April 30, 2014  

Oh, My Sweet Land

A Love story from Syria

By Amir Nizar Zuabi performed by Corinne Jaber at the Young Vic on 25th April, 2014.

Amir Zuabi accompanied Corinne Jaber on a trip to Syrian refugee camps in Jordan and from what was obviously a harrowing experience they crafted this extraordinary one hour, one act, soliloquy they label a Love Story. It would be more accurate to call it a lament for Syria.

The weakness, and in some ways the strength, of the piece is that the drama is set in a kitchen and the action is the obsessive preparation and cooking and re-preparation and re-cooking of Kubah, a classic Syrian dish. Hence the action is, to say the least, limited but the intensity is all-pervasive.

The narrative, it is almost a poem, is by a leading character, who is half-German, half-Syrian, but raised in Germany; and is of her meeting with Ashraf al Rashi, a dissident who had been held and tortured by the secret police, the Mukhabat. They talk, they become lovers. They have three blissful months in Paris; they return and he disappears and she ends up in Munich. The action describes her search for him in camps and shelled out cities, it ends with her meeting him and his wife, Surraya and beautiful baby daughter, Ream – she embarrassed and Ashraf delighted to introduce her to the family.

The circumstances are highly political but neither politics nor religion nor the tribal conflicts, which we associate with Syria are mentioned. The back-drop is full of action but the play/soliloquy obfuscates the detail and the circumstances. This is a tract simply against, against man’s inhumanity to man, against his stupidity, against the waste and pointlessness of conflict, against the pain, and against the destruction of love and life.

For me it was just a little too elliptical, a bit too strange and mystifying. I like my drama to have meaning and perhaps a clue towards redemption. Oh, My Sweet Land is a lament without hope except by escape to a foreign land far removed from the turmoil of the “Arab spring”. But there can be no doubt of the Young Vic’s enterprise in putting on a piece of such gravity about one of the major issues of the day. Remember that she is cooking and thinking of Syria when she concludes:

It’s scalding hot

It’s dangerous

That’s when oil can splatter

A single drop can singe your eye

But no one can afford to look away

Decent people can’t look away from what is happening ….

If even now there can be mass destruction of children and women by gas

The world’s come to an end.

 

Now is the time to say nothing

There is not even a need to pretend to be shocked

Just listen to the oil sizzling in the pan

And pray that the flying drops miss the whites of your eyes ….

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About Tony Belton

Labour Councillor for Latchmere Ward 1972-2022, now Battersea Park Ward, London Borough of Wandsworth Ever hopeful Spurs supporter; Lane visit to the Lane, 1948 Olympics. Why don't they simply call the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, The Lane? Once understood IT but no longer

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