Richard Schechner said about theatre that it “can be an incendiary device for revolution, a tool for critical reflection, and a practice of critical resistance.” Oh My Sweet Land , a solo play written by Palestinian Amir Nizar Zuabi, and conceived and performed by Syrian-German actress Corinne Jaber, is an attempt at illuminating in vivid detail the plight of millions of war-ridden Syrians through the story of one woman’s journey in search of her lover.

Zuabi’s work was staged at the Goethe Institut in Chennai on April 11 and 12. While the play propels the audience to consider the personal side to conflict in a time of desensitisation and apathy wrought by continuous exposure to the horrors of war, it falls short of being a Schechnerian “incendiary device”.

The play opens with a sense of urgency. The protagonist is in her Parisian kitchen, making kibbeh, a West Asian pastry made with ground meat, onions, pine nuts, a variety of spices, and flour. Jaber is in a hurry to tell us a story. She seems distant, preoccupied by kibbeh, and by Syria.

The protagonist, much like Jaber who plays her, was born in Germany to a Syrian father and German mother. For most of her life, her only connection to Syria is through food — prepared by her father, and by her Syrian grandmother, who cooked endlessly during her two-week visits to the family in Munich, her hands smelling of raw meat and spices from distant lands. Over the years, making kibbeh becomes second nature to the young girl — as though the process and the memory are physiologically embedded in her.

Now an adult, her connection to Syria becomes strengthened when she falls in love with Ashraf, a Syrian she meets in Paris. After helping Syrian refugees flee the war, Ashraf decides to return home, propelled by a feeling of guilt that he wasn’t doing enough. When he leaves, the protagonist decides to go in search of him, to make sure that he is safe. Over the next hour, the narrative follows her journey and the violence she witnesses along the way. “My body has a memory — of violence, and of making kibbeh,” the woman tells us.

Traversing through Lebanon, Jordan and, finally, Syria, she describes in harrowing detail the people she meets — whose lives have been indelibly changed by the ongoing conflict. One memorable character is Ashraf’s cousin Salim, an actor who recounts how, when he was being tortured, he noticed the black pointy shoes of his interrogator — shoes that he recognised as being the last pair of size tens at a sale that he too had gone to.

Recounting the memory of eating a chicken-filled pastry in Syria, the woman says, “The idea of eating in this devastating place makes me sick.” And yet, as the play progresses, we see Jaber cut and sauté onions, mince the meat and make the kibbeh, as if to say that life goes on. Jaber’s cooking underscores the fact that one must still eat to live; that in this particular moment, as the protagonist grapples with her identity of belonging to a Syrian diaspora, one who has never lived in Syria nor directly experienced the conflict that continues to eviscerate the lives of other Syrians, she can only make sense of it all by doing the one other thing that makes her feel Syrian — cooking kibbeh.

A prolific playwright and theatre practitioner, Zuabi’s earlier work I am Yusuf and This is My Brother tells the story of the infamous Nakba of 1948, when, in the aftermath of the creation of the Israeli State, thousands of Palestinians fled their homes. Before writing Oh My Sweet Land , Zuabi, along with Jaber, interviewed many Syrian refugees in West Asian camps. “Everything about this play, with the exception of the love story, is based on real events,” said Jaber. “As an actor, I don’t engage with the idea of pathos. This play is not to create pity. It stops short of journalism and YouTube videos of the war. It is not political. If this play has helped change at least one person’s perspective, then we have been successful.”

Despite her affirmations to the contrary, Oh My Sweet Land is political. It has to be, because Zuabi’s subject, at its core, reveals the inextricable connection between the personal and the political and how war destroys any boundaries between the two. Jaber’s character reveals how one can be affected by a conflict even without experiencing it first-hand, (how the sense of one’s identity goes beyond immediate circumstances), and how it borrows heavily from cultural identity and memory. Ashraf brings Syria to our protagonist — he is her link to a larger culture and promises her a sense of belonging. And when he leaves, she is determined to go after him, to see him once again, however briefly.

Zuabi’s story is descriptive. If one were to listen to Jaber with eyes shut, the play would sound almost like an audiobook of a travel journal, albeit with gruesome and violent imagery. The multi-sensorial nature of theatre, while evident when the audience get to smell the sautéed onions on stage, remains somewhat underutilised. What we get, instead, is a simplistic narration. The play could benefit from more craft.

Sindhuri Nandhakumar is a Chennai-based writer and theatre practitioner

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