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Samer Al-Saber, "A Movement's Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theater" (Stanford UP, 2025)
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Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Network.
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Hello, everybody, and welcome back to New Books in Middle Eastern Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Tul Mende, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Samir Al Saber about his new book, A Movement's the Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theater, which was published in August by Stanford University Press. Professor Al Saber is assistant professor of Theater at Williams College. And the book looks kind of at the story of people in the theater space and their context from the late 1960s until the early 1990s. Thank you so much for joining us to the podcast. Professor Al Sabir, it's a pleasure to be here. Maybe you can tell us how. First, to the listeners who don't know Your work, how you came to be interested in the Palestinian theater movement, and why did you want to focus on this kind of subject?
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For quite a while I did directing in theater. I have an MFA in directing, and I started a PhD at the University of Washington, and that was in 2007. And during that time, it was an open field whether I would, you know, study Shakespeare or Latin American theater or European theater. I was really interested in Baroque and Shakespeare, et cetera. And during that time, a film came out called Arna's Children that was created by Juliano Merchamise. I saw that film and it tracked what was happening in Jeanine and. And how the Freedom Theater came about. That got me really interested academically in Palestinian theater. Before that, I was interested in Palestinian theater as a director, as a Palestinian myself, but not as an academic, as a scholar. So that film prompted my interest as an academic. So I visited Palestine. I got to know Palestinian theater makers. And that was really the beginning. It was a beginning that was deeply personal, deeply engaged by the story of the Freedom Theater. And then that eventually led to my understanding that a lot of the theater that we see today in pastime actually was rooted in events that occurred in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. And that's where this period and this geography came about.
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C
Thank you so much, Professor Al Sabir. And do you remember when you knew that you wanted to write this kind of book? Sometimes it turns from a dissertation project or something like this. So can you remember when you knew that you wanted to write a movement's Promise?
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D
Yeah, I mean, the research in this book began as my dissertation project, and at the time it was called Permission to Perform, where I was focusing on the relationship between the theater artists and the Israeli authorities, civil administration and the in West Jerusalem or in the military occupation of the West Bank. But then the dissertation was quite limited in its scope. It didn't necessarily tell the story of this period. It didn't tell as much about the biographies of the people involved. I really wanted to write this book that would be first chronological. It would begin in the 60s, and it would work through the 70s, lead into the 80s, and ask questions about how the transformation of the movement began in the 90s. I came across an anthology of plays edited by Mohammed Anees. And that anthology had a limited print, but quite a few people had copies. So I ended up with a copy, actually that was given to me by the scholar and translator Ibrahim Muhawi. He gives me this copy and says, I was interested in this a long time ago, but I don't think I'm going to write about Palestinian theater, so you should have it. And that was one of my first engagements with that anthology. And the anthology has the Palestinian Theater Movement as a title. And that's when I realized that this idea of the movement, this idea of people coming together, forming a movement that moves forward through time, trying to make a difference, that's when that. That idea came about. And I thought, well, if what we are dealing with is a movement, then that's what the eventual book was going to be. So I wrote the dissertation, finished, and began preparing the book.
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C
Thank you so much. And you mentioned this anthology, and you write in the introduction, I think that since Palestinian is not a real state, sadly, that there is no archive where you could look up sources. And you did interviews with theater actors and people who are involved in the theater movement. What kind of other sources did you had available for writing this book, and how hard was it for you to obtaining them? Especially maybe Arabic sources concerning this time period that you're looking at?
