Amreekan bil Bstan

After signing up for a gym membership early yesterday, I was walking back home and decided haphazardly to scope out two of the theatres on 29 May Street, one of them being the Cinema Ambassador. It was covered in posters of Egyptian comedic films, featuring Adel Imam, but I went ahead and stepped inside. The box office manager told me that there was a theatre downstairs--an Iraqi theatre--and that the show, Amreekan bil Bstan (American in the Garden), started at 9.30pm.

The theatre was pounding with fluorescent lights and live digital music when we stepped inside. The audience consisted largely of tri-generational families, munching on bizr and popcorn. A collage of nine floating headshots against a blue background, the poster suggested that Amreekan bil Bstan would be very much like a slapstick popular Egyptian comedy. Indeed, the dialogue bounced like a ping-pong match; there was a lot of shouting and physical comedy; and the sleazy dwarf broke out in belly dance every so often.

When I was standing in the ticket line, a man speaking in delicate English asked me, "You understand Iraqi Arabic?" I responded in Arabic, and as usual he was surprised and asked me where I was from, etc, blah blah blah.

Turns out, the Iraqi dialect is about as foreign to my ears as the Egyptian dialect: I doubt I understood more than 3% of the language. But I did gather that the play was about Iraqi refugees in a Syrian city (surprise, surprise), the dilemmas of being a refugee, and the disjoint between Syrian and Iraqi language and culture.

Needless to say, we were the only foreigners in the audience of around 300 Arabs, probably most of them Iraqi refugee families. According to a local journal I read last week, there are 1.5-2 million Iraqi refugees in Syria, compared to the 750,000 in Jordan. When I was hunting for an apartment, every single real estate broker would begin the conversation by telling me how the refugee crisis has resulted in a boom in the real estate market.

Just before the lights went down, I experienced a brief moment of horror: there I was in a room full of Iraqi refugees, who had been displaced from their homes, lost their jobs, and left family and histories behind due to the American invasion and occupation and the subsequent civil war. There I was in a room full of Iraqi refugees thanks to a scholarship from the American government.

The same institution that funds me ruined their lives.

And so the show began.