Send in the clowns
Clowns Without Borders Ireland continues their mission with a tour to refugee camps in Lebanon to ensure there is ‘no child without a smile’
Children of Al Jaleel school for Palestinian refugees in Talabaya, Lebanon. Photograph courtesy of Al-Jana
PLAY AND LAUGHTER are normal occupations of young children. It’s how they learn about the world and how to engage with it and each other. And how to relieve themselves of the stresses of their challenging encounters with it.
For millions of children enduring and displaced by wars and hardship, however, the new normal is despair, fear and trauma. There’s little to laugh about when your home and neighbourhood have been destroyed by bombs, members of your family have been killed and you now live in a refugee camp, suffering poverty, hunger, disease and the harshness of the elements.
But laughter is what Clowns Without Borders seeks to provide. The organisation had its beginnings in Spain in 1993, when schoolchildren in Barcelona asked a Spanish clown to perform for refugees in the Istrian peninsula of Croatia. It has now spread around the world, with chapters in 14 countries bringing performing artists to visit the children in refugee camps, conflict zones and areas beset by emergency. Their performances give these children a chance to escape, however briefly, their hardships and anguish with a few hours of light-hearted joy.
CWB Ireland team at Chatila, a Palestinian camp in Beirut: (l-r) Orlagh de Bhaldraithe, Daniel Guinnane, Helen Gregg and Niamh McGrath. Photograph courtesy of Al-Jana
CWB Ireland, a group of professional street artists, theatre practitioners, puppeteers and circus performers – all volunteers – recently travelled to Lebanon to visit several refugee camps. This year, Helen Gregg (team leader and performer), Daniel Guinnane (musician/performer), Niamh McGrath (performer) and Orla de Bhaldraithe (musician/performer) spent three weeks on tour of the refugee population, assisted by the local arts organisation Al-Jana. Its director, Hicham Kayed, wrote: “The performances had a strong impact on the children, often deprived of education and cultural or social activities. [They] would light up as they rejoiced in sharing in the tricks the clowns performed and the pranks they played on each other.”
Putting into practice their motto “No child without a smile”, CWB Ireland’s tour of 19 different locations included Palestinian camps such as Burj Barajneh in Beirut of Nahr el-Bared in Tripoli/Trablus, and new encampments of Syrian refugees in rural areas such as the Beqaa valley.
This was the second time round in Lebanon for Gregg, the leader of the group. She had expected the situation mostly to encompass the Syrian conflict and its refugees. The additional experience of going to the Palestinian camps that have been in existence in the 1940s – “where the residents are the descendants of those people who fled the Arab-Israeli war of that time” and are born as refugees, Gregg explains – was an eye-opener.
Children watch the show at SP Overseas Syrian camp in Saida. Photograph courtesy of Al-Jana
The experience was special not only for the children. “To be honest,” Gregg says, “the work is a gift to us. To be afforded the opportunity to connect with people from cultures and life experiences so different from our own, both children and adults, is a rare thing.” She describes meeting tiny Syrian children in the Beqaa valley, who fled with their families to – or were born in – the windowless shacks and muddy fields near the Syrian border, and “making them smile and laugh with our messing, being gifted with their hugs and kisses”. Every interaction was important to them, she says: “It’s terribly sad and yet wonderful at the same time to be able to make that human connection, to share fun together and bring the memory of them home.
“And when they asked us, as they often did, if we would be coming back tomorrow – well, that was heartbreaking.”
CWB Ireland have since embarked on a tour of Syrian refugee camps in Jordan with Hullabaloo, a new circus show by Laura Ivers, Maria Corcoran, Tony Mahon and Hillas Smith, directed by Angelica Santander
Euro Vision
At the Pulse of Europe rally on Munich’s Max-Joseph-Platz, 19 March. Photograph: Christine Madden
MORE than a thousand people attended a Pulse of Europe rally in Munich on Sunday, 19 March, joining thousands across Germany and other locations in Europe – including Galway, for which the crowd on Munich’s Max-Joseph-Platz gave a big cheer.
