Thanks to the concerted efforts of a number of scholars and translators, the work of Syrian dramatist Saadallah Wannous (1941–97) is making its way into the history of twentieth-century theatre.Footnote 2 A prolific playwright, politically committed intellectual and astute cultural commentator, his oeuvre, collected in three volumes in Arabic, contains over twenty plays, a series of research projects into Arabic folklore, commentaries on Arabic and non-Arabic culture, interviews with cultural and political actors, programmes for the development of national theatre institutions, and a number of important theoretical excursuses which have indelibly shaped the discourse of Arabic theatre. Like many prolific artists, Wannous was a constant innovator, both formally and thematically, and he continued to write until his premature death from cancer at the age of fifty-six.
Since the turbulent years of the Arab Spring, interest in Wannous has exploded, driven in part by a number of high-profile stagings of his work, most notably Ritual for a Metamorphosis (1995) at the Comédie-Francaise in 2013, directed by Sulayman al-Bassam. However, although many contemporary Arabic theatre artists acknowledge Wannous as an inspiration, scholarship on him has been somewhat uneven, tending to treat him in isolation from the wider cultural currents in which he participated. Edward Ziter, for instance, has focused on his place in the specifically Syrian milieu, Roger Allen on the trajectory of his artistic development, and Marvin Carlson on his impact and place within the development of a modern Arabic dramatic tradition.Footnote 3 This body of scholarship has gone far in introducing Wannous to an audience that might otherwise have not encountered him, and begun to cement his place in the history of twentieth-century drama. The Arabic scholarship on Wannous is similar, but pays more attention to Wannous's paradigm-generating attempts at theorizing a culturally authentic Arabic theatre movement.Footnote 4 These approaches, committed as they are to carving out a space for Arabic theatre in the study of world theatre, leave out an important dimension of Wannous's work – namely his internationalism. Wannous was at his most prolific during what Michael Denning has called the ‘era of three worlds’ immediately following decolonization, when international solidarities built around an anti-authoritarian, broadly leftist politics were an important dimension of cultural and theatrical activity.Footnote 5 This was an era where culture was seen as one of the fronts in wider social and political struggle, and, as I will argue in this article, the study of Wannous's work is made richer when he is positioned in the midst of these struggles, rather than outside them. Therefore, to focus on Wannous exclusively as an Arabic playwright is to lose sight of resonances between his production and international experiments in theatrical practice and work, but also to lose sight of a vital history of international solidarity. To reposition Wannous as an international playwright, I will begin by placing him in this milieu by focusing on a trip he took to Paris in 1968. I will then draw attention to Wannous's practice as a translator and adapter in order to contrast his theoretical approach to theatre with another significant perspective on the Arabic theatre scene, that articulated by the Egyptian novelist and playwright Yusif Idris (1927–91). I conclude with an analysis of one of Wannous's most staged and yet least studied plays, his translation/adaptation of a little-known Peter Weiss text, which he titled Rihlat Hanzala Min al-Ghafla Ila Al-Yaqza (Hanzala's Journey from Stupor to Alertness) (1978). I argue that the play shows how Wannous's significance as an Arabic playwright is intimately related to his political internationalism. Written immediately before making a vow of silence that lasted over ten years, Wannous's experimental translation destabilizes the single direction of dramatic influence between Europe and the Arab world that tends to mark Arabic theatre's development and study. My argument thus aims to problematize a recurrent position in the scholarly work on Arabic theatre that sees it as marginal or peripheral to global theatrical development, or that stresses its specificity and local nature at the expense of wider resonances and historical solidarities. Wannous's life, theoretical inventiveness and dramatic production offer an exemplary case for complicating this narrative.
