Location: College of General Studies, Rm 511 871 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA 02215
Event Description: Join us for a staged reading of Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa, adapted by Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace. The reading will be followed by a discussion with Professors Carrie Preston and Margaret Litvin and playwright Ismail Khalidi. Learn more below.
Attendance: (For Kilachand Honors College Students) At the event, a QR will be posted for you to check-in. This QR will expire so please complete the check-in form immediately. You must check-in to earn co-curricular attendance credit for this event.
Returning to Haifa
Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
Returning to Haifa,a compelling story of two families – one Palestinian, one Israeli – forced by history into an intimacy they didn’t choose. This “utterly unsentimental exploration of the complexities of home, history and parenthood” (The Guardian)centers on Palestinian couple Said and Safiyya who were forced to flee their home in 1948. Now, in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, the borders are open for the first time in 20 years and the couple dare to return to their house in Haifa. They are prepared to find someone else living where they once did. Yet nothing can prepare Said and Safiyya for the encounter they both desire and dread.
Returning to Haifa received its world premiere in London at the Finborough Theatre in 2018 and will receive its U.S. premiere at Pangea World Theater in April 2023.
“Kanafani’s parable is even-handed enough to explore the agony of both the exiled Palestinian couple and the Jewish widow…and to empathize with all of them.”
“… a moving confrontation between two sets of displaced people … its call for reciprocal awareness and acknowledgement of past injustice seems more necessary than ever.”
Award-winning playwright Naomi Wallace’s plays have been produced in the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe, and the Middle East and include One Flea Spare, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, In the Heart of America, Slaughter City, Things of Dry Hours, The Fever Chart: Three Vision of the Middle East, And I and Silence, The Liquid Plain, Night is a Room and this adaptation of Returning to Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani and The Corpse Washer by Sinan Antoon (both adaptations co-written with Ismail Khalidi). Wallace’s awards include the MacArthur Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award, Horton Foote Award, Obie, Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the inaugural Windham Campbell prize for drama. Wallace is currently writing the book for the new John Mellencamp musical, Small Town. The second part of her Kentucky trilogy will be produced in France in 2024. Her play, Night is a Room, has been adapted for film, which will star Ann Dowd.
Born in Beirut, Ismail Khalidi is a playwright, screenwriter, and director. Khalidi’s plays include Truth Serum Blues (Pangea World Theater,2005), Tennis in Nablus (Alliance, 2010), Foot (Teatro Amal, 2016), Sabra Falling (Pangea, 2017), and Dead Are My People (Noor Theatre, 2018). He has co-adapted two novels for the stage with Naomi Wallace; Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa(Finborough Theatre, 2018) and Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer (Actors Theatre of Louisville, 2019). Khalidi’s work has been published in numerous anthologies and he co-edited (also with Wallace) Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora (TCG, 2015). His writing has been featured in American Theatre Magazine, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Mizna, Guernica, Al Jazeera, and The Dramatist. Khalidi holds an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is a Directing Fellow at Pangea World Theater and is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Boston University’s Center on Forced Displacement.
Writer Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972) is widely regarded as one of Palestine’s greatest novelists, writing some of the most admired stories in modern Arabic literature. He was also an intellectual, a journalist and political activist. His novellas and short stories, now translated into dozens of languages, are considered by many today as having been ahead of their time, both in form and content. Kanafani wrote the novella Returning to Haifa in 1969, a testament not only to Kanafani’s principled commitment to the politics of liberation, but also his deep empathy for the ‘other’ as well as his modern approach to storytelling. Ghassan Kanafani was assassinated by a car bomb in Beirut in 1972 at the age of 36. Kanafani’s obituary in Lebanon’s The Daily Star wrote that: “He was a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen, and his arena the newspaper pages.”
Meet the Cast & Musicians of the Kilachand Staged Reading
Ismail Khalidi, Said Born in Beirut, Ismail Khalidi is a playwright, screenwriter, and director. Khalidi’s plays include Truth Serum Blues (Pangea World Theater,2005), Tennis in Nablus (Alliance, 2010), Foot (Teatro Amal, 2016), Sabra Falling (Pangea, 2017), and Dead Are My People (Noor Theatre, 2018). He has co-adapted two novels for the stage with Naomi Wallace; Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa(Finborough Theatre, 2018) and Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer (Actors Theatre of Louisville, 2019). Khalidi’s work has been published in numerous anthologies and he co-edited (also with Wallace) Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora (TCG, 2015). His writing has been featured in American Theatre Magazine, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Mizna, Guernica, Al Jazeera, and The Dramatist. Khalidi holds an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is a Directing Fellow at Pangea World Theater and is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Boston University’s Center on Forced Displacement.
Marina Lazetic, Safiyya Marina Lazetic is a forced displacement scholar and Director of Programs at the Center in Forced Displacement at BU. Throughout her academic and professional career, she has worked on projects related to forced displacement, nationalism, conflict prevention, gender, and human security. She focuses on environmental displacement, community organizing, and anti-immigration movements in her research and writing. Marina studied theater as an undergraduate and used theater of the oppressed techniques in her organizing as an activist in her home-country Bosnia and Herzegovina. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
Margaret Litvin,Miriam Margaret Litvin is associate professor of Arabic & World Literature in the CAS Department of World Languages & Literatures. A historian of modern Arabic literature’s global entanglements, she is the author of Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton, 2011), a co-editor and co-translator of Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (Oxford, forthcoming), and the translator of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel Ice (Seagull, 2019). At BU she advises the Arabic minor and founded the major in Middle East & North Africa Studies.
Ethan Wanner, Young Said / Dov Acsa Welker, Young Safiyya Acsa Welker is a senior currently getting her BFA in Acting at Boston University’s School of Theatre. Previous credits include Janne in Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s Let The Right One In, Gertrude in Hamlet, and Amy in Dry Land. Upcoming projects include a cross collaboration between the School of Theatre and School of Communication in a multi-cam sitcom project, Art House, playing at the Joan & Edgar Booth Theater April 27th-May 7th.
Hadi Eldebek, Oud, Vocals Hadi Eldebek is an Oudist and Composer based in New York City. He has collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad Ensemble, Harvard Graduate School of Education, The Kennedy Center, TED, Disney World Imagineering, and others. In addition, Hadi has founded several cultural startups, including grantPA and Circle World Arts. His TED talk, discussing the importance of funding the arts and artists, has over 1.25 million views.
