Activities at Yaabad School, just outside of Shatila camp. Copyright: Seenaryo, August 2015“These boys had shot
up like grass all along the streets of the deserted villages, where the bombing
never stopped… Everywhere overflowed with them, as if they had all been
suddenly abandoned and had never been anyone’s children. They were the children
of chance, living in the hope that an opportunity would come their way, which
would uproot them from the ground and toss them into a more welcoming world
than this one.” – Samar
Yazbek, The Crossing: My Journey into
the Shattered Heart of Syria
I first came to Beirut in 2007. I was struck, at the time,
by the lack of homelessness in the city. One could walk from one end to the
other and see far fewer people sleeping rough than on a similar walk in London,
or Paris. The same was true, if not more so, of Damascus.
Now, eight years later – half of those years lived in
Lebanon and Syria – life in the city has changed. Slowly, in late 2011,
residents began to meet women begging under motorway bridges, saw the ranks of
men waiting for temporary work on the roadside swell, and most noticeable were
the children everywhere living the lives of adults: selling roses, washing
windscreens, hawking ten packs of superglue or beard trimmers or a plastic
gadget, sleeping rough.
One hot summer’s day two years ago, I walked past an old
Syrian man rooting through one of the open rubbish skips that line Beirut’s
streets: an increasingly common sight as revolution degenerated into war across
the border. But this time, something caught my eye. The man was studying a
shampoo bottle half-filled with scented liquid. He smelt it; he raised it to
his lips, took a sip. He did not spit it out; he stored it in his pockets for
later. The sight of someone savouring artificially flavoured hair products for
nourishment seemed somehow emblematic.
Then one Saturday night in mid-winter, I was hopping from
bar to bar with friends and almost tripped over a young boy, no more than 6
years old, lying stone cold on the floor with only a jumper to keep him warm.
For a full minute, we shook him, shouted, but he did not move. His body lay
prone on the floor.
A minute is a long time to try to wake somebody. He finally
opened his bleary eyes, and called for a blanket.
We spent some time with Hussein – that was his name. He said
he was alone, that he came from Aleppo. He wanted to return to find his family
in Syria. We tried to find him a shelter, to find support for him through a
charity; there were none that could take him in. He attempted the comportment
of a grown man – gruffly acknowledging the eggs I cooked with a traditional
phrase of formal thanks. But when he awoke from sleeping he mistook me for his
mother and his eyes filled with tears, his learnt adulthood falling away.
There are now up to 2 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon
(including those who are unregistered by the UN), of which the great majority
of adults do not work. 630,000
of registered refugees are school-aged children (the total including
unregistered refugees is estimated to be significantly higher); 66% of those
children have no access to any form of education. The scale of the tragedy is
overwhelming.
Added to this is the plight of the Palestinians in Lebanon.
Those who have recently fled from Syria are now refugees for a second time, and
face the prospect of building a life once again in ever more crowded camps
squeezed onto a kilometre of land assigned to them 60 years ago to house a
fraction of the number of Palestinians now living in them. Those whose families
have been living in Lebanon’s refugee camps for up to three generations are
little better off, remaining refugees without Lebanese nationality or full
rights even though Lebanon is often the only country they or their parents
know. The limited aid that exists is now focused squarely on providing for
refugees from Syria, those facing the “biggest
humanitarian emergency of our era” says Antonio Guterres, UN High
Commissioner for Refugees. Increasingly, the Palestinians in Lebanon are
forgotten, even though their living space and conditions worsen by the year.
Culture in crisis
I am an arts producer and practitioner, rooted firmly in the
art world and not the world of development and NGOs. But moments like the one I
shared with Hussein, which surround our daily lives in Beirut, have left me
with little choice but to engage with the refugee crisis in a direct way. Today,
four British and Lebanese artists and teachers as well as myself will come
together to initiate Seenaryo, a theatre
project and training programme with refugees in Lebanon. We will spend a week
in Shatila, the Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, hosted in a UN school by a self-organised troupe of Palestinian scouts.
