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Gaza on the Hudson
A play in New York on Rachel Corrie, the peace activist crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza, has an arresting quality to it in the way it brings back from the grave the voice of an idealist.
- By Fawaz Turki, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:00 November 11, 2006
- Image Credit: Illustration by Dwynn Trazo/Gulf News
A three-hour ride on the Metroliner from Washington, my hometown, to New York will get you to Gaza. Well, not quite. But the ethos of that tormented strip of land, whose suffering is beyond all rational understanding, is so compellingly evoked on the stage of the off-Broadway Menetta Lane Theatre, that you think you're there.
The play, My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a riveting one-woman show, is the story of Rachel Corrie, the young, all-American youngster who was crushed to death 3 years ago, at age 23, under an Israeli bulldozer as she tried to shield a Palestinian home from demolition, one of 3,000 homes destroyed by the Israeli military in the Rafah region of Gaza between 2001 and 2003.
The show, deftly cobbled together from Rachel's diary entries and e-mails to her parents by the British journalist Katherine Viner and directed by Alan Rickman, has an arresting quality to it in the way it brings back from the grave, as it were, the voice and inward preoccupations of an idealist who, since her early teens, had committed herself to fighting injustice.
"I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop," she e-mails her mother from Gaza, referring to the oppressive conditions the Palestinians endure daily under occupation.
Unlike those other American idealists from another, earlier generation, who up and went to Spain to fight, with gun in hand, against fascism in the 1936-1939 Civil War, Rachel was content to go to Palestine in order to be part of a contingent of "Internationals", young activists from the US and Europe, who were the vanguard of a civil disobedience movement. But in Palestine, as we all know, civil disobedience is no guarantee that you will not be put in harm's way.
As Rachel poetically writes in her diary, anticipating her own death: "Had a dream about falling, falling to my death off of something dusty and smooth and crumbling like cliffs in Utah, but I kept holding on."
Engrossing performance
Megan Dodds, the skilled and over-confident actress who plays Rachel, puts on an engrossing performance. In her monologue, Rachel's musings, after a while, begin to enlarge the compass of our human awareness, to give the meaning of idealism a novel focus, and to infuse the interplay between oppressor and oppressed with dramatic syntax.
"I wonder how it would be for them to arrive in my world," Rachel says of the Palestinians. "I wonder if you can forgive the world for all the years spent existing, just existing, in resistance to the constant attempt to erase your home."
Years existing, that is, to resist the facile contempt the occupier exhibits towards you as his victim, the standardisation of suffering he imbues your daily life with, and the hollow brutality of the cliches he uses to define you as his terrorist enemy.
The set is spartan, with the first half of the play taking place in the messy, cluttered, all-American bedroom at Rachel's middle-class home in Olympia, Washington state, the other in the low-slung, poorly furnished, white-washed, bullet-pocked home in a refugee camp in Gaza where Rachel lived during her stay there.
In the former, she reflects: "I have had this underlying need to go to a place and meet people who are on the other end of the tax money that goes to fund the US military."
In the latter, she reflects on her refusal to accept cheapness and chaos in the world. We wonder, given her horrific, untimely death, whether she had come to an understanding of that which undermines, and that which may restore, our resources of insight into enslavement and empowerment.
My Name Is Rachel Corrie has had a controversial, bitterly contentious journey from London, where it had initially opened, to the New York Theatre Workshop.
While the play was in rehearsal, several pressure groups (need we identify them?) came out of the woodwork, twisted arms and threatened behind the scenes, till the producer decided to "postpone" the production.
They insisted that the play should be "contextualised," shorthand for presenting the death of Rachel Corrie in context of "Palestinian terror". And you don't mess with those pressure groups when they come after you.
Tony Kushner, who wrote the script for Stephen Spielberg's film Munich, and who had spent months trying to mollify Jewish audiences by defending the concept of "moral equivalencies" in his screenplay, was quoted as saying, in Nation magazine, in reference to the Corrie dispute: "There is a very, very highly organised attack machinery that will come after you if you express any kind of dissent about Israel's policies, and it's a very unpleasant experience to be caught in the cross hairs."
Happily, the 90-minute show was finally picked up by the fiercely independent Minetta Lane, where it is now having its successful run.
As you leave the theatre, marvelling, not so incidentally, at Megan Dodds' compelling performance, what rings in your ears are Rachel's words about the Palestinians: "We have got to understand that they dream our dreams and we dream theirs." Yes, Rachel, your dreams, embodying your humaness and compassion, are ours too. Rest in peace, dear child.
Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.
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