Waving flags and banners, the assembled crowd listened to speakers expounding on their personal experiences of Europe and the importance of the EU to them as private individuals, workers and professionals, community members and citizens.
Scottish Saltire waves at Pulse of Europe rally. Photograph: Christine Madden
And although Britain and Scotland seem currently to be wrestling out their differences regarding union – EU and UK – membership, several of the attendees at today’s rally demonstrated their support for Scottish membership in the EU.
Pulse of Europe, a non-party-affiliated citizens’ initiative to defy the rise of far-right and racist politics in Europe, has begun holding rallies in German cities every Sunday. Their goal, according to the website, is “nothing less than the preservation of the confederation in order to secure peace and guarantee individual freedom, justice and legal security”.
Father and son show their support for the EU. Photograph: Christine Madden
One hundred years ago, stated one speaker, European countries were at war with one another. Now, symbolised by the stars on the blue field in the EU flag, they are members of a political and economic union and – despite disagreements – at peace. The stability of the union and friendly understanding among these nations is a gift that should be valued and treasured and protected.
EU-enthusiast trumpets his support at the Pulse of Europe rally. Photograph: Christine Madden
Munich rally attendees welcoming Scotland in the EU – “Your vote, your future”, the empty star labelled “space for Scotland”. Photograph: Christine Madden
Rebels with a cause
Sarah Bakewell, author of How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne, and At the Existentialist Cafe, tells her Munich audience why existentialism is the rock-and-roll side of philosophy
Writer Sarah Bakewell, author of ‘At the Existentialist Cafe’, signing books at the Literaturhaus München. Photograph: Christine Madden
AT THE RISK of looking like the PR for Munich’s Literaturhaus, here’s another report on an event in their programme. Apparently English writer Sarah Bakewell doesn’t often tour, but she made an exception and paid the venue an exclusive visit to promote her engaging book, At the Existentialist Café. In a question-and-answer session with Austrian literary critic Sigrid Löffler, with passages from the book read by German actor and singer Wiebke Puls, Bakewell described her enduring love affair with existentialism with easy-going humour and enthusiasm. Better than straight philosophy, Bakewell’s book invites us into the cafés and jazz clubs with the existentialists, whose lives she describes with the arch affection of an intimate. Löffler describes Bakewell as the “master of presenting images in relaxed, chatty language”.
Any apprehensions of a dry-as-dust scholastic treatment of a supposedly defunct philosophical movement should be dispelled by the book’s subtitle: ‘Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails’. The philosophers inhabiting this engaging book Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and others had gained a reputation for being worthy, serious, embodiments of “stuffy old Europe” in American circles. But, argues Bakewell, these people were the rock-and-roll celebrities of mid 20th-century Paris, where they represented youth, rebellion and (sexual) freedom.
Far from propounding a rarefied body of thought, distanced from the world we inhabit, the existentialists were writing about “the problems of living, of the world, of love, of desire and what it means to be a human being”, says Bakewell. Their philosophy is imbued with passion and immediacy, which is why, she says, “existentialism never goes out of fashion for 16-year-olds” – a reference to her own discovery of their dynamic work when she was a teenager.
They felt their ideas had the power to change the world
They also sometimes acted like teenagers, quarrelling and falling out with one another. But, as Bakewell explains, this is because they their ideas mattered so much to them, that they felt their ideas had the power to change the world.
They lived with an admirable intensity and immediacy that we, in our technology-addicted world, no longer seem to feel. Separating ourselves from the bold fact of our physicality, the active reality of our existence, we crave easy thrills and, often virtual, distraction and disruption – nothing like the rebellion and revolt the existentialists thought, felt, advocated and put into practice.
Existentialism, Bakewell believes, has a new validity and urgency in the 21st century. “The existentialists asked questions that we need to think about now,” she states, “the big question of freedom.” The leaching of our freedom in the current political climate, she says, is accompanied by scientific discoveries about the brain, that we don’t make conscious decisions, that we’re ruled by hormones, etc. “It’s an old argument with scientific justification,” she explains, “but it doesn’t answer the question of freedom: what is my life and what am I going to do with it?”