The second week we will be in the Beqaa Valley, building a show with a group of
Syrian children in a centre run by the Syrian association Women Now. Women Now was founded in 2012 by
Syrian novelist Samar
Yazbek to support micro-businesses and the development of skills for Syrian
women. The organisations empowers them to support their families, avoiding the
early marriages that have already been the fate of many young Syrian refugee
women.
The view from Women Now’s centre in Chtaura, Bekaa Valley. Copyright: Seenaryo, August 2015The Seenaryo project is initiated entirely independently of
a wider organisation, and comes out of a series of conversations over a long
period of time with members of grassroots refugee organisations in Lebanon. It is
unambiguously a theatre project; and this fact, in the current context, leads
to a fundamental question. Why insist on a cultural project when the urgent
need for basic humanitarian aid is not being met?
Seenaryo will employ a collaborative mode of theatre making
developed by UK arts organisation Upstage
over the past decade, which is entirely geared towards empowering participants
rather than teaching set structures. Starting from scratch today in Shatila, we
will encourage our group of 30 children to play, improvise and write. From
their ideas, we’ll shape a performance that includes specially-composed songs
(with fully produced backing tracks), an original script and choreography, and
a set designed by the children. We’ll be accompanied by three trainees from Shatila
– young adults interested in theatre – who we will train so that eventually,
perhaps a few years down the line, they can lead these “showbuilds” themselves.
Next Friday, the group will perform their show to a local public.
I could attempt to define the value of Seenaryo as an
educational project – and leave it open to the accusation that basic literacy
and numeracy are far more important for a child’s education than building a
play.
I could defend Seenaryo as therapy – and be left asking how
we can hope to address the causes of traumas we cannot begin to apprehend.
I could try to quantify the impact that this work has: the
transformative power I have witnessed working with Upstage with young people in
the UK in bringing groups together, and confidence to individual children.
But as it was the scouts themselves who invited us to
initiate this project with them in Shatila it makes more sense to consider this
project from the ground up, rather than strictly through theory. It is scorching
hot and humid in the summer. Up to 20,000 people live on a piece of land of one
square kilometre. The camp’s population has more than doubled since the start
of the Syrian revolution with Palestinian refugees from Syria. There is little to
do – school is out, and indeed the UNRWA-funded schools in Lebanon, including
the scouts’, have shut due to lack of funding and are not due to reopen until
2016, disrupting the curriculum for thousands of children. Spaces to play are practically
non-existent: there is no free space. And to boot, this summer Beirut is in the
midst of a rubbish
disposal crisis, the result of which is mounds of trash piled building-high on every
corner, so that some of Shatila’s narrow alleys are unpassable. In this
context, the opportunity for children to work intensively for a week, and for
the trainees to build leadership skills for the future, is a precious one. When
I met the group of children last week, their enthusiasm was palpable. In the
Bekaa Valley too, where the project will continue next week, whilst the women
work, their children will be with us, developing a different set of skills. That
Friday, the group will perform their show to a local public.
The value of culture must lie in bringing an alternative
political proposal in a situation where politics has, emphatically, failed. To
use the words of one of the foremost voices of the Syrian revolution, Yassin Hajj Saleh:
“The revolution would have been a longer stride forward if we managed to skip a
stage, if we could get over our bad habits… this includes the extremely limited
role of culture in the lives of the people. There is no culture.”
Aid for Syrians all too often goes one of two ways: on the
one hand, to Islamist charity that imposes cultural conditions and restrictions
on its recipients, all too aware of the power of culture in the battle for Syria.
On the other, international development agendas that risk flattening all
refugees into a subclass of reliant victims.
The infrastructure in Lebanon remains unfriendly to
small-scale cultural work. But if it is true that, in the words of cultural
theorist Stuart Hall, “culture forms the raw material out of which politics is
made” – that it is the strongest tool of resistance to hegemony – then it is
essential to work on cultural projects, in collaboration with and responsively to
the needs of grassroots organisations. It is key to train young leaders in
cultural skills and to work with children on art projects in a participatory
way. Only then can young people begin to navigate their way through these
crises.
Seenaryo is in partnership
with Syrian organisations Ettijahat and Women Now, and the Yaabad
Scout Troupe.
