On a brown leather sofa, the Palestinian actress and writer Raeda Taha sat in front of the viewfinder and in simple words presented herself: “I am the leader of Taha, and my title is the returning leader. I grew up to a father who is always absent and worried mother and suffers bitterness of alienation since I left Jerusalem.” To be among these words the introduction of her monodramatic work "The Fig Tree ... A Journey in the Life of a Leader Taha", which I presented at the Mall of the Emirates Theater. A look at a complete life in the diaspora and alienation, and in the pain and suffering of losing the father and alienation Taha takes us to this work, which narrates a full life on the tree, where all her pains, pain and joys were spread from childhood to the youth in front of the public.
The narrative beginning that Taha adopted in the work dyed the bulk of it. She began to narrate to look like she is playing the character of a storyteller, she started with the details of her mother and her father, the martyr and struggling Ali, and she talked about her return to Jerusalem devoid of her past and all her memories, and her search for the old dream in her grandfather's house and the door that was Opens on the worlds of her childhood, her past and her memories with the departed. Taha tells the Palestinian story without ideology, but on the contrary, it extends the life details that make her touch the audience in the context of the theatrical narration, as she triumphs for the oral narration in which there are multiple characters, and she succeeds in presenting different moods of people on the stage while she is sitting on the sofa not moving from her place.
The theatrical scenography was largely poor, on the stage there are not many details except for the sofa and the camera, next to the screen that showed some of the songs and video clips of her father's funeral, as well as his pictures, which were supportive of what she presented on the stage. This intense void, which Taha deliberately intended on the stage, was a factor supporting her to be the main component narration of the work, through which she was able to keep the audience listening for nearly an hour.
Taha spoke during this hour about all the components of her life, including dreams and innocence with some black comedy, and added to him some painful details, especially when she expressed that she passed through the paths of pain that lead her to her grandfather's house, looking for her father and his memory with tourists, asking people about him, To find that the path of her father is still alive in the minds of people, while she is alive and absent, no one knows about it, to experience the feeling of heavy return at first.
During the work, Taha intentionally placed poetic passages from the texts of the poet Mahmoud Darwish, in which he talks about nostalgia, so between her talk about the homeland and the return she gave recorded clips of Mahmoud Darwish’s poems, but after she recounted all the details of her life, she concluded the work with a message of love from her father to her mother, In her he expresses his longing and love, and in her mother’s sentence, “Because he loves us, so he loves Palestine,” so she sings in conclusion: “See you like you, O Ali.”
A small story from many stories
Pioneer Taha said about her theatrical work: “The story is part of many stories, it is not the full story, but a story from my life with the eyes of a child from three years to seven years, and the second part is a reflection of several stories from (find you like you, O Ali), The stories do not end, and during the 70 years of occupation it is difficult for stories to end, from my story to the stories of people who have their stories like all of us. ”