No Man's Land: a performance that makes complicity inescapably palpable On #spring

No Man's Land by Alaa Minawi tells the story of our present, but also aims to predict the future: our future and, by extension, the future of Palestine. Because, and this is made very clear during the performance, what we do now, today, in Europe, affects what happens there. No Man's Land forces us to face our daily actions, our indifference and our silence. This is the last performance I saw at the SPRING Festival in Utrecht, on Saturday 16 May.

No Man's Land draws on Arab Futurism, the movement that believes another future is possible and, as Minawi says during the performance, “there may be another end.”

The Haram country

The performance summarises this idea through a matryoshka-like narrative: different narrative layers unfold on stage. Initially, it is the author himself, Alaa Minawi, who explains what the performance is about, while the main performer, Wajdi, dressed as a technician, builds the stage on which the performance will take place. White cloths, arranged by the performer, create a “strange” space, completely white and anonymous, with no precise setting: it is the No Man's Land, like the strip of land between North and South Korea, an area without a state, without a law.

A ‘no man's land’, as Minawi explains, can be translated in Arabic as haram land, which literally means ‘the land of sin’, but how can a country be sinful? This land represents what has often been proposed as a ‘solution’ to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the idea of resettling Palestinians in the Sinai desert. Here, Wajdi stands alone, while Minawi remains outside. Wajdi represents the future of Palestine, the sole survivor of his people, while Minawi tells him what is happening outside, in our present and in a possible future. Outside that strip of land, the no man's land, those who have occupied the rest of its territory are constantly partying, with DJ sets blaring everywhere. “Are they happy now?”, asks Wajdi. “No,” replies Minawi, telling us how they are trying so hard to forget the Palestinians that all the olive trees have been burnt and it is now illegal to plant them.

Minawi tells us this is because otherwise they would hear the voices of the people they killed. Wajdi, alone, still hears them singing: the loved ones he has lost. Wajdi embodies the love and resilience of the Palestinian people, while on the other hand, those responsible are haunted by the memory of what they did. The West, of course, is complicit in this massacre. Minawi's criticism spares no one, from the United States to the art world, to those whose only concern is posting on Instagram.

In this scenario, where public guilt runs high, Wajdi also offers a glimmer of hope: for every protest on the streets, a flower bloomed in his country, and he could feel the support.

The body of the Arab man

But why is Wajdi still alive? Because, Minawi explains, they have to keep him alive; otherwise ‘they’ will start killing other groups, and then each other, until there is no one left on earth. It is also very telling that Wajdi is an Arab man who represents the trauma of the Arab body: a body that is often triggered by everyday things, such as loud noises, because they remind us of explosions. Wajdi lives, before our eyes, in a Truman Show in which he is sadly aware of his situation. He knows he has been watched by the whole world and yet his situation remains the same.

There is another reason why the Arab man's body matters here, and Minawi says this clearly during the performance: men do not count as victims, but women, children and the elderly do. A young Arab man like Wajdi is seen as a threat, and therefore his body is considered expendable. These young men, I thought during the performance, are the ones who arrive in Europe because the journey is often too dangerous for babies, the elderly and women. They are the ones who bring political hatred upon themselves, the ones accused of crimes. Yet the body that we so often think of as “dangerous”, in No Man's Land depicted as wounded, scared, vulnerable: a body that cannot hurt anyone and only gets hurt.