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D
Yeah, well, there are a few books about Palestinian theater. When I started researching Palestinian theater, I found a few books. There was a book by Aser Al Mallah. It was a book by Nasret Jozi. There's a book by Abir Abd Zeba. There were a few, and all in Arabic, all addressing different parts of the Palestinian theater experience. What I couldn't find is a book that tells the story of the Palestinian theater movement. There were some critical books, like quite a few people wrote articles in newspapers addressing different plays. They're kind of like reviews, less criticism and more reviews. And I ended up wanting a book that really just brings things together and gives us a holistic idea of what the movement was like. And that's what became this project. In terms of sources, you have the newspapers of the period. We're talking 70s, 80s, 90s, the personal archives of the individual theater artists. A lot of artists keep posters, tickets, programs, and articles in which their name comes up or articles that they wrote. So these personal archives were treasure troves for this book. One archive is the Israel State Archive. One of the things that I learned during my research was that there were a lot of applications that came out of Palestinian theater companies to the Israel Censorship office in West Jerusalem. And I went to the Israel Cities archive. And at the time it wasn't digitized. So you had to go talk to a person and sit in the reading room. They bring you a box and so on. And there was a librarian there and a manager of the reading room who helped Me out. I ended up with a list of plays that the censorship office you granted or denied permissions for. And I walked through that list and identified plays that I had heard about from Palestinian theater artists. And she called me a couple weeks later to come into the reading room in West Jerusalem and she had some boxes for me. These boxes essentially became the foundational archive for the relationship between the Palestinian theater artist and the Israeli authorities. So that's one of the key archives. The greatest archive of all is the oral archive of the artists themselves. The interviews that I did, the experiences they had, how they thought of each other, how they thought about the changes over time. I think those interviews were a personal growth opportunity for me, but also a great foundation for the information that is present in the book today.
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C
And can you maybe introduce to us some of the people behind the theatre movement that you looked at who were likely. Because I mean, of course you mentioned in the beginning Hassan Kanafani, but was he like part of this movement? Because he was, I think, a bit earlier than the people that you are looking at especially. So can you. But about them for us?
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Yeah.
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D
So in the, in the book, in the acknowledgment section, which is like on page, on page 261, I have this extensive acknowledgment. The, I mean, I have tens of names thanking most of the folks that I came in contact with as I did this project. However, there are, there is an older generation that includes George Ibrahim, Francois Salem, Mustafa Kord, all these, Emil Ashrawi, all these great books, Adar I Tartir. Of course, when I mention names, I feel like, you know, I'm not giving credit to the names of other folks. So in the acknowledgments I put everybody's name that I could think of that had an effect on the experience for me. So you mentioned. So I encourage people to like go to page 261 and see all the names because they really mean a lot to me. But you mentioned Kanifani Hassan. Kanifani wrote a book about the nature of literature under occupation and occupied territories. And at the time he meant occupied territories. He meant actually what is today present day state of Israel within the Green Line, what Palestinians refer to as 48 Palestine. And there was a kind of an irony that the Palestinians in Israel were under military martial law until 1966. And then Israel occupied the present day occupied territories, Lowest bank of Gaza and the Golan Heights in 67. And then in the kind of mindset and in the ether and kind of public sphere. The occupied territories no longer became 1948, but became the 1967 occupied territories. And so Kennethani wrote this book and he said that he expects that the people of Palestine will learn from the experience of the 48 occupied Palestinians because they had been under occupation for a couple of decades and then that experience would transfer into the west bank and Gaza. And that's exactly what happened. You have a transfer of knowledge that took place. There was a kind of a politicization that occurred in the occupied territories. And specifically, most specifically, a lot of this happened in Jerusalem. There was a huge connection between leftists in the 48 occupied Palestine and the 67 occupied Palestine. There was a connection, an intellectual affinity that essentially set the ground for this movement that became the Palestinian theater movement. It was truly leftists that led this movement in the late 60s and early 70s, and a lot of it took place in Jerusalem.
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Cementmobile.com how hard was it for you to navigate through these decades? Because there was of course, a lot of information and sources and arguments that you wanted to put in in the book. And how did you, like, decide which characters you use or which dates you use in order to explain this movement more correctly for your readers.
