Sprouting geysers in Iceland, where the venting ground is a dormant giant whale when not a volcano.

Travel offers an appreciation of nature’s marvels.

***

The ancient city engraved in pink stone— Petra, symbols and tombs the size of mountains— the Pyramids, a lover’s eulogy— Taj Mahal, an art collection’s most reveled sanctuary– Hermitage, and a once despised entrance arch—Le Tour Eiffel.

Travel gives an appreciation of Man’s marvels.

Travel is pilgrimage to holy places, Jerusalem, Lourdes, Mecca, Varanasi, catering to the mystical, the spiritual; magnificent temples immersed in gardens on precipices, often combining both nature’s and man’s marvels with a revered historical reference.

Travel enriches.

Travel is adventure, a suspension of reality, an escape to an unknown place, sharing an intimate moment with a complete stranger that feels familiar, under a clear night sky on a Greek Island, skinny dipping, fearless and daring.

Travel reminds us that we are born free.

Travel with someone reveals truths, exposes other sides, tests relationships.

Travel adds to a life’s experience.

Auschwitz, Hiroshima.

Travel reminds us of the horror and madness that man is capable of inducing.

But that is not the travel I wish to talk about today.

***

Working for a multinational consulting company in San Francisco some years ago, I was assigned a two week project in Ramallah, West Bank, Palestinian Occupied Territories.

Landing in Ben Gurion airport, Tel Aviv, I proceeded to immigration and security, feeling secure with my Canadian passport.

“First time in Israel?” the young girl behind the counter said. She must have been in her early twenties.

“Yes.”

“You were born in Jordan?” She leafed through my passport.

“Yes.”

After a few customary questions about the length and purpose of my visit, and after checking documents by my employer validating my assignment, she asked,

“Where are your parents from?”

“Here.”

Her eyebrows flinched.

“Where exactly?”

“My father is from Ramleh [not Ramallah] and my mother is from Jafa.”

“Please go to the office over there.”

She kept my passport and uttered something in Hebrew into her transceiver. I had arranged with my colleagues to meet at the airport, their flights having arrived before mine, and was anxious not to miss our connection. I had no experience navigating this terrain and my cell phone did not function.

After an hour’s wait with other Arabs, I finally got my turn.

“Are these your bags?” an officer said.

“Yes.”

He proceeded to ask me more questions, went through every boring detail in my bag, then took in his hands a book with music scores and flipped through its pages.

“So you play music huh?” he said with belittling amusement. I was reminded of the story of the Palestinian violinist, who was forced to play his violin before the guards at one of the check points in the West Bank. Luckily, piano is not a portable instrument.

Having found nothing suspicious, the officer ushered me to another check point where my bags and I passed through two X-ray machines. After being cleared by the machines, he had the chutzpah to ask,

“Do you have any bombs on you?”

I wasn’t sure of the purpose of the question.

***

Graffiti in Palestine. Photo: iStock

Up until then, I’d only met Palestinians in Diaspora. My first encounter with Palestinians in their homeland was in Ramallah, a run-down place that, compared to Gaza, I was told, is considered the San Francisco of the Occupied Territories. I felt a sense of belonging with the people and the land. It was a strange feeling that I could only approximate to what I imagined to be the feeling of an orphan meeting his biological parents for the first time. After completing my work assignment, I spent a couple of days traveling around Palestine-Israel. I made sure to get a taxi with a license plate that allows it to travel in and out of Israel.

We headed to Ramleh, which became part of Israel proper – not the occupied territories – in 1948. We asked people to point us to City Hall. That was easy to find.

An unmistakable edifice, looking more like an overgrown house, sat in a vast plot of green against the backdrop of olive trees. The taxi stopped and I stepped out. Green grass, well kempt, covered the spacious porch before the entrance.

The façade had pink undertones and was beautified by arches and columns wrapping around a large balcony. As I drew closer, the immense edifice towered over me, making me feel very little. Perhaps it wasn’t really that immense but it did make me feel little. There was no one else but the structure and I.

Security cameras plastered high on the walls gave me the sense that I was being watched, made me feel like a trespasser. I must have looked suspicious for I really had no business being there, walking around this municipal government building.

Except that this house and this land, covering an area of 29.34 dunams (7.25 acres,) belongs to Shukri Rizk, my late grandfather. He had built it in 1947 and had no time or chance to enjoy it or bequeath it to my father.

1948. Forced expulsion. Compensation: nil.

I was defeated by a combination of pain and helplessness. I quickly extricated myself and walked away, re-entered the taxi and took off, never looking back.

My father still preserves the property’s proof of ownership. Many other Palestinians still hold on to such documents, for what they’re worth, for mine is a world governed by the rule of power not the rule of law, and what is history but a fable agreed upon, as Napoleon once said. Except, it is not agreed upon.

Travel nostalgia— you ask?

Exile— I say.

Travel enriches and travel impoverishes the heart as well.

(Today, there are over four and a half million Palestinian refugees registered with the U.N.)

Originally published in JO.

IN 2008, Zeina Daccache made headlines by doing the impossible: she got access to one of Lebanon’s toughest men’s prisons and staged a play there, starring the inmates. After months of work, she brought the great and good of Beirut society, from the Prosecutor General to the Minister of Interior, to sit in a makeshift theater and watch a group of convicted murderers, rapists and drug dealers act out a parable about the failure of criminal justice.

The play was Daccache and the inmates’ own adaptation of Twelve Angry Men, by Reginald Rose. The original is an American classic in which a jury debates the fate of a young man accused of murder. Eleven men agree on a guilty verdict, but one dissents; by analyzing the evidence he slowly wins the others over. Adapted to a Lebanese environment, the drama cuts back and forth between the arguments of the fictional jury and real-life stories told by the prison inmates.

