By Zeina Daccache, Two condemned prisoners residing in a high security Lebanese prison and participating in the drama therapy sessions taking place inside the facility since February 2008 recently described their experiences with the following metaphors: "Prison is a microcosm of the outside world; it holds all kind of people, from differing religious communities and from differing regions throughout Lebanon and consequently belonging to different political parties. In prison, absurdly as it sounds, one learns how to reconcile with the other before returning to the biggest prison: the Lebanese society, (IF, we ever return to it)" - E.F., a Lebanese Christian from Mount Lebanon. "Prison is a train station. You are forced to wait. You wait along with different people that you never chose willingly to spend time with outside the station ... However, you start socializing with them and plan together future travels" - G.I., a Lebanese Muslim from the Bekaa Valley. With any publicly funded project, one typically goes through an exercise beforehand of setting objectives and goals to be presented to concerned authorities. It has long been a dream of mine to implement a drama therapy program in Lebanese prisons. More precisely, this became my goal in 2002, when I had the chance to work in the Volterra Prison in Italy and I have since then wanted to do the same thing in my own country, Lebanon. I applied for a grant from the European Union to implement a Drama Therapy Project inside the biggest detention center in Lebanon: the Roumieh Prison, where condemned men from different regions of Lebanon reside.
My objectives, as written before setting foot inside the prison were straightforward: facilitating drama therapy sessions for around 40 prisoners, producing a play inside the prison that would serve as an awareness campaign for the abolition of the death penalty, the amendment of the law for the reduction of incarceration periods, the respect of equality of prisoners before the law, as well as their judicial and social protection. The project was also meant to help alter the public's perception of prisoners from one of "just criminals" to one of human beings fighting the stereotypes and misperceptions that only view prisoners as sinners, criminals or losers. Part of the goal was to illustrate how vibrant, fluid and exuberant the prisoner's contribution can be.
But soon after the start of the project, I got in touch with what is by far a more important objective, and it stemmed from a question whose answer was a foregone conclusion behind the prison's walls: "Do we Lebanese, only when faced with decisive conditions get to understand how equal we are as human beings? And how much are we wasting our energy and life following blindly our different leaders, our different beliefs, and most importantly our intolerance?"
More than 10 years after the end of the Civil War, regional tension, as well as a climate of economic, political and social crisis, prevails in Lebanon. The multiplicity of communities in Lebanon - richness by itself if only we could see it this way - translates into strong antagonisms that among other things, obstruct mutual understanding and reconciliation between communities.
Exposure to conflict has been a part of my experiences for as long as I can remember. I witnessed wars around me from an early age, two of which accompanied me from infancy until I turned 11 years old (an age when I naively thought that all countries had wars just like mine did).
On each citizen's ID card, one's religion was written, and it was very common and still common to be asked: "what's your religion?" And depending on the answer, long flashbacks of all the war would come to one's mind, before an inner judgment is issued and the relationship between the two either starts or stops from this basis.
As soon as I started studying theater 11 years ago, and as ideological as I was, I longed to do a forum theater dealing only with mutual understanding and enhancing a national reconciliation through inter-communal dialogue. But it never took place.
How could I dream about a forum theater when at a wedding, people have massacred each other simply because a conversation about politics and religion at the dinner table revealed that no one was able to accept the other? How was I expecting to see them embracing each other, when families still teach their children to wear certain colors or hold the flag of a particular political party and encourage their kids to insult their peers at school if they are from families who follow a different party? How was I expecting to bring the different religions into one room when within one same religion, two brothers won't talk to each other just because one is with the government and the other with the opposition?
I gave up on any theatrical idea revolving round this subject until two months ago when I first stepped into prison. George and Ali were walking side by side, laughing and telling jokes. When asked for details about their backgrounds, they revealed that they had both come from the same region in Lebanon - one that had witnessed massacres between Muslims and Christians for a long time. It didn't take long for them to disclose that they had belonged to rival militias and had been shooting at each other from behind a military frontline before being arrested. The two were arrested within two months of each other, and have now spent around 15 years in jail.
Absurdity of destiny? Obligation of circumstances? No. It was real; it was palpable.There it was; the prisoners were a living metaphor. They were the few who could reflect the unreachable mutual understanding and the greater struggle for reconciliation and truth longed for by the entire country. Clearly, the confinement of prison does not distinguish between race, religion, gender or where people come from. Through their imprisonment, they were truly equal and united. Through their common struggle, prisoners discovered the true meaning of mutual understanding and reconciliation, and wanted to convey a valuable lesson about a bigger prison, the one present in the heart of the Lebanese society.
For the time being I am in that microcosm, inside that train station, moving every day from the "small prison" of Roumieh to the "bigger prison"of Lebanon and touching day after day on what I learned from many "Georges" and "Alis" living in jail - a lesson that became the main objective of this wonderful drama therapy journey, to be conveyed to an audience that hopefully might understand.
Zeina Daccache is Drama Therapist and the executive director of the Catharsis-Lebanese Center for Drama Therapy. Her e-mail is: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