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D
Honestly, it's, it's. It was actually quite easy because the, the. The story, as far as I'm concerned, the story told itself. And the periodization, I would say, is a kind of. There's a consensus about it. I know my colleague Helen Assar wrote a dissertation on Palestinian theatre, Stiff University in Berlin, and she also wrote an article for the Columbia Encyclopedia of Theater, where she actually uses a similar periodization. And then there is the Palestinian theater artists themselves. I mean, when they tell the story, they really often cite 1967 as a truly horrific event that transformed their thinking about themselves and art and culture. And then 1970 and Black September and the kind of destruction of the PLO and its efforts in Jordan and its attempts to create operations that go into the occupied territories being ended, that kind of realization that armed struggle was getting further and further away, and therefore physical liberation was getting further and further away. That realization actually led to a commitment to cultural resistance, to creating a cultural front or an artistic front, what I have referred to as a theatrical front. The key here is that in the occupied territories, in the absence of radio, television, press in the late 60s, early 70s, theater became really the primary mode for disseminating cultural ideas and political identity. Therefore, the theater actually became the institution that. That was the primary way to share what people really think. And it was the hardest to manage by the occupying authorities because you had to be physically there in order to get information. And that was not easy in the west bank of Gaza, where the population actually was not as large as it is today. So, you know, Ramallah was a town of 10,000, 15,000 people. Jerusalem. I mean, currently, like, there are 300, 400,000 Palestinians in Jerusalem. Back then, you had less than 100,000 people. And so if you think about it, people, everybody knew everybody. And so the theater became a really important mode to share the Palestinian identity. Now, in terms of artists who did this, the key artists at the time were individuals who created theater companies. So George Ibrahim created El Faniye Francoislem, and a whole crew of artists banded together and created Belalin. Hamid Alvar created the Palestinian theater. And so this period of the early 70s was formative for the creation of theater. And these troops, and there are other ones, but these troops in particular were foundational to this period.
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C
And can you maybe describe or analyze a little bit the place from the Palestinian movement? Like you said that they were, like, about cultural and political identities and how Much political. Were they in fact or did they address other themes as well? Can you maybe give us one or two example about some of the plays that they.
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D
Yeah, yeah, of course. So, I mean, one famous play that really has a quite a legendary status called the Darkness, Elekt Me, Let Me is basically a kind of a happening of some sort where people in the room, people arrive to the theater and electricity goes out and basically infighting begins within the company. And they have to figure out how to light up the room in order to do the play. Eventually they get candles and the entire audience ends up with a candle that they have to light up. And the message of the play is in the Darkness, every single person has to play their role. And there are sacrifices that take place. One of the characters, the carpenter, sacrifices himself, played by Adri Tur, who is a legendary figure in Palestinian theater. He ends up dying in the process. So the idea is we all have to do our part. We all have to sacrifice something, but we also have to honor each other. And so the Darkness is a beautiful play that in addition to self criticism, is an inspiring story of self liberation leading to popular liberation. Another play is Endel Zoom, which is, um. I forget how it translated it in the book Hinder Luzum is. It means when necessary. And the whole story is about. Leads to a woman who discovers that her brother is a collaborator and she has to make a decision whether she has familial loyalty or national loyalty. And in the end she chooses national loyalty and is willing to sacrifice her brother for the greater good. So that's another example and that one is from the Palestinian theater. The Darkness is from Belleville. The Palestinian theater functioned. It's an author driven company where the author was writing plays and then they ended up putting them on and they were quite popular plays. The Darkness is collectively created by Belalim to the point where the script itself has the names of the individuals of the actual actors as the names of the characters. One thing worth mentioning is that the Darkness, the main creative force behind it was Sam Habushi, who. Who was interested in film noir and interested in kind of conceptual, conceptual ideas. And he actually later on became an important architect. But at the time he was interested in kind of conceptual ideas. And that's where that idea came about. It was from same and he actually was recording a lot of the. Of the dialogue that ended up being the play. Francois Abusalim was a director, so he worked closely with Sam Hagbushi. But at the end of the day, the Darkness is really a collectively created piece.