A playwright in Paris: Saadallah Wannous's internationalism
In his article ‘Negotiating Theatrical Modernism in the Arab World’, Marvin Carlson, one of the most prominent anglophone scholars of Arabic theatre, argues for an approach that sees Arabic theatre's historical development as tied to the Arab world's historical moment of sociopolitical modernization, al-nahda, or the so-called Arabic ‘Renaissance’, which began in the late nineteenth century in Egypt and then spread through the Ottoman Empire. As he goes on to highlight,
The close relationship between this general cultural movement [al-nahda] in the Arab world and the various influences associated with European modernism itself created a complex cultural mixture that gave the concept of modernism in the Arab world distinctly different orientations than it had elsewhere.Footnote 6
After framing the trajectory of Arabic theatre development in this way, Carlson goes on to read a range of practitioners from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth as manifestations of al-nahda, paying special attention to both the Arabic and European sources, forms and ideas on which they drew. When he arrives at Wannous's place in this trajectory, Carlson writes,
Wannous had spent the early 1960s as a journalist in Cairo and was in Paris from 1966 to 1968, so he was well-aware of both the Egyptian experiments of that decade and the closely related European work of the absurdists and others … [his] formula for the creation of a modernist Arabic drama was almost identical to [that of Egyptian dramatists Tawfiq al-Hakim and Yusif Idris] and grew out of the same sense of the need for creating a new drama reflecting the changing times.Footnote 7
Carlson is right to point to the importance of the commingling of material conditions, artistic tendencies and political ideologies that are at play in the development of any historical aesthetic form and to foreground the shared concerns of many Arabic theatre-makers. His emphasis on an aesthetic periodization over a political one, however, makes it difficult to see the wider solidarities and resonances that underpinned the practice of these playwrights in general, and of Wannous in particular. A closer look at Wannous's trip to Paris highlights how central these solidarities, and the international perspective they grew out of, are to the aesthetic positions they inform.
In 1966, Wannous took study leave from his job at the Syrian Ministry of Culture to attend the Institute of Dramatic Arts at the Sorbonne. Over the following two years, he would live through two important world-historical events that would shape the decades to come, and inaugurate two widely differing political legacies. The first was the naksa, or ‘the great setback’ of the defeat of Arab coalition armies by Israel in the Six Day War of 1967. The fallout of this war, which ended with Israel's annexation and occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights, severely dispirited the populations of the Arabic-speaking world, and led to the resignation of Egyptian president Gamal Abdelnasser, the face of pan-Arab solidarity. This defeat hit Arabic-speaking intellectuals especially hard.Footnote 8 In Omar Amiralay's elegiac documentary on Wannous, There Are Many Things Still Left to Say (1997), Wannous states that ‘the defeat of 1967 was a defining moment in our collective and our personal history … it was a sharp, violent shock. We all felt our dignity had been assaulted. That we were degraded to our very core’.Footnote 9 Along with the rest of the Arabic-speaking world, Wannous's perspective was forever altered and soured by this defeat.
Wannous cut his Paris trip short after hearing the news and rushed back to Syria, only to find that ‘the radio was broadcasting love songs. The people, the night clubs, the cafes … [It was like nothing had happened.] I decided not to write; I was shattered’.Footnote 10 Having expected to return to his homeland to find a popular anger that he could creatively harness and stoke in order to upset the social and political inertia following the defeat, Wannous was instead met with collective narcolepsy and an increasingly authoritarian state that would not take responsibility for its failures. The sense of defeat, and the generalized apathy towards it, prompted Wannous to return to France, where he continued his studies and became involved with Marxist student politics. There, he witnessed the second event that was to indelibly mark his outlook: the uprisings of May 1968. Ostensibly a mass social movement comprising a broad, spontaneous alliance of rebelling students, anti-colonial activists and striking workers, May 1968 was a moment with global resonance for socialist internationalism, building on similar protests and liberation struggles criss-crossing the entire globe from Vietnam to Latin America. If, as Kristin Ross argues, May 1968 allowed for ‘flight from social determinations, [taking] people outside of their location in society’, we can begin to understand why Wannous, in a temporary self-exile coloured with a sense of failure and disillusionment, found its milieu so productive.Footnote 11
