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Noor Alam is a taxi driver on his way to the airport to pick up a customer. She turns out to be a young widow, whose husband was killed in ‘The War’. Which war? It doesn’t matter. He’s dead anyway, on a mission and for a cause she cannot believe in. Now she’s on her way to his family’s property by the sea, in the hope that she will be able to sell it and use the money to move on to another life. In another car bound for the same destination is the man who plans to buy it, along with his sister, for whom their seaside outing has another resonance. She used to meet her lover in the fairground and once got caught on the Death Train with him. Somehow it’s oddly reassuring to think of Doha having its own Alton Towers, or of people in Bank Holiday mode in Riyadh, larking around beside the sea.
Who can resist watching the waves, rolling in and back out again along the shoreline, or the idea that beyond those waves lies another, better life? Many of the ‘issues’ that arose in the course of Al Amwaj — the loneliness of the migrant worker, the claustrophobia of family obligation, attitudes to women in a male-dominated society — would have seemed foreign to many listeners. And yet in essence these seven stories (created by Abdulla Ahmed Bukamal, Hissa Faraj Al-Marri, Masoud Abdul Hadi and May Touma from Qatar and Ali Al-Majnooni, Fatima Elias Al Gassim and Tahani Al-Ghureiby from Saudi Arabia) were just separate threads of the same story shared by people around the world. How to make the best of your lives, even when constrained by circumstance. How to be content.
Emad is torn between his family which has arranged a marriage for him, and the woman with whom he is in love. Ghanim is running away from his family, in search of a deeper truth, a way of giving meaning to his life, while his wife Nourah is trapped at home with the children, not understanding why her husband is so restless. Intriguingly no mention was made of religion by any of these characters, and especially not of Islam. It was a surprising omission, at least from the perspective of those in the West, so terrified now by all that the Middle East represents. Was this deliberate, or simply a reflection of the writers’ concerns?
This was, though, a tangible glimpse into another world. It was so refreshing to hear a play that was not just written by Arabic writers but also played out in an Arabic setting, giving the drama a rare authenticity. In just 60 minutes we as listeners found out so much, eavesdroppers on the lives of others.
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