the unspeakable injustice he and his family and all Palestinians endure. It is time to talk about what the United States is funding when it funds Israel. It is time to talk about Palestine and Arab culture and history. It is time to broaden our scope for seeing humanity in all people, all faces, all parts of the world.
To learn more, visit Ahmed’s page: www.ahmednajar.com
Ahmed Najar’s Productions
I Have Two Names
Salim, a young man, has lived in London for over 10 years. His life is settled in the city. He has a steady job and a healthy social life but the nagging feeling of homesickness is something he wrestles with constantly.
When friends start to take an interest in Palestine and make plans to travel there he is faced with a bittersweet feeling; the pleasure that those close to him want to discover his homeland mixed with the frustration that they can journey there with the ease of holidaymakers, travelling a route that is totally off limits to him.
With Palestine firmly landing itself within his friendship group, Salim finds himself struggling to communicate his lived experience of growing up in Palestine and living in exile. He, himself, has become divided, and reconciling the two Salims into one begins to destabilise his comfortable life in London.
Project 51
Al Zaytouna Dance Troupe in collaboration with Hava Dance Group present Project 51, written and directed by Ahmed Najar. Project 51 – the Israeli war on Gaza in summer 2014 lasted 51 days- questions the unequal media coverage of conflicts and terrorism, and critically challenges the given perceptions of the Palestinian struggle through the western media. The play centres on a Gazan man trying to distract his
daughter from explosions and the sound of drones and military aeroplanes. Creatively using the power of the traditional Palestinian folk dance ‘Dabke’ and blending it with modern dance and theatre – this typically inclusive, infectious and widely popular dance form is used in a satirical way bringing an eruption of joy and an affirmation of individuality and belonging.
Ahmed Najar is a Palestinian director, playwright, dabke expert and co-founder of the Al-Zaytouna dance troupe. The company fuses traditional Palestinian folk dance (dabke) with contemporary dance, theatre, poetry, music, and digital media to create inspiring pieces of dance theatre to tell powerful stories about Palestine, often focusing on identity and cultural resistance.
As well as a being a regular dancer with the troupe, Najar has also written and directed several productions. He wrote Between the fleeting words, which toured the UK and Europe in 2011.
Najar took dabke teaching abroad when he worked with the Hava dance group in Slovenia (2014), writing and directing Water and Salt (Slovenia 2015) and Project 51 (London 2016).
Defiance
A new play, DEFIANCE, pushes boundaries of traditions and gender roles while breaking stereotypes. Rising against the expectations of a young woman, Amani focuses all her strength and energy on being the best journalist in the world. Ambition and courage drive her to report from checkpoints and the very edge of tragedies in the ongoing occupation of her country.
Against censure from authorities, she will do anything to get the story. The play asks the questions about the very nature of Story and the border between reporting and experience. What happens when Amani focuses so strongly on “getting the story” that she is forced to come to terms with her own? Aided by her professional partner, photographer and videographer Sami, Amani moves ever closer to her dream of journalistic excellence.
The journey also moves her ever closer to profound self-discovery, both of which come at the cost of pain and acceptance of what it means to be a storyteller in the full meaning of the word. Through the character of her father, audiences will also see the insistence of tradition upon the personal narrative of becoming who we are meant to be and the struggles we undergo to strike a balance between history and identity. Told through news reportage, video, spoken word, dialogue, and the exquisite and groundbreaking Dabke choreography for which writer and director, Ahmed Najar is internationally acclaimed, DEFIANCE promises to welcome audiences into new understanding of themselves, the world, and what it means to tell your own story in a world that too much imposes one upon you.
PENNSYLVANIA
We sat in Leicester Square at a glass-walled
café, me the poet, he the Dabke dancer, me from
America by way of Canada, he from Palestine.
Starlings chaotically flocked the kiosk outside.
We sipped mint tea and ate almond cookies.
It was the fourth day of a long friendship,
and the friendship was sweet and fragrant,
infused with the newness from each our sides:
he had never met an American, and I’d never
met someone from Gaza. Story by story,
we each shed a layer of the news and became
the smiling, sensitive, kind people we are.
He poured the tea from the teapot. I licked
icing sugar from my fingertip as I listened
to his stories of his life in a country made
nearly impossible by my country—
his walks to school barricaded suddenly so
the children attended classes in a teacher’s
home they still could access, days that the
University would just be closed without word.
His life held death as an accepted part of it
while mine kept it far off in a foreign distance.
He listed his relatives who had been shot
or suffocated by the teargas, killed by attacks.
I listened in as great a stillness as I could hold.
Have you been to Pennsylvania? He asked
as though the next sentence would tell me
he knew someone there, or that he wished to go
or had heard of something there worth
seeing, that I should have seen. As though it
were merely a place of generally interest.
Yes, I had been, so many times, driving through
those green hills on my way home to Canada,
which now seemed necessary to say because
when he pointed to the scar on his leg
and explained that the shrapnel from a bomb
still lodged in there because the surgeon
couldn’t remove it without him bleeding to death
was part of a larger piece of metal bearing the
words “Made in Pennsylvania.” I felt the taste of
the cookie vanish along with all the sweetness
of the world I had only ever been told about.
Laura Hope-Gill 