Jenin Refugee Camp
Juliano Mer-Khamis looks worried. He is looking at the computer screen of the graphic artist Fadi Wadi, a resident of the city of Jenin, who is showing him a sketch of the sign for the theatre, which announces its name in yellow on a red background in English and Arabic: Freedom Theatre. Mer-Khamis has doubts about which shade to frame the masks that adorn the sides of the sign. – Try blue for a moment, he urges Wadi. It’s not too many colours? he asks the onlookers. I wanted it to attract the children, but it’s too colorful. Try black. No. No. That’s sad. Let’s try blue again. Wadi, despairing, suggests changing the red background. – No, shouts Mer-Khamis. It’s a proclamation. We brought the sun with blood. After long hesitation he decides to leave the masks free of any coloured framing.
– I do not want to compromise on any detail. I want it to be a theatre like in New York or London, says Mer-Khamis in the taxi that takes us to the heart of the Jenin refugee camp. It will not be a children’s theatre with a blanket and a stick. Theatre is first of all enchantment. After that it’s therapy and psychodrama. If there’s no enchantment I don’t think it’ll work. And enchantment is lighting, a sound system and a stage.
For half a year now Mer-Khamis has been playing the role of his life: setting up a theatre in the Jenin refugee camp. The veteran actor in him is aware of the cameras surrounding him (in this case they are in IDF observation posts), addicted to the action suggested by the location in Jenin and he takes it all on with tremendous passion: he renovates a hall, supervises workers, designs the lighting, gets spattered by the black paint of the worker painting the stage, worries about the sound in the emptiness of the hall; but he also finds a few minutes to break away from the flow of the stage work to capture the events on a video camera.
Recently he rented an apartment in the camp and he spends three or four days a week there. – Because I have not yet received a permit from the IDF I waste many hours at checkpoints. For that reason I stay here to sleep, he says.
The initiative to set up the Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp was born of the enthusiasm of two people: the artist Dror Feiler, the creator of the controversial monument with the image of the suicide terrorist Hanadi Jaradat, and Jonatan Stanczak, a Swedish-Jewish peace activist who were exposed to Mer-Khamis’ film Arna’s Children.
In his film, Mer-Khamis documented the activities of his mother, Arna Mer-Khamis, who in 1987 went to Jenin and set up a theatre and activity centres for the children of the camp. He followed children that his mother had guided and shaped and with whom he worked as a director of shows until his mother’s activities there ended with her death of cancer in 1995. The story of the children documents the cruel reality to which they were sentenced: Ashraf was killed by IDF fire during Operation Defensive Wall, Yusuf and Nidal blew themselves up in a suicide operation in Hadera, Dawud was recently released from prison and Majdi is now in jail. Arna’s Children succeeded in the world and in 2004 won for its creator the documentary film prize at the prestigious Tribeca festival in New York and the prize for Best First Documentary at the Hot Docs documentary film festival in Toronto, Canada.
– I believe that a good documentary film is a film that changes reality or influences it, says Mer-Khamis. So one day I got a phone call from Dror Feiler and Jonatan Stanczak, who say they saw the film, visited the refugee camp in Jenin, met the residents and they’re interested in building a theatre in Arna’s name. They asked if I was willing to help. At first I related to it as I do to a hundred other proposals that evaporate into thin air after the people leave the airport in Lydda. I said yes, I was willing, and I slowly got immersed into it without realizing it.
The Freedom Theatre project is a European-Jewish-Palestinian-Arab venture, emphasizes Mer-Khamis. The Jenin camp embraced the theatre, Feiler and Stanczak set up an association and solicit contributions in Europe.
Yael Lerer, editor of the Andalus publishing house, Osnat Trabelsi and Prof. Avi Oz are doing all they can to contribute to the success of the project, and many Israeli-citizen Palestinian creators have flooded him with applications. So far the theatre’s board of directors includes: the poet Mahmoud Darwish, the writer Elias Khouri, Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler and Prof. Avi Oz and Mer-Khamis adds that they are close to a comprehensive agreement with the Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter and the actress Susannah York.