In his writing, Wannous claimed that his main mission in Paris was ‘to learn European theatre, and, at the same time, to crystallize a critical position towards it’.Footnote 12 As part of this mission, he befriended Jean-Marie Serreau, the radical French director who had been instrumental in early French stagings of Genet, Beckett and Ionesco, but who also had a commitment to decolonization and to the contemporary theatrical work that reflected its realities. He famously worked with and directed plays by the Algerian Kateb Yacine, Ivorian Bernard Dadié, Haitian René Depestre and Martinican Aimé Césaire. In 1968, Wannous held a long interview with Serreau as part of a series that might allow him ‘not to provide a journalistic sketch of theatrical activity in France, but to really get to the roots of the directions this theatre was taking vis-à-vis its engagement with diverse intellectual currents’.Footnote 13 Their interview ends with a discussion of Arabic theatre. Wannous asks Serreau, ‘What would you do if you lived in a country like mine that lacks theatrical traditions … is there any advice you would give that would help us find our theatre?’Footnote 14 Serreau responds that Wannous should look to folk and popular performance, and says,
You especially can help theatre move out of the frozen forms that it has settled on in Europe. Here, the heavy weight of theatrical tradition is a burden that paralyses us in place, and which constrains our ability to think of new styles and forms. You have the chance to have a free, spontaneous beginning that is full of the heat of collectivity.Footnote 15
Serreau's discourse here might seem typical of the well-documented avant-garde tendency to inject new life into calcified Euro-American dramatic tradition by incorporating, appropriating and amalgamating Third World performance traditions and forms.Footnote 16 What sets Serreau apart from these formulations, as articulated in this interview but also over the course of his career, was his keen awareness of the violence of colonization. This can be gleaned from the aforementioned list of artists with whom he collaborated, all of whom were vociferously critical of the legacies of colonialism, and all from states that had recently been decolonized. Serreau's attempts at directing these playwrights in Europe demonstrates his knowledge that he was a witness at the historic moment of colonialism's demise in the struggles of national liberation: he wanted his European audiences to hear the death knells of this demise as they were sounded by the Third World thinkers and artists carrying its coffin. This sense of solidarity spoke to Wannous, and in the introduction to the interview he expressed a deep admiration for Serreau's anti-colonial stance. Serreau's position thus points us to the historical fact of internationalism. May 1968 is an important marker in this internationalism, for, as Robert Young states, ‘May 1968 was a moment in which activists in Europe and the US sought to emulate the success of the tricontinental independence movements by extending their challenge to an assault on the political centers of the western imperial powers’.Footnote 17 It therefore testifies to the practical equality that marked this era of world history, and ‘provincializes Europe’, in Dipesh Chakrabarty's formulation, by demonstrating how European theatre and politics were shaped by diverse voices from around the world.Footnote 18
Conversely for Wannous, what Euro-American practices offered was a form that he could then imbue with a specific content that suited his audiences and grew out of their history and everyday life. More importantly, what practitioners like Serreau, Genet and the everyday performers of 1968 offered someone like Wannous – whose sense of moral outrage and historical calamity was so developed – was a way to think of theatre as an act that could address the political and social inertia that was the legacy of decolonization in the Arabic-speaking states. Theatre for Wannous was a tool to amplify, comment on and potentially shift this sense of defeat. On the other hand, as the interview demonstrates, Wannous also saw theatre as a distinctly international institution from which he could draw, which he could critique and with which he could converse. Wannous's position could point us to towards what in another context Margaret Litvin has called a ‘global kaleidoscope’ of appropriation, one where the theatre-maker ‘is free to choose his or her influences, but from the options made available by the kaleidoscope of the day’.Footnote 19 Rather than a binary of self and other, the kaleidoscope model allows us to see the artist as a historical agent whose work is nevertheless contingent on the sociopolitical milieu in which they are operating; it lets the artist make art, but not under conditions of their own choosing. For Wannous, as for many of his international comrades, these conditions were often the result of historically significant geopolitical events, and led them to similar conclusions on how artistic practice could supplement wider social struggle.
