U.S. News &World Report _ July 2, 2007 Edition
Iraqis find a Better Life in the Theater For refugees in Syria, it's a welcome reminder of home
By Robert W. Gee
DAMASCUS, SYRIA—The theater was sold out on opening night: men wearing suits and ties, jeans and T-shirts; women in conservative black abayas, in designer head scarves and high heels. They were all there, a mixing of the sects and social classes. It was like Baghdad, circa 2002. "When I got on stage, I felt that I was in Iraq," said Rasim al-Joumayli, 69, one of Iraq's most famous comedic actors and the author and star of a new play, Don't Play With Fire. "It's the same audience as in Baghdad."
Only this is Damascus in 2007, the new, de facto capital of Iraqi arts. Actors, artists, musicians, singers, and writers, facing death threats in Baghdad because their professions have been deemed anti-Islamic by extremists, have fled to Syria. Most arrived within the past year.
Damascus is one of the few Arab capitals that can match prewar Baghdad's rich Arabic culture. Here, there are art galleries, theaters, a state-of-the-art concert hall—and an eager audience: Some 1.2 million Iraqi war refugees have poured into Syria. Most of them have settled in the Damascus suburbs, and their yearning for the culture they left behind has helped resurrect Iraqi theater.
Reality based. At the time of the American invasion, there were more than two dozen theaters operating in Baghdad. Today, only the National Theater is still open, with a schedule restricted to matinees because of curfews and the constant threat of violence. In Damascus, as many as three Iraqi plays are running at a given time. Most weave familiar stories of war and loss, and of Iraqis struggling to survive in exile. They are black comedies, tinged with self-criticism and laments of a lost homeland, all fresh expressions of the 21st-century Iraqi experience. "The aim is to call all Iraqis to be united, to be helpful, to give up this dispute between Sunni and Shia, give up these differences between Iraqis," says Nahad Hassan, coproducer of Problems That Make You Laugh, Problems That Make You Cry, which has been running since the beginning of the year. Hassan is Shiite, and the other producer is Sunni. The cast is a mix of the two sects.
As in real-life Iraqi Damascus, the characters in the play come from all backgrounds: a female medical student who flees to Damascus after her father is killed; a peasant who sells all his possessions in Iraq, only to have his money stolen after he arrives in Damascus and then suffer a heart attack because of it; a female dancer; an unscrupulous Iraqi businessman who owns a hotel and a cellphone shop and employs two young Iraqi men, paying them less than he would pay Syrians to do the same job. Eventually realizing his greed, the businessman in the play joins the other characters to pay for an operation to save the peasant's life. "When we entered Syria, we brought our problems to Syria," says Ahmad Shukri, the play's director. But, he says, the play's message is that Iraqis must help one another in order to survive in their diaspora.
In Don't Play With Fire, an Iraqi man comes to Syria looking for his son, who disappeared after looting banks in the wake of the U.S. invasion. The son has constructed a new identity in Syria as the scion of a rich Baghdad family. In the end, he rejects his father, choosing to maintain the trappings of stolen wealth. His distraught father collapses and dies, and the curtain falls. "We show the negative and positive side of the Iraqi personality who lives here as a refugee," says al-Joumayli, who plays the father. "We make the audience laugh from the beginning, but we have to shock them."
Iraqi theater, which built its reputation in Baghdad on comedies, has taken a darker turn in its new incarnation, as Iraqis in exile begin a process of confronting the forces from within that are destroying their country. The Damascus Iraqi plays are "from our reality," says Hussein Najjar, the author of Problems That Make You Laugh. "We are not a perfect community. There are a lot of people who are lying and stealing in a way to serve their own interests."
Najjar has written more than 30 plays, the last three performed in Damascus. Just Come, which ran for three months last fall and will be performed in Sweden in August at the invitation of the Swedish government, tells a story of the dangerous underground migrant route from Iraq to Europe. The play's villains are the Iraqi smugglers, who become rich from their fellow Iraqis' misfortunes.
Coexistence. The explicit critiques of Iraqi disunity seem to play well with the audiences, which are largely portraits of religious pluralism. Iraqis in Damascus will tell anyone who will listen that they not only coexisted before the war but shared lives. They include Shiites married to Sunnis, threatened by militants from one side or the other. One such couple, Neseer Khather Hussein, who is Shiite, and Sana Abbas Mohammad, who is Sunni, were forced from their home and convenience-store business last year by the Shiite Mahdi Army militia. They attended a recent performance of Problems That Make You Laugh with their 11-year-old daughter for the third time. "It makes us comfortable, makes us forget our problems, our sadness in those few hours we are here," says Hussein.
In Damascus, Iraqis have not, for the most part, organized themselves in sectarian enclaves. In some cases, young men from sects that fight one another in Iraq share apartments in Syria. They are united by nostalgia for the past and by their present circumstances. Still, Iraqis don't have much choice but to live peacefully in Syria. The country is a Baath Party dictatorship that enforces a get-along-or-else policy for Iraqis, officially considered guests, not refugees. The penalty for Iraqis running afoul of the law: a one-way ticket home.
About three quarters of Iraq's actors now live in Damascus, according to unofficial tallies by the actors themselves. They also produce Iraq's television drama series in Syria. And they don't expect to return home anytime soon. Several death threats posted on militant websites last year listed actors by name. One reads: "We want to punish them and take revenge for all Iraqis. I know they will die faster than anything. God has to know they are bad people."
Iraqi theater developed into a cultural institution during Saddam's rule, despite his support of the military over the arts and his heavy-handed censorship. "In the beginning, when American forces took Iraq, we were very happy to have freedom. We could make whatever we wanted that didn't depend on the government," says Mohsen Mohammad, actor and retired longtime director of the Iraqi National Theater, who has started an organization to support Iraqi actors, directors, and playwrights in Syria.
Theaters, however, were looted in the wake of the American invasion and have since closed because of the violence. There are no longer government censors, but new threats effectively suppress any mention of religion or the competing militias helping to drive the cycle of violence in present-day Iraq. Even in Syria, such topics are taboo. "We think about returning to Iraq, so we have to make sure our page is clean," Najjar says. And if the old government provided only token support for the arts, the new government gives even less. "What makes us laugh now is that in the time of democracy and liberation, there is no interest in theater at all," Najjar says.
Syria, by contrast, offers security and a measure of freedom. "I'm happy to be here in Syria. It's safe here. We can move freely. We can work," says Walid al-Hussein, an Iraqi television actor who performs in Don't Play With Fire. He moved to Damascus with his wife and three children late last year. "As an actor, if I keep on working, I feel like I'm alive. But if I stop, I will die," he says. Ticket prices are relatively inexpensive, ranging from $1.50 to $5, although theater managers often offer discounts for families or for those who say they can't afford it.
On opening night in May, the audience for Don't Play With Fire greeted each actor's first appearance on stage with sustained applause. During set changes, young men danced in the aisles to loud Arabic pop music. The audience erupted in laughter at punch lines, as if on cue. "All Iraqis are so thirsty for Iraqi culture," says al-Joumayli, the avuncular playwright and lead actor, who before the performance sat at the doors to the theater welcoming patrons. "That's why you see this audience: because they are so thirsty for Iraqi culture. When they have the opportunity, they will take it immediately."
Iraqi refugees currently in:
Syria 1,200,000
Jordan 750,000
Elsewhere 200,000
Sources: Refugees International, news reports
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