Q&A with William Nour, playwright of 'Rosette'
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“Rosette” is a new play that will premiere this weekend in Minneapolis. It will be performed at the Mixed Blood space and is produced by New Arab American Theater Works, which describes the play as being the story of “a young Palestinian woman, born in 1948, the year of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”
Arts reporter Jacob Aloi sat down with playwright William Nour to discuss the deeply personal play.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about ‘Rosette.’
Rosette is a name that I love because it's my grandmother's name. Maternal grandmother, it's her namesake.
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And Rosette is a young woman about 16 in high school in Haifa, after the occupation of 1948, and [the] Nakba. She is learning about herself, about her family, about the culture, about the new world that's popped up around her. And this young woman reminded me of myself. So, a lot of the play is autobiographical in the sense that it is stories from my family.
I remember as a child growing up in Haifa, and we would take trips to Nazareth to visit my family. And on the way to Nazareth, my parents would wake me up because I would often fall asleep as a kid. And it's like, ‘Hey, wake up! Wake up, look. This is our village,” and we always had to look at the village on the way to Nazareth.
It's a village that my family was dispossessed from and was destroyed during the war, along with 530 other villages.
And they would point to my grandmother's house, which was bullet-ridden... the church was still there, and the monastery and those two were not destroyed. Everything else was destroyed in the village, and we, as my family, when they were displaced, they ran away to Nazareth, which is like three miles away, but [were] never allowed to come back, even though it's just three miles away.
The main character grows up in a world post-Nakba. Why did you really want to focus on someone who's grown up in a world only knowing occupation.
She has no memory of a pre-occupation, so she is learning about it from her parents.
Usually, many sentences in Palestinian society would start “Before the occupation, we were this and that,” and for her to be in a city that's predominantly Jewish now that used to be predominantly Arab, learning European ways, and the culture is changing. She has a lot of questions.
Also, half of her family is in the refugee camps in Lebanon, and so they receive cassette tapes or reel-to-reel from Lebanon, from the refugee camps outside of Beirut.
We've received similar tapes from our family, and I still have them, and some of them will be aired in the play.
This is a coming-of-age story. It's about somebody finding who they are, and understanding where they come from, but within that context of living under occupation and not knowing their culture the way that her parents knew their culture. Could you talk more about how you dealt with that?
I went to a Catholic school. We were not taught that we were Palestinians. We were called “Israeli Arabs.” It's what's called divide and conquer. They are Palestinians, and now there are Israeli Arabs. So, we happen to be Israeli Arabs.
So as a young kid, I was embarrassed to say that I was Palestinian because Palestinians were always mentioned as terrorists on the news. So, I would deny my Palestinian heritage and say I was [an] Israeli Arab until I was about 20, when I met a dear friend, and he asked me, “Why do [you] say that? Your parents were Palestinian.” And that's when I started accepting my identity as a Palestinian, being proud of it.
It’s something that I am growing as well as I'm writing, you know, I'm learning about myself. And why do I have these ideas? Some things come from my father and my mother, as they taught us ... my parents were very open.
You'll see in the in the play that there is a Christian family and a Muslim family, and they have been living side by side in the village before occupation, and then they continue to live next door to each other after occupation.
Because they were like siblings, but when it came to marriage, oh, you can't do that, of course, right? Yeah. But for me, personally, religion is arbitrary. You know, you just happen to be born in this household.
In this last year with the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and in the West Bank, I'm just curious how you're doing and how this piece of art has been a part of your experience through it.
It’s been a very difficult time.
My other love is to write poetry. And I've written a lot of poetry and read poetry and been to grief circles with friends and protests, of course, and I want to go visit my family.
They live in Haifa, but I am honestly afraid to go because I am an Israeli citizen, I have dual citizenship. And going to the airport, there have been Jewish people who have been arrested for just expressing sympathy on Facebook ... And then there's Gaza, which, I don't know if I can ... how can you talk about Gaza? I don't know. There are no words.
Poetry is what I used to speak about it. I'm writing this because I love my family, and I love to be able to say, to say something about our humanity and not a plea, but just to tell the story.
If I don't tell the story, we hear it from somebody else.
Is there anything that you want people to engage with or get out of this play?
We need to educate ourselves and start noticing what is being said on the news about Palestinians and what is our role in the disenfranchisement and occupation actually.
Because America has a very complicit role in the occupation of Palestine, we basically finance it.
I just wanted people to come and enjoy the story and see these people that are engaging in daily activities, cooking and laughing and singing and caring for one another.
Life for the Palestinians is like life for anybody else except we have the occupation always in the background, or right above us, right over our heads.
Everybody has hopes. They want to get married and have children, get a job, travel like everybody else, but there are always these limitations, and we live with them.
Despite the fact that we have these limitations, we still have the hopes of overcoming, you know, or freedom and self-determination.