Wannous against Yusif Idris: two approaches to a new Arabic theatre
Wannous, as mentioned above, left for Paris making a ‘decision not to write’, but he returned home to begin the most prolific period of writing of his career.Footnote 20 In the decade following his The Elephant, O King of All Time (1969), Wannous wrote his best-known plays, and became the Arabic playwright most closely associated with cultural sovereignty and progressive Arabic political commitment. He also produced his paradigm-setting theoretical excursus Bayanat Li Masrah Arabi Jadid (Manifestos for a New Arabic Theatre) (1970), a text that made him a central voice in the ta'sil conversation, a wider conversation across the Arabic theatre scene that aimed to articulate the best way towards an ‘authentic’ Arabic theatre following formal decolonization. An important contrasting voice in the ta'sil debate was Yusif Idris, the Egyptian playwright and novelist. Idris's play, Al-Farafir (1964), along with the highly polemical theoretical excursus that accompanied it, had been thrown like a firecracker into the ta'sil debates and his formulations warrant some unpacking.Footnote 21 In brief, Idris's theorizations, initially published as a series of articles in Al-Katib (The Writer) magazine in 1964 under the title ‘Nahwa Masrah Masri’ (Towards an Egyptian Theatre) and subsequently collected in the volume Nahwa Masrah Arabi (Towards an Arabic Theatre) in 1974, begin by renouncing all hitherto existing Egyptian (and Arabic) theatre as illegitimate, and as the direct result of centuries of colonialism ranging from Ottoman control all the way down to the French and then British imperial projects. Idris states that these continuous colonizations had severed the Egyptian people from their natural theatrical idioms and forms.Footnote 22 He proposes the popular marketplace form of the samir as an authentic Egyptian theatrical event, and the samir’s central character type of the farfoor as its most important constitutive element. The first feature of the samir that Idris discusses is its episodic nature, with some episodes humorous and others pedagogical. Farfoor is an everyman and a no-man,
a truthful model of the Egyptian protagonist, perceptive, intelligent, mocking, mercurial and acrobatic. He is not an actor in the traditional sense because in his reality and his life he is also farfoor … who does not comport in an exaggerated manner and who does not pretend to be what he is not …Footnote 23
Idris thus essentializes a national character into a performance idiom, one that is meant to inaugurate the birth of a finally decolonized Egyptian theatre. The play, al-Farafir, attempts to put this theory to practice, and revolves around the eternal struggle between Farfoor, an archetypal subaltern, and Sayyid, his timeless master. Importantly, the play was published and performed in Egyptian colloquial Arabic as opposed to standard Arabic, rooting it in a vernacular that is local and untranslatable. However, Wannous was unconvinced by Idris's formulations and their practical application. In his retort, republished in his collected works but initially delivered as a lecture, he takes Idris to task for a consistent simplification of the historical record, and for a number of theoretical lapses.Footnote 24 Wannous was sceptical of the idea that simply because they had translated and adapted French plays during the period of the nahda, the original pioneers of Arabic theatre had inaugurated a false form that did not carry a link to its place of performance. Instead, ‘they understood that simply copying European theatre was an impotent gesture … they each in their own way conceived of methods of how to best plant the theatre in an Arabic cultural milieu’.Footnote 25 Wannous, then, does not concede that to translate and adapt means to give up cultural sovereignty and authenticity, but instead sees a committed translation practice as central to the development of theatrical practice.
Wannous's retort to Idris, specifically in relation to the critique of the reinvention of folk forms, while polemical, is sympathetic. Indeed, much of Wannous's early career attempted to practically enliven folk performance forms by translating them into his dramatic works.Footnote 26 Nevertheless, Wannous proposes that Idris's theorizations work by ‘disavowing the historicity of modern theatre, deleting a long narrative of flourishing and repression, of development and contradiction, unifying all of this into the image of an intractable colonial “West”’.Footnote 27 On the other hand, Wannous is quick to point out that Idris's ‘conception of a level playing field between cultures is a superficial view of history that doesn't further the quest for liberation … liberation does not simply occur on the cultural register alone, but must occur on the other registers: the economic, the political, and the social’.Footnote 28 Wannous reiterates the need for internationalist solidarity. His formulations here point to the fact that to assume a cultural equality in the way Idris does is to ignore the real unevenness produced by political and economic systems, obscuring the challenges that stand in the way of liberation.
This exchange highlights the central role played by theatrical development in arguments around social, cultural and economic development in Arabic modernity, often working metonymically and subsuming the others under the logic of its own issues and contradictions. It also calls attention to an anxiety around translation in this context, an anxiety rooted on the one hand in the social and political ‘backwardness’ that many theatre-makers in the Arabic-speaking world felt themselves to be facing following the revolutions of national independence, and on the other in the inspiration many of them found in Euro-American practices that they saw as a tool to address that perceived social and political ‘backwardness’. This is even the case for Idris, who, despite the intensity of his polemic and his use of the vernacular, wrote his al-Farafir in an absurdist, metaphysical vein that seemed more indebted to European styles than to the carnivalesque idiom of the Cairene street performers from whom he claimed to draw. Theatrical translation and adaptation thus become intimately tied to social and political development in the post-colonial era, and to the prospect of cultural sovereignty. Considering what I have emphasized as Wannous's internationalism, his approach cut in a different direction as regards the ta'sil debate. As he stated, ‘we adapt and translate because we are searching for a vision that responds to our reality, to ensure our theatrical act is contemporary, effective here and now’.Footnote 29 With the global entrenchment of capitalism and the political standardization that was increasingly characterizing the international state system in the post-colonial era, the question of translation and adaptation spoke to a wider social, political and cultural reality for Wannous. It opened up the possibility of solidarities that an exclusive focus on the local could not engender.
