Echoes of Antigone rattle through this fine transcription of Darina Al Joundi’s dramatic monologue like machine gun fire: turning against organized religion of all stripes, and the male patriarchies they relentlessly support, her ‘fuck you’ approach overturns convention at her Syrian father’s funeral, around which the narrative of Al Joundi’s incendiary examination of middle eastern culture begins and ends. Her narrator, Noun’s, declamation of familial allegiance cannot but reinforce a subtextual connection with Sophocles’ Tragedy, and lest we were in any doubt as to her absolute commitment to her father’s memory, we are gifted a damning illustration of his antipathies:

“Watch out, Noun, the men in this country are monsters towards women. They’re hung up on appearances, they’re slaves to their customs, they’re nuts about God, they’re tied to their mother’s apron strings, and they’re obsessed with money. They spend their lives offering up their arses to God on a platter. They unzip their flies as if they were arming a machine gun. They let their dicks loose on women as if they were unleashing pitbulls. They’re dogs!”

From acclamation on the stage in France, the actor’s textual rendering of her own play, here translated with energy and authority by Helen Vassallo, appears in a new series from Naked Eye. Playing out in the partial form of an apostrophic address to her father, a profoundly secular academic, journalist and writer, Al Joundi’s story is as flagrantly immediate as her treatment of an internecine conflict demands. Taking her father’s cue for indiscriminate cynicism, Noun’s vocal denunciation of all kinds of religious intolerance and misogyny must have resounded like an echo in a sharply acoustic theatre, and her bravery – first to countenance criticism in a real landscape of orthodoxy, and second, in its theatrical re-envisioning – is her eloquence.

The thread which unites daughter, father and drama, is the music of Nina Simone whose deeply human expression anchors Noun’s stolid sense of identity in memory. Punctuated with her song ‘Sinnerman’, whose repeated strains refract the experiences and attitudes of the protagonists, the story unfolds into a hall of mirrors where certainties are compromised by recrimination, and carefully-nourished truths are later renegotiated.

In the maelstrom of Beirut, Bohemian polyglots consume Gibran alongside Rimbaud, Lacan with Sartre, feeding an impulse for existential freedom, the freedom to name names, to think independently of the kinds of men - and they are always men - who dictate the terms of endurance for others:

“A believer, my dear, is a ball-breaker who makes other people’s lives hell to get to heaven”.

The ball-breaker in question would fit any prescription in any religious culture, though we are not far, here, from the monomaniacal zealotry of John of Patmos, curator of The Book of Revelations. Practicing the secularism he preaches to the letter, Noun’s father is a life celebrant in the manner of Omar Khayyam, who proposes an addiction for life and the living in the face of the various factions whose tanks carve and re-carve his homeland in the name of boundary re-drawing or hegemony of religious control. The picaresque Beirut that Al Joundi inveigles into her audience’s minds is a carnival of extreme violence (her apartment block is destroyed and rebuilt no fewer than seven times), tolerance and intolerance, alcohol and ‘coke’ alongside the casual misogyny of the Lebanese male. The cognitive dissonance set in a framework of explosive mayhem is stark, and starkly seductive: “West Beirut was in flames. In East Beirut, couples were slow-dancing to Julio Iglesias”.

For most of all, Al Joundi’s story is one of love, stoicism and resilience. The means of survival in dark times – enacted so often in the citizenry of memory – is the cocking of a snook at the tableau of Israeli F-14s tearing the sky and eyeless shells of apartment blocks. The indifference is both shocking and salutary: the greyness of unwashed skin, the ironic fear of cockroaches in a terrain of cluster bombing, the counter-intuitive obsession with a televised football international as missiles whip past the windows. And, the growing of Noun into a new skin of adolescence, of menstruation, and the carpe diem of fucking for the sake of fucking in a war zone.

A bildungsroman in dystopia, the retailing of Al Joundi’s journey is necessarily comedic in places since dark humour naturally inheres to the woodwork of landscapes in turmoil. Helen Vassallo’s inventory of names for ‘dicks’ in translation is tireless in both assiduity and accuracy, but yields an obvious countertone in the suggestion of promiscuity. The narrator’s tone is insouciantly defiant rather than disingenuous, a declaration of another kind of war on aggressive phallocentrism. A response to the defining depredations of a terrain, and culture, in flux, her monologue is entirely natural, an upping of the ante to countermand antagonism squarely. We should not cavil as we hear echoes of erotic-thanatic impulses in the lethal urgency of circumstances, if only because this stylized performance is intended to do for complacent misogyny what Lysistrata did for the Athenian military.

Al Joundi’s peroration on the meaning and disposition of dicks is the prelude to a brutal, abusive relationship with a photojournalist whose obsession with filming the mutilated dead amounts to a mental disturbance made concrete in outbursts of uncalibrated anger. And a harrowingly wrought depiction of a game of Russian Roulette, played out in the lunatic maelstrom of free-basing and self-destruction, where anticipation overcomes fear to yield a perfect illustration of the Sex/Death axis: “I wasn’t afraid, it was exciting, I felt as if I was going to come”. The random acts of violence that punctuate the narrative – the prison cell horrors, the sudden shootings – would be rendered deafening in the near silence of an auditorium, and we are reminded that Al Joundi’s mandate as witness is to collapse the flimsy walls of the theatre to expose the limits of degradation in a world beyond comfortable margins

And in the end, we are returned to uncertainty, not of love, but of other kinds of control that thrive unnoticed behind a carapace of overwhelming concern. For Noun’s father, systematic dominion over his daughter’s thinking, in the ironic name of intellectual freedom, might represent another kind of misogyny if it were not for the love in between. The rest – the abusers and the abused; the religious reactionaries and their charges – do not share her recalcitrant benefits:

“Dear Lord, please don’t let my daughter become a whore, she smokes marijuana and shows her breasts in public. Dear Lord, she’s mad, please heal her”.

The problem is more fundamental than we know. Al Joundi’s dangerous, self-lacerating and profoundly exposed journey of liberation demands to be heard. An actress by inclination, the power of her performance of Nina Simone has Stopped Singing on stage can only be imagined.


The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing, translated by Helen Vassallo is published by Naked Eye

More information here: https://nakedeyepublishing.co.uk/uncategorized/the-day-nina-simone-stopped-singing/