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C
And coming to the last two questions of the podcast, how do you feel that the movement has an impact on today's Palestinian? I mean, I know you're an historian and you work on historical aspects, but maybe do you have an idea how it is an impact or a legacy on today?
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D
So let me tell you this. I this past summer I worked on a play that I wrote called him and she and I co directed it with Marina Johnson in Jerusalem or El Hakawati Theater, which forms a huge part of this book and stands on the shoulders of the movement from the period of the book. The reason is one, it was rehearsed and created and prepared in Alpakawati Theater which was built during this period. It was built in 1984. I dedicate a chapter to the building of the theater. It was built and created in 1984 in a burnt out cinema. That's the theater which we rehearsed in Manshee. The director of the theater is Ahmed Khalil, who is a member of Al Hakawati and he physically worked on the building of that theater. The play toured, it went to Al Khattabah Theater, it went to, it went to Jaffa. And this regular circuit of performances was in fact created in the 70s when these companies began to tour their plays. Al Kasaba is the offspring of Alwarsh al Faniyeh, which George Ibrahim created in the early 70s. And so without the work that was done in the 70s, the play I wrote and co directed this past summer wouldn't actually have a place to exist. So that gives you an idea. Hossam Abraishe, who starred in the show as a storyteller, in fact was one of the early artists in the 70s that was who was foundational to the theater movement. And so that gives you an example. Another example that is not my own is that a lot of the theaters existing today started in the 80s. When you think about it, Ashtar Theater, which is in Ramallah and Jerusalem and Gaza today, the founders actually were members of Al Hakawati Al Kathabah. As I mentioned, George Ibrahim has a lineage from 1967 until the 1965 until the present, continuing as part of the theater movement. Hossamu Barishe, Ahmed Abu Salahouns and Abbe Theatre who exist today and do amazing work performances almost every day in schools, in institutions for groups, et cetera. Amazing individuals started in the early 70s. You've got also influence in 1948 within Israel, where you've got, you know, Adnan Torabce who ran cultural centers. Ibrahim Khale, who ran cultural centers, both of them were part of Radish Hade, who was part of the building of theater as a Sera Theater in Ghar. And he tours children's shows that are basically created with masks and puppets and has done so for 30 years. His shows tour everywhere. Again, without that period and the creation of that theater of that time, we would not have that today. Even individuals who have theater companies today, like Al Hara Theater, Arouad Einad, these three come out of Bethlehem, have connections to that period in the 80s, if not as participants just starting out. They were inspired by these artists who had created this performance circuit and establish these theaters throughout Palestine. So that gives you a basic idea. There are many people that I am not mentioning only because of our time limitation, but I would say the influence is absolutely huge. Without these amazing people building this infrastructure in the 70s and 80s, we would not have this powerful theater movement today.
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C
Thank you so much, Professor Al Sabir and I asked all the authors that I do the podcast with, can you reveal to us what you may be working on next academically? Is it still connected to Palestinian theater, or will you look at something else that you are interested in?
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D
Well, I will always be connected to Palestinian theater in one way or another. I don't have a choice in the matter. I consistently think of the necessity of having a book that addresses the Oslo period and its influence on Palestinian theater. So that is an idea in the making. The play in Menshee is still getting done and so I'm involved in that. Excuse me, I am in the middle of a project that I am not sure how it will come to fruition, but basically I did field work during the Qatar World Cup. Two months of field work. I have lots of notes, lots of writing on it, but the shape of the final project has not taken place yet. It likely will be a book, but basically right now I am between these three major kind of pivots and I have to make a decision on what's next.
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C
Thank you so much, Professor Alzaber, for joining us today again on the podcast. Thank you for your time and that you talked a lot about your work. Thank you so much and Sapsliger.
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D
Have a wonderful day. Sam.