Translation theory/translation practice: Wannous rewrites Weiss
The positions Wannous adopted in these debates help explain why he was himself such a committed translator and adapter. His early practice involved adaptations of Sophocles’ Antigone, a translation/adaptation of Gogol's Diary of a Madman and a translation of Brecht's Turandot. Moreover, his brutal (and subsequently banned) late play Al-Ightisab (The Rape) (1989) was based on Antonio B. Vallejo's 1964 novel La doble historia del Doctor Valmy (The Double Story of Dr Valmy). There, against the overriding ideological currents on the Arabic right and left, Wannous translated in order to invent a sympathetic Israeli character, who, in the play's epilogue, has a conversation with a fictionalized Wannous about the possibility of Arab–Israeli solidarity against the occupation of Palestine.
In 1978 Wannous attempted to put his theory of translation, and its centrality to building a lively Arabic theatrical tradition, into practice. He accomplished this task with his translation and adaptation of a little-known Peter Weiss play, Wie dem Herrn Mockinpott das Leiden ausgetrieben wird (How Mister Mockinpott was Cured of His Sufferings) (1968). A relatively faithful translation and adaptation of Weiss's play, Rihlat Hanzala Min al-Ghafla ila'l Yaqza, is, paradoxically, one of Wannous's most performed, but least analysed, plays. The lack of critical attention afforded to the play can be read through an anxiety in Arabic theatre around derivation and influence, metonymically figured in translational terms, an anxiety amplified by Wannous's reputation as the Arabic playwright who most directly articulated a sense of national and cultural sovereignty. Abdulaziz al-Enizi's PhD on Wannous, which strove to be ‘the most complete analysis of Wannous’ plays’, does not mention it at all, and does not include it in the timeline of Wannous's plays – which is otherwise complete. Roger Allen's 1984 appraisal of Wannous's writing does not mention it either. Edward Ziter's survey of Wannous's work does not touch on it, and neither does Marvin Carlson's long essay on the development of modernism in the Arabic theatre, which spends a significant amount of time with Wannous. Indeed, the only work that I have come across that critically assesses the play – and for obvious reasons – is A. H. al-Abdullah's PhD thesis ‘Western Influences on the Theatre of Syrian Playwright Sa'd Allah Wannous’. Abdullah devotes a number of pages to discussion of the play's plot and to its Brechtian influences, before arriving at the conclusion that ‘the play did not receive as much critical or public attention as the previous plays had, perhaps because of it being an adaptation’.Footnote 30
This lack of attention is surprising considering the immense popularity of the play in performance, having been staged often since its debut in Syria in 1978. The debut was directed by Fawaz al-Sajir for Al-Masrah al-Tajribi (The Experimental Theatre). Subsequently, it was performed at the 1985 Baghdad Theatre Festival by the Kuwaiti Arab Theatre Troupe, at the 1988 Damascus Theatre Festival by the Dubai Popular Theatre Troupe, in 2008 at the American University of Beirut directed by Sharif Abdulnour, in 2010 in Amman, directed by Firas al-Raymouni. In 2012 there were three productions – at the Jordanian Theatre Festival, directed by Islam Imam, the Yemeni National Stage in Sanaa by the Yemeni National Theatre troupe, and at the First Theatre Conference in Fez in a version by the Moroccan director Al-Khammar al-Marini – and most recently in 2017 in Ramallah directed by Mohammad Eid. It has also received numerous stagings by university dramatic troupes across the Arabic-speaking world. As this list shows, there was an increased interest in producing the play around the time of the Arab Spring.Footnote 31
