Identity Found: On West Side via West Bank
Najla Said’s “Palestine,” a one-woman Off Broadway show that began previews on Saturday, is a coming-of-age story about Ms. Said’s journey to become an Arab-American on her own terms.
The daughter of Edward W. Said, the Columbia University professor who until his death in 2003 was the most prominent advocate in this country for the cause of Palestinian independence, Ms. Said guides the audience though her teenage years as a self-described politically agnostic Upper West Side princess to a vision of herself today, a 35-year-old woman who is deeply moved by the very word “Palestine.”
Ms. Said, a writer and actor, insists that she is not an especially political person. “Palestine,” which officially opens on Feb. 17 at the Fourth Street Theater in the East Village, offers no remedies for Mideast tensions or blanket assessments of a complex situation. Ms. Said just tells her tale (with generous helpings of humor), which includes attending an elite Manhattan prep school (Trinity), where she blended in with her Jewish friends; becoming anorexic at 15; and visiting the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan and Lebanon with her family, where her priority was often getting in some beach time rather than analyzing the geopolitical situation.
“I worried about being pretty enough, smart enough and fitting in,” Ms. Said recalled during a recent interview about “Palestine” and the years before 9/11 cast a dark shadow. “In the way of many immigrant kids,” she added, “I just wanted all the questions about identity to go away.”
Those questions persisted, of course. And so on a minimalist stage, with shifts in mood and scene accomplished by an original soundtrack of Arabic and Western music, Ms. Said talks about them. Her trips to the Middle East with her family were sometimes a jumble of confusion, she says, with the smell of open sewage in Gaza, the stark separation of the sexes, the food and the language that seemed to have nothing to do with her cushy Upper West Side life.
Her mother, Mariam Cortas, is Lebanese and was brought up Quaker. She and Mr. Said, a professor of English and comparative literature who was born in Jerusalem but left the Middle East as a teenager, bonded over books like “Jane Eyre,” not discussions of Orientalism. In the play Ms. Said recalls her Christian father fondly as a “cute old guy,” dapper in a three-piece suit, playing tennis, driving a Volvo and smoking a pipe.
Beyond his daughter’s gaze, Said was certainly considered a provocative figure. Some supporters of Israel accused him of failing to condemn specific terrorist acts by Palestinian groups. His supporters applauded his advocacy of a Palestinian homeland. Ms. Said’s play revisits a 2000 international incident over a widely published photograph of her father at the Lebanese border, about to throw a stone at an abandoned Israeli guardhouse.
Ms. Said casts his action as part of a stone-throwing competition with her older brother, Wadie, with little political significance. Her father at the time called it “a symbolic gesture of joy” that the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon had ended. His detractors urged Columbia to reprimand him or to repudiate his action, but university officials decided that no action was needed.
Given that “Palestine” flirts with that kind of controversy, Sturgis Warner, the co-artistic director of the Twilight Theater Company, which is producing the show in association with New York Theater Workshop, said he worried about raising the initial $30,000 to mount the production. But even with the inherent difficulties of fund-raising, money from all kinds of people flowed in from all over the world, Mr. Warner, who is directing the show, said. It included a $15,000 donation from the Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim, who was Edward Said’s best friend.
“Najla’s play is important because it adds a personal dimension to the difficulties of communication in a life that has many different reference points,” Mr. Barenboim said in an e-mail message. He mentioned Ms. Said’s position as a second-generation American with Arab roots, growing up in a predominantly Jewish environment, a child of privilege confronted with “the deprived conditions of many Palestinians.”
“The way she moves between these spheres,” he added, has much in common with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a project Mr. Barenboim started in 1999 with Edward Said, who played piano and wrote music criticism. With the orchestra, Mr. Barenboim said, he and Said wanted to “encourage conversations between Arabs and Israelis and connect people individually across the chasm of speechlessness that so often characterizes the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”
To Mr. Warner, whose company supports the creation of new plays, especially by emerging playwrights, “what’s important is showing the individual narrative and going beyond the politics.”
Indeed, while Ms. Said’s theatrical cocktail might be viewed as personal and political, she said she made efforts not to offend any group. She felt the pain of being misunderstood all too keenly after 9/11, she said, because she realized that her heritage made her an outsider, at best, to people who knew nothing about her or about Arab-Americans.
But Ms. Said also finds a danger in group identification, which can mean the loss of the details of real personal history, which are needed for people to see and hear each other fully, she said after a recent rehearsal. “We’ve all got stories,” she said.
Lameece Issaq, a Palestinian-American playwright who lives in New York, concurred. “We are artists, trying to get work, but we have to create conversations to take on the complexity of our experience,” Ms. Issaq said. She is part of a group of playwrights who are establishing the Noor Theater group to support, develop and present the work of artists of Middle Eastern descent. (Ms. Said is not involved but has done similar work in the past.)
“Like Najla, people are coming out more and sharing their narratives more,” Ms. Issaq added.
In the past few years Ms. Said has appeared in Off Broadway plays, in film and on television, and most notably in the Seattle Repertory production of Heather Raffo’s solo play, “Nine Parts of Desire,” which looks at the lives of a cross section of women in Iraq. “Palestine,” she said, has been a chance to deal with all the things she spent many years trying to avoid.
“When I hear the word Palestine, I hear my dad’s voice saying it. But I don’t know what it is, because it’s not a place for me,” she said. “I don’t know it; I have no connection to it. Even my dad was not really connected to the actual, geographical place — for him it was an idea, a struggle for equality and human rights.”
