This afternoon at 7 pm, Casa Árabe and the Ministry of Culture are organizing a conversation entitled From the Nakba to the Theater on cultural resistance, accompanied by a dramatized reading between the playwright Ismail Khalidi and the interpreters Samy Khalil and Beatriz Mbula. Free entry until capacity is complete. The event will be in Spanish.
Nakba Day commemorates 15 May 1948, when the State of Israel declared its independence over almost 80 percent of historic Palestine. In the process, more than 800,000 Palestinians were evicted from their homes and land, while 531 Palestinian villages were wiped off the map. The trauma it caused is known as the Nakba, “catastrophe” in Arabic. But the Palestinians also refer to al-nakba al-mustamirra, the “continuing Nakba,” understood as a continuous process of dispossession and ethnic cleansing. The last 19 months of military campaign and bombing on Gaza, coupled with new threats of expulsion to its population and unprecedented levels of human rights violations, have already made talk of a new nakba in the 21st century.
The dramaturgy of Ismail Khalidi, born in Beirut to Palestinian parents and raised in Chicago, retraces the legacy of the Palestinian Nakba in the last century through works such as Tennis in Nablus (2010) or Sabra Falling (2017), but it also echoes many other disasters in the world. In conversation with actor Samy Khalil and actress Beatriz Mbula, who also participate in a dramatized reading, the playwright takes advantage of this round table to reflect on the process of dramatic writing and the staging of cultural resistance in contexts of occupation, invasion and exile.
The event is part of the Culture for Peace programme. Spain-Palestine organized by the Ministry of Culture and the Embassy of Palestine and with which Casa Árabe collaborates.