The good Palestinian

Shubbak, meaning ‘window’ in Arabic, is a biennial festival taking place in various venues across London. The brochure reads like an A to Z of human misery. All the tired phrases from the Middle East’s history lurch up and poke the onlooker in the eye: ‘revolution’, ‘dystopia’, ‘cries of pain’, ‘ruins’, ‘waking nightmare’. The agony is leavened with slivers of earnest pretention. Corbeaux is a ballet designed for Marrakesh railway station by dancers who ‘take possession of public spaces’. Ten women with hankies over their hairdos move in ‘geometric alchemical arrangements’ making ‘piercing sounds and extraordinary cries’.

I decided to give that a miss and plumped instead for Taha at the Young Vic. This is a biographical study of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, who was born in Galilee in 1931, fled to a displacement camp in Lebanon, and later opened a commercial reliquary in Nazareth. He recounts the circumstances of his family’s eviction from their home town in 1948 but the details are left obscure.