In the meantime the treasury of the association contains the meager sum of 150 thousand shekels that was gathered from the receipts from the film Arna’s Children and contributions raised by Feiler and Stanczak in Sweden. Also the premises are far from optimal: for half a year the theatre will operate in a modest-sized hall, in a building that was contributed by UNRWA. But Mer-Khamis is excited by the repercussions surrounding the project and in the near future will travel again to Europe with his film to raise a sum that will permit the transition from the provisional premises to a theatre that will be build nearby and that will serve as a cultural centre for the residents of the camp. These days he is even working on planning the theatre together with Palestinian architects in Haifa.
– The Freedom Theatre was created with the inspiration of Arna, he says, but even so, despite that the partners of the project requested to name the theatre after her, I refused. Arna hated commemoration. We will not make a personality-cult for her. We are setting up a theatre in the spirit of her actions. One of the reasons why we called the project Freedom Theatre, apart from the obvious political connotations, was the intention to create a theatre that would be free from all the elements of the occupation that is imprinted on the population. Part of the work with the children will be to liberate them from the scars of the occupation, from the social patriarchy they live under, from the oppression they live under at home and outside.
According to Mer-Khamis, the theatre will produce shows for adults and children. On the opening night, the 19th of February, the show Diab by the dramatist Alaa Hleihel with the participation of his brother, the actor Amer. A week afterwards will be shown The Pessoptimist, by Emil Habibi, in a production that was contributed by the actor Muhammad Bakri, and there will also be two shows for children.
In addition to the ongoing productions the theatre will set up workshops for children in dance, music, drawing and drama. The theatre will set up its activities under the auspices of the local centre to rehabilitate children and its workers will guide the children. According to Mer-Khamis, about 30 international senior professionals from the field of psychodrama and art therapy volunteered to go to Jenin to train additional resource-people from among the residents of the camp.
– The real essence of the theatre is to create a free zone for children so they can create and bring about change, says Mer-Khamis. I think that the best way to influence the behaviour of a child is to create for him a living space without laws, which is the opposite of the reality he comes from. This is not a pedagogical effort or an attempt to deal with neurological or pathological phenomena. We have no pretensions. Certainly not me.
Affecting the Parents Too
Mer-Khamis aspires to set up a community theatre that will also affect the parents, not just the children. – I think that adults too need theatre. It’s not enough that they send their children here, we want to work with them. Because a network of relationships in the camp are based on violence and hierarchy between the camp and the occupation, between the parents, between the parents and the children and among the children a way of group work in psychodrama workshops can teach the participants to create different networks of inter-personal relationships.
The Freedom Theatre was warmly received in the Jenin refugee camp. – The residents of the camps and the military organizations understand that the occupation oppresses also the cultural-intellectual infrastructure and does not allow the residents to develop, says Mer-Khamis. One who contributes greatly to the theatre’s acceptance in the place is non other than Zakarya Zbeida, commander of the al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigades in Jenin, in whose heart the memory of Arna is seared. – There is a green light for cooperation between Jews and Palestinians, he says with a smile. Zbeida, armed with his men, brings us to his house and in front of the entrance he points to an open asphalt space. – One morning Arna came here. She handed out paper and paints and gathered the children and let them draw, he relates. My mother saw her from the window and asked herself, “who is that crazy woman?” After a few days my mother invited her for coffee. When she understood what Arna was doing she told her, “if that’s your intention then take my house, and that’s how Arna started to run the theatre on the roof of our house.
Zbeida`s mother was killed in 2002 by a sniper. It is clear that his and Mer-Khamis` yearning for their mothers who cooperated and made possible the establishment of a modest theatre for children in the camp is a tie that links them and that the establishment fo the Freedom Theatre is for them the closing of a circle. – This time, I cannot do anyting in the theatre, emphasizes Zbeida. I don’t want to be linked to it for fear that the theatre will be destroyed by the army. The theatre is an important project. It can bring the children together under one roof, give them the possibility to dream, develop them and lighten their psychological burden.
At the end of the day the sign is ready and Mer-Khamis goes to get it. The workers help him hang it up. Children from the are gather in groups. Rina, 10, Munir, 12, Yahiya, 13, explain that a theatre is a celebration and ask if snow falls on Tel Aviv. – This place is progressing, says Mer-Khamis with satisfaction, and I’m not bragging. To be willing to carry out a joint Jewish-Palestinian-European struggle, this opening, this decisive stand that there will be a theatre and the acceptance that there will be a mixture of men and women, you have no idea how revolutionary that is. Especially considering the results of the PA elections.
by: Vered Lee, Haaretz Newspaper