Nehad Selaiha watches a scathing anti-American political skit at Al-Hanager In a report entitled Changing Minds, Winning Peace: A new Strategic Direction For US Public Diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim World, commissioned by the State Department and published on 1 October 2003, the 13-member advisory group who prepared it under the chairmanship of Edward P Djerejian repeatedly warn against the widespread and fast growing anti-American feeling in the countries they visited, including Egypt. On page after page one comes across statements like: "animosity toward the United States has grown to unprecedented levels"; "hostility toward America has reached shocking levels" or, "the bottom has fallen out of Arab and Muslim support for the United States." In Egypt, for instance, a survey conducted in 2002 revealed "that only six per cent of Egyptians had a favorable view of America". The report goes on to list the main grievances that Arabs and Muslims harbour against the US, some of which, it candidly admits, cannot be redressed through public diplomacy. Apart from the fact that the US has become the only superpower and self-appointed policeman of the world (though the report does not put it quite like that, opting for the gentler phrase "the world's preeminent power") and what Arabs and Muslims "perceive as US denigration of their societies and cultures" in the American media, the major source of resentment, it concedes, stems from America's foreign policies. "It is clear, for example," it says, "that the Arab- Israeli conflict remains a visible and significant point of contention between the United States and many Arab and Muslim countries and that peace in that region, as well as the transformation [my italics] of Iraq, would reduce tensions." In this respect, however, the advisory group is helpless: their "mandate is clearly limited to issues of public diplomacy". The report offers many astute, practical and level-headed recommendations; but without addressing the root causes of the problem can one really hope for improvement? I had read Changing Minds some time ago, and in the crazy mêlée of events that sweeps us along from day to day, incredulous, stunned and half dazed, had almost forgotten it. But Khalid El-Sawy's Al-Le'b fil Demagh (rendered last week in the Listings section as Mind Games but translates more accurately as Messing with the Mind) brought it vividly and disturbingly back to my weary mind. It seemed like a response to, a dramatisation and confirmation of the findings of that report. It was the first day of Eid Al- Adha; I had spent most of the day with the family, had eaten more than I should to please my mother and had had endless discussions with my brother, on a fleeting visit from New York where he lives, about the prospects of the next American elections and the different candidates...etc. I had fled the family home to give my stomach and mind a break. I made my way to Al-Hanager and sat quietly sipping tea in anticipation of the performance. I knew from previous experience that El-Sawy's work was never light on the digestion -- invariably loud, aggressive, and peremptory. That evening, however, anything seemed preferable to my mother's effusive culinary expressions of love. The moment El-Sawy rushed into the foyer of Al- Hanager, with some members of his Movement independent troupe, all dressed marine-style, with helmets, waving mock guns, letting them off now and then with explosive bang bangs, barking abusive, mostly four-letter-word curses in the American slang at everybody in sight, and generally causing a terrible din and behaving like hooligans or, in view of the military getup, like brutal, thuggish security officers, I knew what I had let myself in for. It was the last thing I could have wished for on that evening: an agit-prop play and on an intractable subject that has become our bitter daily bread -- us and the US, or, more accurately, us and the western other, forgetting how together we have forged a wonderful, enlightened culture over centuries, despite the shambles of history. Time seems to hopelessly recede and we are back on the merry-go-round. It was then that I remembered the vicious circle of misunderstanding that has bedevilled us since 11 September -- what that report I had read months ago had said about both the Americans and Arabs and Muslims being trapped in "a dangerously reinforcing cycle of animosity". When I was a child I was often advised by wise elders that if someone abused me, I should not respond by hurling the abuse back at them; it is infinitely more rewarding, I was told, to stop and ask why, and examine myself honestly to find if there was some truth, however painful, in what they said and try to establish some sort of dialogue. Nowadays, neither party, us or the US seems willing to do that. Though the official media here is careful to control or tone down any offensive, anti-American emotional outpourings, one would be a fool to ignore the tenor, pitch and resonance of popular opinion. Visit any mosque, any open debate at a university, any theatre, and you will know what I am talking about. And it is not very pleasant. People are herded under one rubric (Arabs, Muslims, Americans, Christians, Jews, Asians, or what you will, regardless of the glaring fact of subcultures and ethnic multiplicity) and expected to behave according to a rigid set of precepts and practices imposed by god knows whom. Individuality seems to be dead and mutual distrust is advocated; things you, and others, have long believed in and cherished are branded as anti-Islamic, anti-Semitic or anti-national; the veil has come to be mandatory, the mark of female Islamic identity (in capital letters), though it has been historically a mark of female oppression in many patriarchal cultures and religions, and all the values that humanity has long cherished and fought for are claimed as the property of one set of people to the exclusion of all else. What Khalid El-Sawy did in his Messing with the Mind, whether he meant it or not, was to air these dilemmas, albeit without giving much thought to their complexity. Consciously, he planned an agit- prop-cum-political-cabaret performance which used the modes of parody, grotesque, farce and meta- theatre and harnessed them together within the framework of a television phone-in-cum-talk-show with a live audience. Unfortunately, or fortunately for some, we, the hapless Hanager audience, were the victims. Having been bullied into the auditorium we discovered that we had been autocratically cast by the author-director-scenographer, sound and set- designer and star of the show, Khalid El-Sawy, into the role of paid studio audience at a live TV show. And since the security were dressed as American marines the message was tediously obvious -- our media, indeed our whole lives, are run by the US. The star of El-Sawy's mock talk-show was a US general who managed to hold all the ropes of the Egyptian media in his fist, imposing "decadent liberal" values (which accommodate peaceful co- existence and negotiated, peaceful settlements within the eternal triangle of wife-husband-lover -- read Palestine, the Arabs or Palestinian Authority and the United States) on everybody at gun point. It was hilarious, one has to admit, with a lot of witty punning, shrewd use of innuendo, parodies of historical soap operas, well-known talk shows, some satirical, political take-offs of well-known Egyptian media stars and American musical style numbers, lots of video pick-ups of the scenes on stage taken live and projected simultaneously on a screen, which provided the scenic backdrop, to suggest, together with a few other carefully selected props, that we were really in a TV studio, participating in a live show, plus a good dollop of sentimental songs about the power of love to bore a hole into the mightiest of strongholds (the aforementioned report had gently satirized the new 83 million dollar consulate outside Istanbul which, though it "satisfies important security concerns", seems like "a remote crusader castle"). As it transpired the one solution the show had to offer after two hours of clowning around basic, crucial issues, was that the only way left to us to fight is suicide- bombing. Another round of mutual massacre and self-annihilation. The report, I remembered, despite all its lapses and shortcomings, had recognised, at least, that we had to put a stop to the cycle of violence. And there I was, on a holy day, asked to carry a gun and decimate as many of God's beautiful creatures as I could. On the other side, in Israel and the settlements, people are asked to do the same. El-Sawy's Messing with the Mind was a timely reminder of what we are letting ourselves in for. If the media in the US and Israel is distorting us, eroding our individuality as human beings, and if we pay them back in a similar coin, distorting them out of all recognition -- and granted there is a lot of injustice in the world -- is the solution simply exploding yourself or bulldozing as many houses and people as you can, as the play seems to infer? Messing with the Mind was a deeply painful experience on both the political and existential levels. I would like to think it was cathartic for some. As for the actors and singers, I owe them an apology. This was an instance where art came too close to reality and it is to their credit that it did. I could imagine them doing their skit in many anti-war, anti-globalisation demonstrations all over the world. They would be at home in Paris, London, New York and San Francisco. So what are we talking about? For performance details see Listings