One prisoner, the diminutive Youssef Chankar, plays a narrator, whose comments help bridge the different sections of the play. In his opening monologue he points out that, although called 12 Angry Lebanese, the cast also includes a Bangladeshi, a Palestinian, a Nigerian and a Syrian.

“We all came to Lebanon to be angry,” he says.

The production generated a huge amount of attention, and was followed up in 2009 with the release of a documentary film, “12 Angry Lebanese.” The movie tells the story behind the production, and examines the effects of this “drama therapy” on the 45 inmates involved, and the enclosed world of prison society itself. At the 2009 Dubai International Film Festival it won both the People’s Choice award and the Muhr award for best Arab documentary. It screened in Amman at the end of January.

So how exactly did Daccache manage to walk into a prison and get nearly 50 mostly violent offenders to do something requiring so much dedication and cooperation?

In one surprising scene in the film, viewers get to see Daccache taking her actors to task quite harshly.

“All I ever hear is ‘I want,’ or ‘I need,’” she says. “This is the language of children.” Shockingly, there’s no riot. The inmates bow their heads?one even agrees. What the audience may not quite appreciate is that such minor miracles represent years of work.

Daccache has lived in Paris, Italy and the United States, as well as Lebanon. She speaks four languages, and stars as the clownish character Iso in the popular Lebanese political satire show “Bassmat Watan.” In 2000 she studied clowning with Phillippe Gaulier, a French physical theater guru in London. Shortly thereafter she assisted in a drama therapy project in an Italian prison. The following six years were spent working in rehab centers, until 2007, when she studied drama therapy at Kansas State University; she’s also earned an MA in Clinical Psychology.

Of course none of this would have been much use without a sense of humor.

“You need to be confident, a gentleman,” she says at another point in the film, gesturing in an exaggerated fashion as she teaches Bangladeshi inmate Hussein Al Mawla how to walk without slouching. “Haven’t you seen those people who are like: ‘How are you darling, so good to see you,’” she continues, prancing around the room and playfully shaking the hands of the inmates. “Trust me, these people are everywhere in Beirut.”

It’s one of the more light-hearted scenes, but perhaps also one of the more telling. What exactly made Daccache abandon a world of coffee-shop boulevards for Roumieh prison, or the Beirut in-set for society’s outcasts?

“I don’t believe in art for art’s sake,” says the sprightly young director, dismissing the question as a distraction. “Why do you write, or why does a singer sing? I work with people like this because it’s right for me and because I think it’s important.”

It’s only when pressed that Daccache reveals the insight that seems to drive the work behind the 12 Angry Lebanese project, and Catharsis, the drama-therapy company she runs.

“People like this are naked,” she explains. “We know their sin, we know what they have done, and they can’t hide?they’ve been caught. But [for us] on the outside, our wrongs are hidden and we can fake so many things.”

Neither the play nor the documentary is arguing the rapists and murderers in Roumieh are innocent, or that they should not be held to account. What these works question is the presumed innocence of those outside the prison walls, and their readiness to sit in judgment on those within.

The more explicit aim of the documentary, however, was to chart and champion the effects of drama therapy on the inmates involved. Perhaps the most convincing case for a therapeutic effect is Majdi Sirjani, a murderer sentenced to death in a country where the death penalty, although not implemented, remains on the statute books. Sirjani describes his “psychological crisis,” and his overwhelming and constant preoccupation with death, but by the end of the film his features seem somehow lighter, his eyes less hollow. Another inmate, called simply “Haweelo,” who was convicted of drug dealing, learned to read and write for the play with the help of his cellmates.

The residents of Roumieh aren’t much given to artifice (or else they’re very good at it) but their reflections on prison life and the drama project don’t seem scripted.

12 Angry Lebanese shows that in some ways prison life is a microcosm of the world outside.

“Inside I’m a servant, and outside I’m a servant,” says Al Mawla, the Bangladeshi inmate.

“You’ll find exactly the same prejudices inside a prison as outside,” explains Daccache—mentioning how at first, some of the inmates at first didn’t like taking direction from a woman. “They call me Abu Ali,” she recounts. In the documentary itself, she quips that she “can never procreate with such a nickname.”

Then there’s Chankar, the play’s narrator, who was given a life sentence for murder. In Lebanon a life sentence means just what its name implies—it’s of indeterminate length. With nothing to look forward to, Chankar can only look back. He counts up the 18 years he’s spent in prison in days, hours, minutes and seconds.

Rateb Al Jibawi, imprisoned for rape, will be released one day—but he regards the prospect of freedom with ambivalence. “Another prison awaits me,” he tells audience, “a prison without walls.” He fears the censure of the society, the life of a pariah in the crowd.

Technically, “12 Angry Lebanese” is neither filmed, edited or scripted particularly well. Footage of the play is incorporated rather awkwardly into scenes from the rehearsals, and interviews with the prisoners’ in which they describe the process. More background—for example, on how Daccache found herself at Roumieh, or the struggle to launch the project in the first place—might have helped the narrative along.

But such criticisms are very minor. In fact, it’s in large part by avoiding the structure of a “journey story,” and instead focusing on what the inmates have to say for themselves, that makes the documentary at once so compelling and so different.

John Lillywhite is an Oxford History graduate with a law diploma he’s determined to never use, a Walmart laptop that remains the bane of his life, and a tongue so irreverent its best kept closed.

He has experience in Film, Talent, New Media and Book Publishing, and currently works as Art’s Editor for JO. John is a ‘culture vulture’ who’s loves creative things and creative people.

You can contact John by sending him an E-mail at john[at]jo[dot]jo. You can also add him on Facebook and follow him on Twitter.