MARCH 20, 2003, the day on which the United States launched its fateful invasion of Iraq, an invasion which toppled Saddam Hussein but convulsed the country in violence and political instability.
In the aftermath of the invasion some two million Iraqis fled the country, with the majority going to Syria and Jordan. The UN estimate that 40 per cent of the country’s middle class were among that number. Many of the refugees are today mired in poverty in their host countries as they are barred from working.
In June 2008, the award-winning American writers Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank were commissioned by New York Theatre Workshop to travel to Jordan to find out firsthand what happened to the Iraqi civilians as a result of the US invasion.
They interviewed 37 people - a cross-section of lives interrupted - who fled the chaos and violence that befell Iraqi society. Following the visit to Amman, Jessica and Erik crafted their conversations with the Iraqis and turned them into an unforgettable theatrical event, entitled Aftermath, a show which promises to be one of the highlights of this year’s Galway Arts Festival.
Journeying to Jordan
Speaking from her New York home, Jessica Blank recalls the initial impact of that trip to Jordan.
“It was definitely an educational process for us going into a country where we’d never been, and conducting interviews in a language that we didn’t speak,” she tells me. “We had three translators working with us. There were all these cultural hurdles that we needed to cross to make the piece.
“At every step of the process from arriving in Jordan, to finding our interview subjects, to speaking with them, what we realised is that through doing the interviews just the simple act of an ordinary American civilian speaking to an ordinary Iraqi was very profound, given everything that’s happened between our two countries.
“We realised through that process that translation was a really important part of what the play was about which is how we got the idea of having the translator as a character in the play. He’s the only composite character in the play because he’s drawn from the three translators we worked with.
“Everyone else who is represented in the play is based on actual people. There are six stories featuring eight individuals, two stories feature couples, and those are real stories. We’ve changed their names to protect their identities but the text is taken directly from our interviews.”
As Americans, did Blank and Jensen, who happens to be her husband as well as co-author, encounter any hostility from their Iraqi interviewees?
“We really expected that people would be suspicious, hostile, sceptical, or that they wouldn’t want to talk with us,” Blank replies, “but what was amazing was that we found exactly the opposite. It was very striking and very moving; people welcomed us into their homes with so much warmth and generosity.
“Iraqi refugees in Jordan have no legal status; they can’t work legally so most of them are living off whatever savings they still have from Iraq, and many of the people we spoke to had almost nothing, yet nevertheless they were hugely generous hosts to us when we visited.
“We were very struck by it and it took us a few days of doing interviews to wrap our minds around why these people were being so nice to us considering the circumstances. We finally realised everyone we were talking to had lived under Saddam for 25 years so they had a very visceral understanding, in a way Americans often don’t, that there is a great difference between the policies of a government and the people of a country. So they didn’t see us as representatives of our government, they just saw us as human beings.”
Iraqis’ own stories
Blank outlines the kinds of stories these Iraqi refugees had to tell.
“Every single person we spoke to had lived through something that would be almost unimaginable to you or me,” she observes. “People had lost five, six, seven family members to bombings or militias. They’d had death threats from militias, had their homes raided, had family members kidnapped.
“We have one story of the Imam of a mosque who was arrested in a raid by the Americans and taken to Abu Ghraib where he was detained for nearly a year before he was exonerated and released. There’s another story of a Christian woman whose car was caught in a bombing in which her husband, baby, and sister were all killed.
“What Erik and I quickly realised is that reading the papers in the US doesn’t give you any sense of the scale and the scope of what has happened to Iraq. It’s really huge and has touched every Iraqi’s life.”
As well as accounts of suffering and loss, were there also stories of hope and uplift?
“Very much so,” Blank avers, “and that was so moving for us. Human beings are incredible, everyone we met was a survivor. There were maybe a couple of people that had been broken by what they had gone through but they were very much in the minority.
“People go on living, we find something to latch on to that gives us hope and allows us to keep out hearts open. For some of the people we met that was their religion, for others it was their family, for others it was their enduring love for their country. Human beings also survive so much through humour and there is a lot of humour in the play even though you wouldn’t expect it.”
A Middle East background
Blank mentions that the actor playing the translator is an Iraqi-Canadian, so were the rest of the cast drawn from Iraqi or Arabic backgrounds?
“We would have loved to cast the play entirely from actors of Iraqi descent but that wasn’t possible, the Iraqi-American acting pool is pretty small,” Blank notes, “but we went as close to that as possible. I think if you cast people who don’t have an understanding of the region you lose something important. So the cast, while being American, all have backgrounds from the mid-East region, one is Lebanese, another Israeli, another Palestinian, and so on.”
Aftermath premiered in New York last September and the production has been lavishly praised by the critics. Variety hailed it as a “superbly staged and beautifully acted testimonial to the innocent victims of an ugly war…”; Backstage called it a “moving, intensely human docudrama,” and The New York Daily News found it “graceful and gripping work…The stories unfold bit-by-bit and are haunting and harrowing, but there’s also room for humour.”
Aftermath will surely prove to be a memorable Galway Arts Festival experience.
Aftermath runs at the Town Hall Theatre from July 20 to 25 at 8pm. For the July 22 performance the cast will give a pre-show talk as part of the festival’s Backstage series of talks and discussions. Tickets are available
from The festival box office, Galway Tourist Office, Forster Street, and www.galwayartsfestival.com
