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Alan Alexander finds
A Sniff of Caring
in the Air |
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And so to
Keswick. One of those fantastic Cumbrian days, clear blue skies,
bright sun and the snow melting on Skiddaw. But I spent the first
two hours of this Saturday morning watching a two hander at Keswick
Theatre under the banner title “Speaking for Palestine. The first
half saw Peter Mortimer a writer and journalist from the North East,
who looks like a one-time rock star, explaining how on a whim he
decided to go and live in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in
the Lebanon. This was in spite of the advice given by the foreign
office and anyone else he spoke to but then a man who spent weeks
and weeks on trawlers in the North Sea is bound to do his own thing.
With quotes from his book* and being a natural raconteur he drew us
into the noise, hardship, flooding and the breeze blocks and heat of
a primitive camp where three generations of Palestinian children
have grown up without hope and without a future. In spite of
loneliness and living in a windowless room he decided to do what he
does best, theatre.
Using the children’s story he had already written called Croak The
King & a Change in the Weather he adapted it into a 30-minute
theatre piece, incorporating dance, music, and mime and presented it
to the head of the girls’ school. As we found out he’s obviously
someone who can inspire people to believe in his ideas and before
long children with little knowledge of English were endeavouring to
learn their lines in readiness for a performance and chance to
believe in themselves. After two performances it was time for Peter
to return to Tyneside but his journey home gave him time to reflect
on what the children had achieved. Once back he raised £22,000 to
bring the children and teachers to Newcastle to performing the play
8 times at 4 venues including the Sage. The children’s courage and
effort were so moving a Shatila foundation will be set up to build
cultural links between the Camp and Tyneside. Mortimer was perhaps
most moved when the children, in spite of the violence and their
inhospitable surroundings in the Camp, wanted the play’s ending to
be changed. In the last moments of the story the greedy self-centred
king should have died by drowning but the children wanted him to be
saved so the story was changed and one little bit of brutality was
removed from their lives.
The play in the second half of the morning Sumoud (Steadfastness)
was based on the real words of Israelis and Palestinians as
experienced by Jo Alberti a writer from near Keswick who has visited
the area 5 times as an Ecumenical Accompanier (EA). Accompaniers
from all over the world provide a protective presence to vulnerable
communities, monitor and report human rights abuses and support
Palestinians and Israelis working together for peace. The cast of
local amateur actors in Sumoud used the words of a Palestinian
lawyer and keen walker, a Palestinian taxi driver, an Israeli
settler and peace activist, an Israeli mother who lost her 14 year
old daughter in a suicide bombing and Palestinians who had their
farm lands removed or Olive groves burnt down by settlers. The taxi
driver had been a farmer but having been removed from his land three
times gave up so that he could earn a less dangerous and precarious
living. The words of these people were expressed more in sorrow than
in anger and in fact this has been my experience just watching
interviews on TV with ordinary Palestinians: an amazing lack of hate
but terrible world weariness. Two strong images stuck in my mind
after the play, “flashing on that inward eye” perhaps, one was the
description of how fertile and green parts of Palestine are as the
lawyer and walker described the streams running through the land and
the creatures living there, the wild oregano and artichokes and the
olive groves. The other was from the words of the grieving Israeli
mother who said “killing someone else won’t bring my daughter back”
and described how grief can bring the options, of Anger, Depression
or Reconciliation. She chose reconciliation and once she had joined
a Palestinian-Israeli Parents Circle for those who had lost loved
ones she found that her pain became hope and that Palestinians
became not “them” but one of “us”.
The hope for the future expressed in these performances and our own
experiences in Northern Ireland certainly let a chink of light into
our political and social futures. But I’ve also been troubling the
tea leaves recently and I think I can smell a change in the air.
It's a bit like those green shoots of economic recovery poking their
fragile heads out of the mire that the bankers left us in. But what
I can sniff in the air is about caring. Last month I mentioned how
the floods had flushed out so many good deeds and my conclusion is
that our humanity can rise above the insensitivity of the
marketplace and wholesale privatisation. We should never again give
up our sense of responsibility for each other just because someone's
profit says so.
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