Blackouts in Lebanon, and other love stories
I’m in an Ibis ‘Styles’ hotel* in Birmingham, having just got in from seeing the new Tania El Khoury show for Fierce festival. Like all live art festivals, Fierce is a place where I can feel exceedingly content — this work is so exciting and stimulating — and, at the same time, horribly conspicuous and self-conscious. I have never known how to draw a comfortable line between work and play; in environments that can feasibly be both, I can feel like a two-headed monster.
I’m not going to the party tonight, but I’m also not going anywhere else, and it dawned on me in the show earlier that I might come back here, to this Ibis STYLES (my room is lime green), and record some of my internal monologue for posterity.
The new Tania El Khoury show is ostensibly a piece of investigative journalism; an international journey, from archive to archive, as she and her historian husband Ziad try to find out why there are still so many blackouts — scheduled and not — in their home country of Lebanon. There is a bit of preamble at a kind of security desk, and then in a dark corridor, but really it all happens around Tania and Ziad’s wedding table.
There, a few years ago (I forget exactly how many), with all their loved ones around them, their friends improvised music for the couple of dance to in the dark, as an unscheduled power cut interrupted their celebrations.
Tonight, we are their friends and loved ones, and it’s a rare opportunity to see the warmth of a happy relationship performed without awkwardness. Tania, obviously, is an experienced performer (winner of a tonne of awards, including the ones that matter), but Ziad is an academic who lectures in universities and speaks at protests, and for all his protestations about needing a script, he also handles an audience with a natural ease.
We drink wine with them, and look at photos from their honeymoon, which was spent on the afore-mentioned archival research trip: Washington, Paris, Brussels, London. The story they hope to tell is one that will uncover for us the real reasons why Lebanon still experiences such regular and inconvenient power cuts, but like so many stories tangled up with poverty, civil war, colonialism, and big business, they acknowledge by the end that really they’re telling a story of power.
This word — power — is a word I’m not sure we needed to hear so explicitly. It’s in the title of the show, The Search For Power, but hearing it spoken felt like a single clanging moment of unnecessary translation in a narrative whose weight comes from a pointed look, rather than an underlined summary.
In reality, the full force of the corruption and negligence is communicated through the boxes of documents, copied from those archives Tania and Ziad visited, which we are each invited to examine at the table. There is something gloriously real and tangible about sifting through them. Because I am an ignorant westerner, most are in languages I do not speak, but if anything that gives me an even greater sense of their material. They are cheap reproductions for the sake of the show, but still, they are microfilm, and manila envelopes, and newspaper cuttings glued to scrap paper, and telegrams translated by hand, and the notepaper of grand colonial hotels. There is something magical about uncovering things — ancient, precious things — in an archive. It’s something that, with digitisation, we’re seeding less and less. But here, in the boxes in front of us tonight, we get a chance to feel the weight of a paper history. (In a week that saw multiple protests by Extinction Rebellion, problematic and bourgeois though they were, perhaps it is the paper that makes it feel weightier?)
The history is of a certain type, of course; as is to be expected, we are provided with the histories of old white dudes in linen travelling suits sent to ‘protect national interests’ or ‘secure investment potential’ or ‘quell Communist sympathies’. (Tania notes that no woman, other than her, ever appears in this story.) But the papers in the box shove these old port-sipping thieves out from the supporting cast of an Indiana Jones film and solidify them into real-life agents in ongoing social injustice, architects of the very specific circumstances of Tania and Ziad’s candlelit wedding.
I’m conscious now that I shouldn’t need this… box of stuff to bring these orchestrated, systematic, and brutal power games to life. I shouldn’t need this gorgeous, intelligent, internationally successful couple — who, crucially, speak my language — to couch their investigation in their own love story in order for me to listen to it. But then, maybe that’s what makes this art, and them artists, while another version of this story is just an article in a journal.
That I would never read.
*No relation to Harry (alas)
