On a small whiteboard I wrote the following question: “Why do you want to participate in this play?”
I didn’t expect that among the answers, which ranged from “wanting to discover the theater” and “sharing stories of war and the difficulty of refugee life,” that the one most cited would be a desire to address a Lebanese public that they believe sees them only as dirt poor, ignorant, conservative and close-minded.
“We want to tell the Lebanese that we had a good life, and homes, and jobs. We’re not beggars, we have dignity,” said Mona, who was displaced from Rural Damascus province and lost a son to an illness under harsh conditions.
“I want people to see us in a way that resembles us,” answered Wafaa.
She had been displaced along with her family from the outskirts of Aleppo when it became a battlefront; she is the mother of five children who ran a small shop next to their home, and doesn’t know what happened to it.
In fact, the women’s insistence on giving priority to this topic was surprising. I expected that the stories of war and loss were their primary motive for speaking out and re-producing Antigone.
Over the three months of the project to perform this play, I would learn that the near-daily confrontations that women would withstand in the face of racist or condescending comments stood for a large portion of their tales of injustice.
Thus, it wasn’t only stories of oppression, war and losing loved ones that emerged during the rehearsals. The stories of Syrians who are crushed inside Beirut’s pockets of poverty were also strongly present. I found myself, a middle-class Syrian, and also a refugee in Beirut, learning from my work with them how racism in essence is based on strongly-rooted class criteria.
When I walk through the street, it’s simply not the same as it is for them. My social circles, no matter how diverse, are different from theirs. Syrians in Lebanon, like Lebanese of course, are made up of classes and these worlds are practically closed to each other.
When the bus taking the female trainees stopped to let them off in Gemmayzeh, where we were working that day, it caused a momentary halt in traffic. This was enough for a woman in a luxury car to scream at the women, “What are you people doing here?” This prompted other people in the street to intervene, and let out their anger on the women with a strange appearance in their neighborhood.
The anger of the woman and those who followed her harbored astonishment mixed with condemnation. What were a group of hijab-wearing women, with their modest clothes, doing in this part of Beirut? Why were they meeting here? Don’t they have places where they live, and never leave?
My team and I had preceded the group to our training location and thus were unable to catch this short “show” in Gemmayzeh. Fatima was the first woman to enter. She approached me with a sad smile and said, “Seriously, what are we doing here?”
The same thing took place in practically every place we went in the city. As much as it would unnerve me, it would make the women more determined to continue with their project.
Most of the time, they would recall these incidents as rare funny spots in the rehearsal. How could they overcome this injustice? I believe the answer would come from others, Lebanese men and women, whom we would regularly encounter by chance. They would always smile at us and offer assistance whenever they could. We couldn’t have gone forward without them. The world would be truly desolate without such people, and Beirut certainly has its inescapable share of them. Beirut is fierce and always tense, but it continued to stubbornly resist the spread ofharshness to its heart. Through its people, the city would always return some of the hope that we had just lost upon encountering others.
A few days before the performance, Farah arrived. She had been forced to leave her home and land in rural Aleppo and live, with her husband and four children, in a musty room in Shatila. She asked me to add another story to the tale that she was telling in the play. She said she had to talk about her Lebanese neighbor, Umm Khaled, who made their life possible in the camp; Farah insisted that the play would be lacking without her. I tried hard to convince her that the script had been completed, but Umm Khaled was Beirut for Farah. Each one of us had his or her intimate intimate Beirut, to which we would flee when the city’s harsh streets became oppressive.
The women of Antigone know that their difficult conditions have left them more fragile and susceptible to ugly racist incidents in Beirut. But they brought all of this to the stage, to confront the audience that would come to know their happy spirits, their love of live, and the difficult paths that brought them to the camps of the Diaspora. They knew that they had difficult destinies but none of them intended to surrender any time soon.
At the end of every performance the meetings between them and the audience would see long bouts of laughter mixed with stolen tears. A small portion of their dreams had been achieved but they were aware that they faced a difficult path ahead of them, in enduring their lives as refugees. This applies to Syrian refugees who today are now facing new official measures that will make their situation even more difficult.
The decision by General Security on Dec. 31 of last year reminded them that discrimination first affects the poor. This unfair decision to regulate the entry of Syrians in to Lebanon, along with the loopholes that were deliberately created, states, ambiguously, that there is no problem for well-off Syrians to enter, or to settle their status. As for the poor, the laborers and those fleeing from oppression, there are other borders that will be closed to them, or that will force them to leave for parts unknown. In fact, the discrimination against refugees is taking a more dangerous course. This time, it’s not just racist behavior by individuals, or media outlets using the rhetoric of hatred against the Syrian presence. It is a government decision, backed by Lebanon’s political elites.
Thus, Lebanon is cracking down more and more, but we once again find refugee from its harshness with its people. Lebanese, as individuals and associations, have rushed to fight back against this decision and overturn it. A sit-in was held at the National Museum and media outlets and social media have launched campaigns. The group Legal Agenda has launched a legal campaign, backed by other groups, to mobilize against this decision. These people share the anxiety of Syrians and are offering them unconditional support, reminding us that together we will face huge dangers if we give in to the policies of discrimination and the rhetoric of hatred. They reminded us all that though we aren’t in a position of power today in countries being torn apart by wars and the contending interests of politicians, nevertheless we are not a small group, and we are certainly not weak. Thus, we can only work together to allow the aspect of Beirut that embraces outsiders to win out over the aspect that seeks to repel them, even if this takes a while.