Monologue on Palestinian poet’s life nimbly sidesteps overt politics to encourage hope and empathy in shared humanity.

8,000 kilometres away in the Gaza Strip, a terrible war rages on. It is the culmination of decades of conflict, where countless innocent lives have been lost, key infrastructure and history are stripped away by bombs, and the world watches on, helplessly bearing witness to the loss as it grows each day. On social media and on the streets, people call for a ceasefire, to end the violence, crying, screaming for someone to finally say stop, a world that is drowned in noise and competing voices. It is perhaps odd then, that it is a quiet, one-man theatre show that leaves a resounding impact on the audience, as we experience in Amer Hlehel’s Taha.

Directed by Amir Nizar Zuabi and performed and written by Hlehel, Taha tells the life story of poet Taha Muhammad Ali, an icon of Palestinian literature, whose writing stood out amongst his contemporaries due to its direct, sometimes humorous, and often devastating style, combining both the personal and the political in the poetic expressions of his lived experiences. In Taha, Hlehel adopts the voice of Taha himself, and explores his childhood growing up in Saffuriya, and the tragedy of the Nakba in 1948, forcing his family to move to Lebanon for a year.

Taha’s staging is simple – there are no tricks, no set changes, no fancy projections, save for occasional surtitles for Taha’s poems, spoken in their original Arabic. All that is onstage is a bench with a single leather briefcase, before Hlehel steps out in character, donning simple brown pants, a white long-sleeved shirt, and a black vest, sporting a half-greying beard. He is well-put together, an ordinary man who means no harm, coming to us as he is to simply tell a story, his story, as he had lived it.

To that end, Hlehel is a masterful storyteller. From the moment he speaks, he is already in control, beckoning us to lean in and listen closely, layering Taha’s tale with emotions, nuance and emotion, building the scene up. Taha’s story begins with his birth, where he recounts the series of brothers who came before him, each one dying in succession in infancy, to the point it begins to sound like an absurd cosmic joke, as his parents do everything from moving house to changing his mother’s name in the hopes of a surviving son. It’s an indicator of the rest of the script, equal parts tragic and comic, and altogether very real.

As Hlehel continues, we learn of Taha’s childhood, and despite not having any visual aids, his words alone are enough to build the image of a vivid, idyllic Palestine in our mind’s eye, a land of fleeting momentary peace as he speaks of reading, of his family and others around him, embodying each of these characters and moments with the slightest change in voice, his mood lifting subtly but surely when he speaks of his childhood love. We imagine the pain of stepping barefoot onto glass shards, the sheer relief in his voice when his father manages to buy him new shoes, a simple joy that goes a long way. There are times what he speaks of is so matter-of-fact and so conversational, you forget you’re there in the theatre, believing that all these are indeed things that Hlehel himself has faced from the sincerity in his voice. There is a beauty too that comes through in Taha’s poems – spoken in Arabic, Hlehel’s voice changes, feeling and savouring every syllable, lending power to each character, a beautiful language that offers relief against the instability.

Perhaps there are indeed times that reality and fiction do overlap with each other – Hlehel himself is a Palestinian, and despite being born years after Taha, Palestine remains in a state of unrest, and he at times seems to recall his own memories of the peace between the terrors. And it is this juxtaposition that makes the moments of terror all the more tragic, as Hlehel, as Taha, talks about the fateful day of the Nakba in August 1948, going beyond the narrative of simply fleeing with his family to Lebanon, to add details that root him as a quintessentially fallible human being.

And it really is these mundane but powerful facts that make us understand, feel for, and root for him as a fully fleshed out character. This is primarily felt when he finally becomes a shopkeeper, where there is a meticulousness to the way he describes how he lines the shop with chocolates and sweets, prepares a block of ice for the lemonade, swelling with pride at owning his own business and ensuring everything is taken care of. It is these intricate and nuanced descriptions that form a complete picture in our mind’s eye and understand just how much he’s built a life around this, his voice filled with absolute joy over what he’s achieved, where we too share in his happiness, and he imagines for himself how with the profits, he will finally able to provide his entire family with shoes after recalling the barefooted pain of childhood, to make their life that much better.

So for this shop to be completely lost in light of the bombing, while it feels like a small loss against its actual backdrop of Israel’s historical ethnic cleansing of Palestine, but because of how personal Hlehel makes it, a domestic inconvenience feels devastating, the pain of the loss leaving us a little emptier and sad in our souls. In a similar vein, when he reads a letter announcing the marriage of his childhood love to another man, we see a flash of anger streak across his eyes, robbed of the opportunity to even try for her hand, tears on the brink of falling. He is devastated, he talks about how much this land has changed, and how perhaps, things will never quite be the same again, a grief in his voice, knowing he will only ever be ‘almost happy’.

Yet amidst the fears, in the jokes, in the comfort Taha offers his family and us, his displacement becomes a little more bearable. Taha always finds a way to turn things around, and there is somehow still joy that comes after grief, where lambs once lost are found again, and sold off for profit, recouping some losses. With a single lamb remaining, it becomes the literal sacrificial lamb for a communal meal, a momentary breath of relief after one form of suffering after another other. In coming together and eating, this feels like a sacred act of celebration and a prayer for peace, as they take solace in what they do have in each other, to find themselves happy still in knowing they are alive, and fill themselves with a fierce will to live on in spite of all the obstacles facing them.

In a war-torn country, where everyone is fighting for survival, one imagines it can be almost impossible to find help. Yet, our faith in humanity is restored when we see the Palestinians’ show of solidarity when they choose to help Taha rebuild his business, extending their innate trust to a fellow countryman, where the sentiment of community and care continue to exist even when the going is so tough. This is a play with so much weight, but one that is made bearable through Taha’s eternal optimism and ability to find wry humour and beauty in the smallest of things, even when the world is against him.

The nature of violence is cyclical, noted by how the play begins and ends with the words ‘All my life, nothing came easy.’ Conflict and tensions are perpetual, but through the powerhouse performance that is Hlehel’s masterful rendition of Taha’s life, you see not a man revered, but an ordinary man living life to the best of his ability, always pressing on against all odds and finding resilience and endurance in routines and family. There is an overwhelming sense of empathy that fills Taha from start to end, and you can’t help but admire how much verve the man possessed to stick through it all. At the end of the play, we sit in silence for a while, impressed by the performance but unable to immediately clap, so affected by what we’ve witnessed that we are momentarily at a loss for words. Taha reminds us that we are all connected in our shared humanity, and quietly but confidently fights for a world that is free of war forevermore.

TAHA plays from 2nd to 14th April 2024 at KC Arts Centre. Tickets available here

Production Credits:

Director and Translator Amir Nizar Zuabi Cast and Script Amer Hlehel Stage Design Ashraf Hanna Music and Sound Habib Shehadeh Hanna Lighting Design and Technical Management Muaz Jubeh