Home  Opinion Robert Fisk: Torture in Lebanon via a Toronto stage |
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Robert Fisk: Torture in Lebanon via a Toronto stage |
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Written by The Independent
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The duty of an artist is to place imagination on a higher level than history
Mar. 10, 2007- Scorched is the right title for Wajdi Mouawad's play about Lebanon. The word "Lebanon" doesn't occur in the script and "the army invading from the south" - the Israeli army, of course - remains preposterously anonymous. But any playwright who calls a town "Nabatiyeh: or refers to a prominent Shia figure called "Shamseddin" - the late Mehdi Shamseddin was the leader of the Shia clergy in Lebanon - hasn't tried very hard to hide the country in which his powerful, murderous scenario takes place. Suitably bloody, Scorched is a story of love, family honour, civil war and barbarity.
Wajdi Mouawad, who is of Lebanese Christian Maronite origin but is now a French Canadian - his play was written in French and translated into English for its latest performance at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto - has written a programme note in which he acknowledges his own background, even the devastating Israeli-Hizbollah war last summer. But his play, he says, is "anchored above all else by poetry, detached from its political context and instead anchored in the politic of human suffering, the poetry which unites us all".
The plot is simple. Nawal, an old lady, dies in Canada, and her son and daughter try to discover - from two sealed envelopes left to them by their mother - why she had remained silent for years before her death. In her youth in Lebanon, it transpires, Nawal's lover made her pregnant and the child was taken from her to preserve her family's honour. So she sets off, amid the massacres of the Lebanese civil war - there is a terrifying moment when blood from the victims of a bus massacre sprays over the young Nawal's clothes - to find her missing child.
During the civil war, she poses as a schoolteacher to educate the children of a local militia commander - so that she can assassinate him once she has gained his trust. The militia leader is killed, but Nawal is caught and taken to a prison where she is regularly raped by the jail's chief torturer. An old man later recalls for Nawal's daughter - who has gone to Lebanon to find out why her mother endured years of silence - that he was ordered by the jail authorities to throw two new-born babies into a nearby river. Instead, he takes the babies, covered in a cloth, to a local family who save their lives.
Nawal's secret - which turns her from being "the woman who sings songs" into a silent old lady - is that the original child for whom she is searching, the child of her long-dead lover, is her torturer and rapist. The torturer is the father of the son and daughter in Canada. He is also their brother. It is a secret revealed to the daughter by the militia leader called "Shamseddin" and it breaks the mind of her brother/father. He, too, lapses into eternal silence. An Oedipal drama if ever there was one.
And I can accept the play on that level. The duty of an artist, I have always thought, is to place imagination on a higher level than history, to frame real events - if her or she must - to fit the interpretation that an author or playwright chooses to reveal about life. But as a witness to the Lebanese civil war - and the author of Pity the Nation, my own testimony of that terrible conflict (the title is from a poem by Lebanon's greatest poet, Kahlil Gibran) - I find Mouawad's work much more difficult to accept on the level of mere art.
Shamseddin, as head of the country's Shia, was the first to call on the Lebanese to fight the Israeli occupation army in 1982. And there really was a girl who posed as a schoolteacher to murder a militia leader. Her name was Soad Bshara and she was a Christian leftist, not a Shia - I've even met the man who gave her the gun to kill the militia leader - and she did indeed attempt to assassinate him.
But General Antoine Lahd did not die. He showed me his wounds - two bullet holes - not long after his return to Lebanon from hospital in Israel. He was one of Israel's ruthless proxy warlords in Lebanon and he was in charge of the same brutal Israeli-controlled prison in which Bshara was subsequently locked up. She was not raped, but she was beaten and endured years of custody until the French government organised her release; she lives today in Paris while Lahd, after the collapse of his cruel "South Lebanon Army" in 2000, now lives in Tel Aviv where he runs - wait for it - a nightclub.
However, there certainly were well-trained torturers in Lahd's jail - its real name was Khiam prison and it was turned by the Hizbollah into a museum until being largely destroyed in last summer's war. The sadists of Khiam used to electrocute the penises of their prisoners and throw water over their bodies before plunging electrodes into their chests and kept them in pitch-black, solitary confinement for months. For many years, the Israelis even banned the Red Cross from visiting their foul prison. All the torturers fled across the border into Israel when the Israeli army retreated under fire from Lebanon almost seven years ago.
After watching Scorched, I went backstage to meet the actors and actresses - one of them gives a frighteningly accurate portrayal of a jazz-crazed sniper - only to find they had no idea that they were, in some cases, playing real people. They didn't even know that Israel had farmed out Khiam's torturers to western countries as "refugees" who would be killed if they returned to Lebanon.
The Israelis, of course, didn't mention their role in Khiam's horrors - which is why, several years ago, two members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police turned up at my home to ask if I could identify any torturers who might have been given asylum in Canada. I told them that their names were now written on the gates of Khiam prison.
But I do know that one of the torturers - who, of course, appears in Scorched as Nawal's rapist - is believed to have found guilty sanctuary in Toronto where he has set up in business. In other words, he probably lives less than three miles from the Tarragon Theatre in Bridgman Avenue. And who knows, maybe he will drop by for a ticket this month, just to enjoy the suffering he caused in a faraway land to which he will never dare to return. Would that be history? Tragedy? Or art?
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Madness takes over Lebanon.
Militants are fighting in the streets of Beirut. Military guns are on both sides. What is the prospect of such a situation. Aren't the Lebanese fed-up with wars?
23 November 2007
Lebanese President Emile Lahoud left the Baabda presidential palace without handing over the power to a new president. This is the first time since independence in 1943. |
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