‘The Cassandras in the world are never asleep’
Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka – playwright, poet, ‘anatomist of the workings of power’ – shows a Munich audience he is still well able to pounce
Wole Soyinka, speaking at the Munich Security Conference, 17 February 2017. Photograph: Christine Madden
THE BUZZ in the lecture hall in the Literaturhaus München becomes more subdued as the minutes tick by – Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, scheduled to speak as part of the Munich Security Conference, is late. The audience were told yesterday that he was flying in from Los Angeles. Is the flight delayed? Or – in this age, one can’t help leaping to drastic worst-case scenarios – had something more sinister happened?
He arrives then, to enthusiastic applause, flanked by the deputy director of the MSC. It appears that Soyinka’s arrival occurred at the same time as “our chancellor’s” and in the worldwide political pecking order, her security took precedence. (It is, after all, a security – not a literary – conference.)
Literally an éminence grise with his eye-catching shock of white hair, Nobel laureate Soyinka explains what sets Cassandra and her heirs apart: “listening to the quiet, hearing the sounds of danger”. Soyinka has been speaking and writing with her voice for decades – he was imprisoned for using it in the 1960s when the government interrogated then imprisoned him for almost two years. He also criticised the 20th-century concept of “négritude”, current among intellectuals using it to oppose a mentality of colonial racism. Being deliberately outspoken about their ethnicity did not give Africans power but put them on the defensive. “A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces,” he stated. Most recently in Africa, Soyinka says, “the voice of Cassandra was heeded” when former Gambian president Yahya Jammeh was finally forced to step down after repudiating the results of an election he did not win.
Again he used that voice – the result of experience, of human knowledge, the practice of integrity – in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He relates how then French president Mitterrand convoked a conference of Nobel prize laureates. Asked for his opinion, Soyinka said that one of the few scientific principles he had retained from his schooling was that nature abhors a vacuum. The eastern bloc had crumbled. Had the rest of the world thought about what would take its place? “I think,” he told them, presciently, “it will be religious fundamentalism.” Only a few weeks later, the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran issued the fatwa against writer Salmon Rushdie for the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. It was, as he explained, the first act to show the militancy, the disregard for humanity and lack of conscience of a movement that has now ascended to be the issue of our era.
‘What you call an enemy is very important’
“People say there was no warning,” Soyinka challenges, “but there is always a warning. The Cassandras in the world are never asleep.” He cites two examples in 20th-century literature in which her voice was loud and clear. Max Frisch’s The Fire-Raisers (also known as The Arsonists) describes how a normal, seemingly innocent lodger takes over the house of a bourgeois family until he and his cohorts have taken it over turned it catastrophically upside down. In Eugène Ionesco’s The Rhinoceros, we see the effect of “peer pressure, wanting to conform”, says Soyinka. “Do I want to stand out? Oh, my neighbour, his children are already grow their horn,” he quips. You wouldn’t want to cause a disruption or make them feel bad. These plays offer a stark depiction of how easily the moral framework of society is disrupted to a point at which it can’t be reversed without cataclysmic struggle. “What greater warning do we want from literature?” he asks.
To do that, you have to oppose power with freedom, not bow before it in submission. “And what you call an enemy is very important,” he warns. He mentions the western use of the names Isis or Isil to describe the Islamic fundamentalist movement in the Middle East with scorn. They are not a state, he insists; to give them that name gives them a status, credibility. In the Middle East, in Africa, they are called Daesh. The Cassandras of this world refuse to show deference to those who control with force, with submission, with domination. “You have to show them your contempt,” he says. “If we listen to Cassandra, we can escape becoming rhinoceroses.”
‘Doomed to be a writer’
David Grossman appears in the first of a series of talks – The Cassandra Phenomenon – during the Munich Security Conference
Israeli author David Grossman speaking at the Munich Security Conference. Photograph: Christine Madden
‘WE CAN ALL IDENTIFY with the horrible experience of Cassandra,” says Israeli writer David Grossman at Munich’s Literaturhaus on 16 February. You come to feel that you’re in a dream, and it would be so easy for you to believe that you are the insane one. What, he asks, can literature do in such a chaotic world? “I’m afraid, very little.” He pauses, then continues: “Yet, quite a lot.”
