-
Peace of Women
- PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art
- The MIT Press
- PAJ 83 (Volume 28, Number 2), May 2006
- pp. 26-29
- Article
- Additional Information
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28.2 (2006) 26-29
[Access article in PDF]
Peace of Women
Lenin El Ramly
A leading Egyptian playwright, El Ramly has written over 40 plays as well as numerous scripts for films. His work has been performed throughout the Arab world and has been translated into other languages. His best-known play in the West is In Plain Arabic (1991). In 2005 El Ramly was a recipient of the prestigious Dutch Prince Claus Award.
War and love can never meet. A man returning from war is no longer a man, whether he is victorious or defeated. He turns into a broken being or a violent beast. In both cases, he treats his woman as if she were the enemy. He has lost his masculinity and she, in turn, loses her femininity. Then both end up losing their very humanity. And these are what we call the war-maimed.
War, whether mounted in aggression or in defense, is always the outcome of the economic and cultural setup in a given society. Yet, regrettably, war has been humankind's destiny since time immemorial. This is what Aristophanes' Lysistrata reminds us of, with the play's focus on politics, sex, and the way both sexes view each other.
Lysistrata captured my imagination when I reread its Arabic translation, inspiring me to write a parallel play, Peace of Women, set in Baghdad during the last days preceding the war.5 It always irritates me when I get asked about the message of any work of art. I prefer to discover messages through writing plays. Now that I have my adaptation of Aristophanes' work, it is clear to me how the original provides an opportunity to emphasize the connection between war as an external political challenge, and sex (read: war of the sexes) as an internal, social one. The women's political mobilization led by my Iraqi equivalent of Lysistrata, Labeeba (Arabic for "Intelligent woman"), may be nothing more than an imaginary situation, yet the issues it raises are very real and contemporary. [End Page 26]
Click for larger view | Figure 1 Scenes from Peace of Women, based on Aristophanes' Lysistrata, written and directed by Lenin El Ramly. Open-air theatre of the Opera House, Cairo, December 2004. Above: Kamel implores Mowafaka to have sex with him, kneeling below a portrait of Saddam Hussein; Photos: Courtesy Lenin El Ramly. |
Click for larger view | Figure 2 Scenes from Peace of Women, based on Aristophanes' Lysistrata, written and directed by Lenin El Ramly. Open-air theatre of the Opera House, Cairo, December 2004. Below: The character of Labeeba, the sober Iraqi Lysistrata, is sits on the floor, listening to two flamboyantly dressed Western women, in drag. Photos: Courtesy Lenin El Ramly. |
Admittedly, in our contemporary culture there are religious misgivings about sex that would conflict with the subject matter of Lysistrata. Yet we should handle this problem creatively rather than allow it to become a deterrent. We may assign subversive opinions and ideas to characters from a different religion. As for the comical scenes about the erection of men, a possible alternative is to use punning and implicit sexual references. This is an inherent tradition in our culture (although I do not usually resort to it). We should also remember that Aristophanes intended to use sex as a comic and popular means for a political purpose (even though, in my view, the means almost took over the political purpose). In and of itself, however, the idea of women abstaining from sex with their men has been used for social purposes in various forms of Egyptian drama over the past half-century.
I do not expect my government to find Peace of Women offensive, as the subject of the play is the war the U.S. led on Iraq, not Egypt. It might not welcome it either, because it prefers to narrowly define Egypt as part of the Arab entity for political or religious reasons, or simply to keep up some pretense.
