Making the Space of the New Present: Theatre in Palestine

Abstract

In Palestine, the present and space, are the flares, the fevers, of experience and resistance. It seems to me that many Palestinians are in a suspended present in which many labor to create a new present, radiant with the past of the village that was there, a present that unfolds the brilliance of the rusty, old, now useless key held through long, courageous, blistering years in a suitcase, a drawer, around the neck. And that present in which the key will be radiant unfolds in a space that is both the past and something not witnessed before. The present holds the past. It is the village no longer there, the trees bulldozed, the bones scooped up out of the ground. It is also that past’s potential, in today and its unfoldings, its spaces. A space not witnessed before is there in the dust when the Wall is destroyed, as destroyed it must be. It is maybe in the air over the Wall, through which the first opening flights recover something of equality.

But all of these indexes of collective Palestinian maturity were enabled by, and indeed grounded in, the Palestinian approach to political effectiveness, which is a new phenomenon in people’s history.

(Said, 1992: 177)

History does not exist. There are only disparate presents whose radiance is measured by their power to unfold a past worthy of them.

(Badiou, 2009: 509)

Maybe now is much more distant. Maybe ‖yesterday‗ is nearer

And ‖tomorrow‗ already in the past

But I grasp the hand of ‖now‗ that History may pass near me,

And not time that runs in circles, like the chaos of mountain goats.

Can I survive the speed of tomorrow’s electronic time?

Can I survive the delay of my desert caravan?

I have work to do for the afterlife, as if tomorrow I will not be alive.

I have work to do for the eternal presence of today.

(Darwish, 2003: 140)

The Palestinian must make the present since the present is not an imaginative luxury but a literal, existential necessity.

(Said, 1992: 153)

Subjective induction allows us to think the place in which the new present is constituted, what we could call the space of the new time.

(Badiou, 2009: 496)