This inaugural inclusion of literature in series of talks at the 2017 Munich Security Conference was suggested by Dr Jürgen Wertheimer, professor of contemporary German and international literature at the University of Tübingen. A welcome and prescient addition – particularly under the aegis of Cassandra, who didn’t fare particularly well as the harbinger of bad but accurate predictions in a world gone mad. In introducing the writers of this series – Grossman at the start, with Wole Soyinka and Hertha Müller to follow – Wertheimer contributes to the discussion with his broad knowledge of literature, quoting Ingeborg Bachmann – “Writing with my burnt hand about the nature of fire” – as well as Turkish prime minister Erdoğan – “Some books are more dangerous than bombs”. Grossman, like Soyinka, Müller and other wise voices in the dark, is “doomed to be a writer,” says Wertheimer, “doomed to truth and reality, doomed to observe something other than the mainstream”.
Grossman – who, as Wertheimer says, share’s Kafka’s fate of being recognised worldwide but shunned in his own country – spoke movingly of the current political chaos in the world today. He vividly exemplifies the image of writing about fire with a singed, even still smoking hand as a voice calling out in Israel for a two-state solution when the current political wind is blowing against him – fanning the flames. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute has gone on for so long that people are acting against their existential ideal, he reasons. “We are limiting our ability to free ourselves from the trap of the conflict.” Without the two-state solution, “Palestinians will never get sovereignty; Israelis will ruin with our own hands the miracle that created their country.”
‘Maybe we can write a new story for ourselves’
The tragedy of this perpetual conflict is rendered particularly poignant because of the “existential foreignness, existential homelessness” of the Jewish people. They had succeeded in creating one place in the world that will be a home for them. But, he says, “I don’t have such certainty that Israel will continue to exist. The feeling that you don’t have a future is a terrible thing for a society.”
Writing, however, including his own, can be a liberating influence. “Literature can connect us to a place inside us that recognises truth, what is light, what is darkness, the primal conditions of emotions.” In all his years of observing the often disheartening political process and corrosive conflict, he remains hopeful. “Maybe we don’t have to be stuck in this story,” he says. “Maybe we can write a new story for ourselves.”
Sadly there doesn’t seem to be any mention whatsoever of this outstanding programme on the MSC website. Maybe the hosts and participants agree with Erdoğan. Which is perhaps not a bad thing. Perhaps they, too, realise literature has an explosive power to wield. There’s hope for us all yet.
Memorial for victims of Munich shooting
Munich’s city council has chosen a design for a memorial for the nine victims of last year’s shooting at a Munich shopping centre
Flowers, candles and toys placed in memory of the victims of the shooting at Olympiaeinkaufszentrum in Munich. Photograph: Christine Madden
A design by artist Elke Härtel has been selected to commemorate the nine people who lost their lives at the hands of a lone gunman in front of Munich’s Olympiaeinkaufszentrum in July 2016. The memorial, featuring a living ginkgo tree, will stand opposite the site of the shooting in front of the OEZ shopping centre.
The attack, which took place after 6 pm on 22 July 2016, held the city of Munich in terrified thrall until the early hours of the morning, when the body of the 18-year-old perpetrator, Ali Sonboly, was found in a side street not far from the centre, where he had shot himself. Munich was in lockdown for the duration while police tried to hunt down the perpetrators of what had all the appearance of a terrorist attack. Instead, Sonboly was discovered to have been a loner who planned his attack using a weapon obtained on the dark net.
The tree will be planted in April in readiness for the official opening of the memorial on the one-year anniversary of the shooting. The design visualises the ginkgo encircled by a 2.5 metre-wide, stainless steel ring, partly sunk into the ground. Inside the ring, the names and images of the nine shooting victims will appear. The dual nature of the memorial combines symbols for solidarity, community and eternity (ring) with peace, friendship and hope (gingko).
Thousands of people came to commemorate and mourn the victims of the shooting at Munich’s Olympiaeinkaufszentrum in July 2016. Photograph: Christine Madden