our people had mansions
“This Haifa mansion belongs to Mustafa Pasha al-Khalil. After the Nakba, it was first occupied by Jewish settlers. Developers tried to demolish it to build a shopping center. But liberal Zionists appropriated it as an artistic project: a theatre.” — Johnny Mansour for the Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. 52, No. 2, “The Pasha’s Mansion Refuses to Become a Theater.”
EXT. EDGE – Sunrise
A group of Palestinians standing at the bottom of a hill, gazing upward at the Pasha Mansion with their backs to the audience. At the bottom of the hill, at street level, are shops with Hebrew names selling olive oil, soap, dates, figs, and oranges: all re-packaged to say “Made In Israel.” A food cart selling falafel, made using a centuries-old recipe, bears a sign reading “Try Israel’s national dish!” A billboard with decorated IDF soldiers reads “The only democracy in the Middle East.”
CHARACTERS
Lest you think we were all fellahin
grinding olives on rocks like
we’ve never seen millstones
—not that there’s anything wrong with that—
we had our capitalists, too.
Had our means of production
seized by wealthy, powerful elites.
SETTING
Their pink sandstone mansions mocked our modest
homes, the Wadi Salib estates looming atop
Haifa’s hills, overlooking the sea:
an assumed aspiration—surely nothing wrong with that.
Who wouldn’t want recessed doors,
trefoil arches, vaulted liwan, bathhouse
& terraced gardens with three gates to keep?
The commercial soap & oil families, the bulk cloth
& gauze weavers, the grain & orange
growers, the newspapermen, the exporters
—always sending wares to far-flung corners, preceding us.
They made their coin, filled the family
shatwehs so their daughters’ necks strained
on their wedding days. Head held high, aching.
TENSION
Their stately manors were the first to go,
the first stolen, & they the first shoved
down the road to exile, elsewhere
—definitely something wrong with that—
while some fellahin still worked;
their houses not garnering the kind
of attention that covets, at least not at first.
CONFLICT
Picture our poppy-dyed thobes, our woven carpets,
our olive wood spoons the settlers wanted
to sell in their strip mall. While
theater proponents—the “liberal occupiers,” the “colonialist left”—
ignore the irony of stealing
our culture & land & history & lives
to make a venue to perform, to pretend at humanity.
MOTIVATION
But even our homes resist: The Haifa mansion
refused to become a theater the way
we refuse to become past tense
—crumbling its walls rather than suffering the anthems
of the Hebrew land of Israel.
Colonizers & luxury real estate
developers gave up domesticating the place.
Let the wild desert we made bloom remember
while the world debates the historical
amnesia we call inheritance.
—Memory outlives bodies & buildings; becomes legacy.
If all life is theater & performance
is nuance, consider: by forcing us on the trail
of tears toward diaspora, they ensured we will endure.
CONCLUSION
The world over we perform our own plays, write
our own poetry, sing our own songs, speak
our truths about our stolen land
—how she calls us home, echoing through generations.
Consider there is some truth in play
& the last performance was Beckett’s Endgame,
the absurdist one-act with ambiguous denouement.
The house took them to account, forced the truth
from their limbs, & unable to bear witness
to their manufactured atrocity
—not unwilling but unable; they were just following orders—
they let the mansion crumble,
abandoned. No harmony to be had between
the natural culture of the place and the colonial culture.
Our lineage, like the mansion, a witness to the Nakba,
a scar on the landscape; what befell the stones
a bellwether for our people, fellahin & not
—we both lost our material possessions in the end.
This is not our performance, but real
life; a walking memory, not entertainment.
Battleworn, the mansion still stands & so do we.
EXT. EDGE – Sunset
A group of Palestinians standing at the bottom of a hill, gazing away from the Pasha Mansion, facing the audience. They’re wearing thobes with intifada tatreez, holding posters decorated with watermelon drawings in one hand and stones from bulldozed homes in the other, fists raised high, readying the pitch.