The translational anxiety which Abdullah cites as the reason for the lack of critical attention afforded to the play might have been tempered had Wannous taken significant liberties in the adaptation, but as it stands its plot is relatively faithful to the original. Weiss's original version is structured as a modern morality play, with clear resonances with the story of Job. The play begins with Herr Mockinpott in jail, wearing his shoes on the wrong feet and constantly tripping over them. He does not know why he is in jail, and his jailer refuses to tell him. He bribes the jailer to get him a lawyer, who he then also has to bribe in order to get legal representation. With the help of the lawyer, Mockinpott exits the jail and meets Wurst, a harlequin figure who follows him, or leads him, on his adventure of disillusionment. Mockinpott next finds himself in his home, where his wife has taken a new lover. When he goes to meet his old boss, he finds that the boss does not recognize him. He visits a doctor, who tries to cure him of his suffering with brain surgery. In the penultimate scene, Wurst encourages Mockinpott to go and meet government personages to complain about his unfair arrest and subsequent humiliation, but they only express their appreciation that the police are doing their jobs properly. In the final scene, Mockinpott and Wurst meet God and attempt to hold him accountable for Mockinpott's suffering. God, a divine capitalist wearing a fur coat and chewing on a cigar, is presented as a ridiculous manager who has lost the bearing of his enterprise. He denies any responsibility for Mockinpott's suffering, leading Mockinpott to finally rebel and take responsibility for his own life. Mockinpott puts his shoes on the right feet, and so the play ends, on a note of individualized epiphany.
The critical disinterest in Weiss's play curiously mirrors that afforded to Wannous's adaptation. For most Weiss scholars, it is a blip in his career, a strange simplistic piece – not uninteresting, but paling in comparison to his other work. This is especially true when considering that it came off the back of his seminal Marat/Sade (1963) and his later work in Third World solidarity and documentary theatre. As Robert Cohen puts it, the play's weakness stems from the fact that it ‘provides no analysis for social conditions, that it does not present causes but only effects’.Footnote 32 The play's relative simplicity of critique, especially when read against the formal complexity of Weiss's early period and the direct political engagement and groundbreaking experiments with documentary theatre, is indeed surprising. It does not seem as if Weiss himself was that committed to the play; he began it in 1963, shelved it, and returned to it in 1968, publishing it with minor amendments, whereupon it received a premiere in Hanover in West Germany, and was only mounted in the GDR – where Weiss's work was quite popular – eight years later.Footnote 33 The play's simplicity, however, its attempts at positing a universal mise en scène of exploitation, are arguably what made it such a productive text for Wannous to translate and adapt.
Wannous's adaptation sticks closely to this script. It begins with short monologue by Harfoosh, the play's analogue for Wurst, who introduces us to Hanzala:
HARFOOSH: Ah misery and wretchedness. Look on, ladies and gentlemen. This scraggy specimen is to be the hero of our evening. Do not despair; we are long past the age of imposing heroes. For every age has it character, and this scraggy specimen (his register becomes more declamatory) is the character of our age.Footnote 34
Wannous substituted the original's rhyming verse with a rich register of literary Arabic replete with folk aphorism and a healthy dose of ironized platitudes, as seen above. For another example, we can look to the scene of Harfoosh's interrogation of Hanzala:
HARFOOSH: What is your doctrine?
HANZALA: My doctrine?
HARFOOSH: What is your doctrine in life?
HANZALA: Walk from wall to wall and pray that God hides you.
HARFOOSH: (in an accelerating register) Your doctrine?
HANZALA: Save your bright shilling for your dark day.
HARFOOSH: Your doctrine?
HANZALA: Between you and your neighbor is a thick barrier.
HARFOOSH: Your doctrine?
HANZALA: Brace yourself against the wind and relax.Footnote 35
As Harfoosh attempts to get the character to speak a truth, or at least to articulate a well-thought-out political or ideological position, Hanzala can only repeat the defeatist popular aphorisms that mark his personal timidity. Harfoosh's questioning here, on the other hand, mimics the official discourse of the state in its brevity, terseness and directness.
