When Taha al Baskini won a part in a new play about soldiers who reunite after dying in combat, his costume was already in his closet. His onstage camouflage pants were the same ones he had worn as a fighter during Libya’s most recent civil war a few years ago, when an airstrike injured Al Baskini and killed several of his comrades as they defended their city.
“People are sitting and talking to you, and the next moment they’re bodies'', Al Baskini, 24, whose brother died in the same conflict, said after a recent rehearsal for the play, “When We Were Alive'', at the National Theatre in Misrata, Libya’s third-largest city. “You never forget when they were smiling and talking just moments before.”
As an actor, “I try to show reality to the people'', he went on. “The message of the play is: ‘No more war.’ We’ve had enough war. We want to taste life, not death.”
To the audience, that message is hardly a tough sell. After more than a decade of violent chaos — years that saw their country overrun by foreign mercenaries and subjugated by fighters whose power made them a law unto themselves — Libyans are clamouring for peace.
The question is whether the country can maintain a brittle truce even as two rival governments and their foreign backers jockey for power, raising fears that Libya is, once again, sliding toward conflict.
To achieve lasting peace, Libya needs not only to find its way out of the current political crisis, but also to demobilise a generation of young men who have grown up knowing little but war.
Misrata, whose powerful fighters were key to overthrowing Libya’s longtime ruler, Muammar Gaddafi, during Libya’s 2011 Arab Spring revolt, is full of such men. More than 40 of them — mostly veterans of Libya’s conflicts — now act at the National Theatre, a former meeting hall for Gaddafi’s political party. They hope to bring Misrata entertainment, they say, and some semblance of normalcy.
But there is no avoiding the city’s damage, physical and psychic alike, onstage.
“I’d rather do something funny to lighten people’s moods, instead of reminding them of the friends and brothers they lost'', said Anwar al Teer, 49, an actor and former fighter who raised money and put his own acting earnings toward converting the venue, which city officials were renting out as a wedding hall, into the National’s 330-seat theatre, installing seating and lights himself. “But the theater is impacted by Libya’s reality, even when you don’t want it to be'', he said. “A play is like a mirror reflecting the consciousness of our society, and our society is sick.”
Libya’s 2011 revolution made rebels into heroes. In the years that came after, as the country splintered into rival political factions and warring regions, many former rebels and new fighters joined armed militias, hoping to defend their hometowns or simply to make a decent living.
Fighters could pay three times as much as the average salary or more, not that there were many other jobs on offer for young men. As fighters grew into political forces, the higher-ups raked in illicit profits from smuggling weapons, fuel and migrants, building their fortunes and their power.
It was not only the money that appealed. At a time when weapons spoke loudest and wearing a fighter uniform inspired deference, young men took to imitating the fighters’ style, even if they had never fired a shot: Driving pickup trucks with blacked-out windows, wearing their beards long, dressing in fatigues.
“They were seen as heroes'', said Mohammed Ben Nasser, 27, a rising star in Libya’s small-but-growing television industry who also acts in “When We Were Alive.” “It was how you got money, power, cars.”
For the four decades of Gaddafi’s rule, no one was allowed to be more famous than the dictator. Soccer players’ jerseys carried no names, only numbers, lest they gain a following. Paranoid about what it saw as the contamination of foreign ideas, the regime banned foreign films, allowing only Libyan productions that pushed the Gaddafi agenda.
If Libyans saw anything else during that period, it was thanks to smuggled-in videotapes and, eventually, illicit satellite and internet downloads.
So Al Teer is teaching many Misratans how to be a theatre audience, down to when to clap. He stages comedies, tragedies and histories from Libya and abroad, including, recently, “The Government Inspector'', Gogol’s classic satire of municipal corruption.
He plans to add movie screenings, which will make his venue Misrata’s first cinema since the few allowed under Gaddafi closed down during the revolution. One Misratan father recently told him that when it opens, it will be the first cinema his children have ever visited. — New York Times
Vivian Yee
The writer is Cairo bureau chief at 'NYT'
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