The people who long for a home

Jan 3 2009 by Barbara Hodgson, The Journal

Writer Peter Mortimer tells Barbara Hodgson about bringing theatre to a Beirut refugee camp.

IF there’s one thing guaranteed to make you think twice about the excess of the festive season then it’s Peter Mortimer’s recent experience.

The Cullercoats-based writer has just returned from spending almost three months in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon.

As well as providing a wealth of material for a new book, the camp – Shatila – in the capital, Beirut, has left a permanent impression on him.

“It did affect me,” admits Peter who is still re-adjusting to being home after sharing the sparse conditions of the camp where he was shown remarkable generosity despite the extreme poverty.

“It feels really strange to be back.

“I said to Kitty (his partner) ‘I don’t feel I can go out and buy lots of Christmas presents that nobody needs’. It felt all wrong somehow.

“Hearing talk of the credit crunch then seeing scenes of Boxing Day sales mania all felt obscene to me”.

He celebrated his 65th birthday the day after his return, having a pint after his period of enforced abstinence from alcohol but found he hadn’t much missed it. “I didn’t particularly enjoy it,” he says.

His decision to visit Shatila, which has been in existence now for 60 years, came when his writer’s instinct was sparked on hearing of a teacher friend’s experience of working there.

Set up by the United Nations in 1949 for Palestinian refugees from the newly-created state of Israel, Shatila now has 17,000 people crowded into makeshift homes on a patch the size of a cricket pitch.

It was the site of a massacre in 1982 – during a war between Israel and Lebanon – when Lebanese Christian militiamen gunned down innocents. Now, “there’s an uneasy relationship between Palestinians and Lebanese,” he says.

At first he was very apprehensive about what he’d taken on and there was a spell of wondering “what am I doing here”.

“It was a totally unknown world,” he says. “I felt very isolated, especially because of the language barrier.”

He met up briefly with Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk to pick up a few tips and life settled into a routine.

From his sparse room provided by a charity, he would get up in the early hours, when the camp was quietest, to write his book.

“I was writing a blog and 1,500 words a day of my book. By 8am the noise in the camp was deafening; people live on these narrow ‘streets’ and young bloods ride around on scooters – it’s deafening.”

While the word “camp” conjures up images of rows of tents, Shatila, after so long, is a jumble of three-storey breeze-block flats; hanging electricity cables – and illegal Sky link-ups – which would regularly fail. Families would just light candles and carry on as usual.

The rest of Peter’s day would be spent at the camp school where he’d instigated a theatre project, or visiting families he’d made friends with, taking them gifts of cakes or chocolate in return for the meals they constantly wanted to cook him.

Without TV or radio, he’d occasionally cycle into Beirut centre to buy an English newspaper.

The older generation was curious at his presence but, while one or two people might suddenly ask him ‘what do you think about Hezbollah?’, most were friendly.

The feelings of many were that they wanted to go ‘home’. “They wanted to get out of the camp,” says Peter.

“They’d say to me ‘can you get me to England, to Europe’? but they want to return to Palestine – they feel they have been kicked out.”

In November there was a big rally in the camp to mark the fourth anniversary of the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat but, says Peter, he was home before the current hostilities in the Gaza strip escalated.

“It was building up but the conflict hadn’t erupted.”

Half of him (obviously the writer’s portion) wished he’d still been there when it did – “to see how they would have reacted, but it will have only deepened the sense of injustice,” he says.

Nevertheless Peter found much to be positive about in his theatre work with the pupils.

Because girls and boys are taught separately, Peter had to choose to work with one group and picked the girls to take part in a play, in English, based on his children’s fable Croak, The King & A Change in the Weather, about a greedy king who gets his comeuppance after living in luxury while his subjects suffered.

While he’s done theatre projects with schoolchildren in the past, these 11-year-olds, having lived all their lives in the camp, had never watched theatre before and were initially nonplussed.

“Putting the play on was one of the most demanding things I think I’ve done,” admits Peter. “Nobody in the school has experience of anything to do with theatre.

“Once my idea was translated into Arabic by the head teacher they were really excited.”

An initial read-though of the story met with silence, so Peter pared it down to basics, and made the English lines as simple as possible.

Finally 16 girls performed the play, adding a new ending of their own.

Peter explains: “In the rehearsals the children said they thought the king should be given another chance. No-one has ever suggested this before, and these are Palestinian refugees – 11-year-old kids – who have grown up with violence. I was proud of them.”

He wonders whether a group of boys would have chosen a different ending.

He may be still getting used to home comforts again but he’d like to return to the camp in the future, although keeping in contact in the meantime with the friends he made won’t be easy in a place without proper streets or, therefore, addresses.

And what he’d love to do is to secure funding to bring the children over to perform the play in England.

“We read quite a lot about the Palestinian politics but are not aware of their culture.

“They need culture as a weapon.”

:: Peter’s trip was made possible by charities Education Action and Lebanese Association Najdeh. He had financial assistance from Arts Council England, North East and New Writing North.

His blogs, documenting his time at the camp from October onwards, can be read online at www.inpressbooks.co.uk

His book, Shatila Through Western Eyes, by Five Leaves Publishing, is due out next autumn.