As opposed to Idris's experiments with the Egyptian vernacular, experiments that make it difficult to stage the text outside Egypt, Wannous's linguistic hybridization works to open up the text to varied dialogic interpretations depending on its site of performance, allowing the text a structure rooted in a simple formal Arabic that could be played in myriad Arabic-speaking countries, as demonstrated in the varied sites of performance mentioned above.Footnote 36 Wannous likewise translates ‘Mockinpott’ into ‘Hanzala’, a name that has rich resonance in the Arabic-speaking world, popularized as it was by Naji al-Ali's famous cartoon character.Footnote 37 Al-Ali's cartoon of a bald child, arms locked behind his back as he witnesses the continuing plight of the Palestinians, has become an immediately recognizable icon for the Palestinian cause. The character of Wurst finds an analogy in Wannous's Harfoosh, but rather than the mocking, anarchic Wurst, Harfoosh is here a comrade and guide for Hanzala.
The most significant alteration comes in the play's last two scenes, which are effectively switched around. In the penultimate scene, Hanzala and Harfoosh visit a darwish, or a religious mystic, who attempts to exorcize Hanzala's unhappiness. In the final scene, Hanzala meets the government personages who here are marked in the script as ‘the policeman, the doctor, the mystic and the boss’, the very same characters who have been the ostensible cause of Hanzala's trials and suffering.Footnote 38 The dialogue with God is thus translated into a dialogue with the state. This substitution can be read in two significant ways. The first is that Wannous self-censored and refused to depict the figure of God in order to respect the general religious sensibility of his audience, but also of the censorship bodies who would approve this show for publication and production. The second, and more interesting, way of reading this substitution is through its political logic. What Wannous's alteration does is strip the original's metaphysics of capitalism, and instead make the play about political alienation and the constructions of hegemony through consent. He posits that the state is not some abstract entity, but a material configuration of the diverse factions of the ruling class.
The concluding lines of the play support this latter interpretation. Hanzala does not experience Mockinpott's symbolic moment of individualized epiphany. Instead, upon realizing that his participation in the systems of oppression is what allows his articulation through their logics, Hanzala, along with Harfoosh, decisively repeats the line ‘Here lies the beginning of the journey’.Footnote 39 As the curtains fall, this resolute slogan, voiced in tandem, cuts through the flat, empty political discourse of the government personages and constitutes an opening up, a call for political – and cultural – reinvention. For Wannous, this was not the empty promise of a utopian theatrical event, but a call for continuous action. By translating Weiss's Mockinpott into his own Hanzala, Wannous refuses the jargon of authenticity by opening his practice up to diverse, international movements. By proposing that this is not the end of the struggle but simply its beginning, Wannous reminds us of the historical possibilities for solidarity that have been eclipsed by the global entrenchment of neo-liberal capitalism and authoritarian statism, a solidarity that needs to be constantly reinvented, translated and restaged.
Conclusion
Rihlat Hanzala was Wannous's last work for a long time. In Amiralay's 1997 documentary, Wannous states that he became deeply depressed after Anwar Sadat's historic visit to Israel in 1977 and the announcement of the neo-liberal ‘Open Door’ policy that this visit inaugurated. He took a vow of artistic silence that lasted until 1989. If we follow Michael Denning's periodization and see the decolonizing era up until the late 1970s as the ‘era of three worlds’, then Wannous's vow of silence coincides with the ‘post-everything’ era of neo-liberal globalization, the onset of the era of ‘one world’ when the political aspirations of international solidarity were put to rest by the arrival of globalized neo-liberalism. Hanzala can thus be read as Wannous's final work as an internationalist, before a significant shift occurred in his own practice, and the world he inhabited. As he put it in an interview with the Palestinian magazine Al-Huriya in 1986,
The period of silence was necessary. It brought with it, for me as for a whole generation of thinkers and artists, serious self-reflection. We had, in the immediacy of our excitement, simplified history into discourses, banners and slogans that we thought some time and struggle would materialize … But history retaliated and continued its bloody path, leaving us naked and alone with our torn-up words.Footnote 40
Wannous's late work is touched by the same melancholia. Wannous did, however, manage to muster up a final note of optimism before he passed. In the dedication of the first edition of his collected works, written the year before he died, Wannous writes,
I wish that this melancholic note with which I write were simply the illusion of my illness. I wish that the energies contained within you were stronger than our defeats and visions. You may, after all, find that magical sentence that makes the age look beautiful, and the land in bloom.Footnote 41
If Wannous has taught us anything, it is that the magical sentence must be translatable.
