Campers performing a scene about selling dates at an Iraqi market
July 2009
Before my two weeks in residence as drama teacher at Al-Bustan Camp, I had limited experience with Middle Eastern culture. I have close friends from Egypt, and I had spent time observing a community-based arts program in Vienna, Austria’s Turkish section as part of my dissertation research. Like many others, I followed the barrage of media reports on the war in Iraq and the recent political events surrounding Iran. However, I had never spent significant time considering the personal stories of people from this large and significant part of the world.
I began with several exercises designed to engage the students’ senses of play and their imaginations. During this time I led them in a word association game. This allowed me to confront the students’ prior knowledge of Iraq and also to help them begin to think of these cultures as material for their theatrical creations. Knowing that many of these children have Arab parents, I expected that this exercise would yield vastly different associations than the same would yield in a class full of students with no Arab heritage. I was surprised when the words the students gave me so completely matched words that the news media tends to emphasize in conversations of Iraq. Words such as “war”, “death”, “Bush”, and “Cheney” were as common as phrases such as “suicide bombing” and “U.S. occupation”.
Given these associations, it was clear to me that my students needed to explore issues not typically linked to Iraq in the news media. Even conventional, mundane stories about growing up in Iraq, I thought, would help to break down the stereotypes that the kids held and start to frame Iraqi culture in more human terms. Enter one of our counselors, an Iraqi student who recently came to the US as a refugee and was studying at a nearby college.
I asked her if she would be willing to share some stories of what it was like growing up in Iraq. She paused before agreeing to this, fearing that I was asking her to reveal stories of her later years in the war-torn country before she and her family fled and were relocated. She was relieved when I told her that I did not want her to tell the children the “dramatic” stories that many new acquaintances ask her to tell. I told her that I wanted her to focus on the many positive experiences she had while growing up in her homeland.
Campers singing Iraqi folk song "Fogh al-Nakhl"
She told me that some of her best memories revolved around the Ramadan celebration, especially Eid, the day after the fasting when her entire extended family in Baghdad would go to her grandfather’s home and she spent hours playing in his garden and climbing the date tree. Smiles accompanied Dina’s delivery as she told the students that one particular day she spent at her grandfather’s home was “the best day” of her life. A genuine exploration of the culture required the presence of someone who could tell the children stories rooted in her own personal experiences, and the play evolved in a fluid, organic manner from her stories.
Through the improvisation and story-telling exercises that we had practiced in the first classes, campers were primed to construct dramatic presentations from phrases, themes, and story fragments. I asked the 10-12 year old students to break into two small performance groups and construct a play based on their Iraqi counselor’s memories.
I already had much experience guiding students towards the creation of stage-worthy pieces of theatre, but the most transformative teaching moments (for the students and myself) were experienced when the children embodied the seemingly mundane, yet profoundly important memories of a girl who lost a great deal to the current events that remain at the forefront of public discourse and the news media. Sometimes the most seemingly quotidian elements of a culture are the most revealing and the most useful for confronting cultural stereotypes.
- Justin Poole, Drama Teacher
