Taha Muhammad Ali is an unlikely dramatic hero. His arms shake with age and infirmity, his legs occasionally buckle, and he often appears lost on stage, as if adrift in a vast expanse of sadness. But for an hour the story of this Palestinian poet has a vice-like hold on our attention and our hearts.
The one-man show “Taha” receives its English-language premiere on Wednesday at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. It offers not only a rare chance to learn about one of Palestine’s finest poets, but provides a visceral account of what it was like to live through the Nakba – the Catastrophe that befell hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were expelled from their homeland in 1948.
Its author and star, Amer Hlehel, has been performing the play in Arabic since 2014. He hopes he has been able to help young Palestinians rediscover Taha Muhammad Ali’s poetry following his death in 2011.
Hlehel, like Taha, belongs to Israel’s large minority of Palestinian citizens, numbering today some 1.7 million, or one in five of the population. They have found themselves forced into a unique and troubled position: inside Israel territorially and nominally as citizens, but outside the state’s Jewish self-definition, Israel’s popular consensus and its circle of ethnic privilege. As a result, the minority has acquired an unusual and illuminating perspective on both the Israeli and Palestinian experience.
Young Palestinians in Israel, says…