This article scrutinises the disastrous impacts of Israeli occupation on Palestinians in the Palestinian-Irish playwright Hannah Khalil’s Plan D (2010) by decoding the diacritics of the Palestine Nakba of 1948. Plan Dalet was a Zionist master plan for the military occupation of Palestine and the plan became central to the Zionist expulsion of the Palestinians and Palestine Nakba in 1948. Khalil’s play ( Plan D) portrays a rustic family undergoing a crisis against a background of enforced mass deportation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. The playwright gives a voice to the victimised Palestinians as the play represents an indictment of ecological imperialism which weighs upon Palestinians who are crammed into unlivable ghettos. Khalil’s attachment to her native environment shapes the portrayal of her characters and their environment which is exposed to demographical changes and distortion by reason of the Nakba. Psychologically, the play delves deeply into the tragedy of Palestinians who are forcibly deported from their farm houses to live in other ecological units such as the woods and outskirt camps and how they adapt to the new-found ecology as a survival mechanism aloof from the unscrupulous aggression of occupation. Put differently, it dismantles the diacritics of the plight of Palestinians and deconstructs projections of otherness in order to find an ecological outlet for them to rethink their life-threatening crisis.
This study points out how the American playwright Craig Wright's Grace is replete with multi-dimensional traumatic aesthetics: physical, existential, emotional, and psychological. The aesthetics of trauma are reflections on the varied dimensions associated with traumatic experiences. The play demonstrates that traumatic aesthetics can plunge man into an existential void which distorts his beliefs, disrupts his cognitive equilibrium, and fragments his perception of human existence, self, emotions, and memories. Physical trauma has been existentialized to disclose the characters' distorted beliefs, existential anxiety, and alienation. Emotional trauma has been existentialized to unfold the characters' perspective on the futility of life, skepticism, and selfabhorrence. Psychological trauma has been contextualized to divulge the bitter effects of trauma on the characters' psyche. Grace is a dark play which dives deeply into the nature of suffering and the existential anguish of disappointed faith through the eyes of a young couple, Steve and Sara, their next-door neighbor, Sam, and the building's German exterminator, Karl. As their stories converge, Wright's characters find themselves face-to-face with their traumas. The traumatic effects include distressing memories, negative flashbacks, existential anxiety, distorted beliefs, and alienation. The play ends with three dead bodies. Steve's broken faith instigates him to kill Sara, Sam and himself.
This paper aims at exploring the multi-layers of suicide in Sarah Kane's play 4.48 Psychosis (2000) in the light of Emile Durkheim's identifications of suicide: egoistic suicide, altruistic suicide, anomic suicide, and fatalistic suicide. The play encompasses these kinds of suicide through the portrayal of a hospitalized patient battling with her psychotic disorders and suicidal thoughts. Egoistic suicide is demonstrated through the patient's social alienation from the mainstream of society and her submersion into a state of egoism. Altruistic suicide is depicted either through the patient's view of suicide as a window overlooking infinity where the ego should be situated beyond life itself or through her inability to cope with her mental illness. Anomic suicide takes place when the patient falls into the abyss of frustration, despair, vulnerability, and anomy because of society's indifference to her feelings, passions, and organic necessities. Fatalistic suicide is manifested through her suffocation by the overregulation of society represented by the oppressive, uncaring medical system. The disintegration of the human mind of the depressed patient is poignantly divulged through the employment of the stream of consciousness. Rarely do we find dialogical parts except the conversations between the patient and the therapist. Kane does not designate characters throughout the play as though she desires to grab the readers into the labyrinth associated with suicidal thoughts.
This study examines how the theoretical insights and ideologies of the French sociologist Michel Foucault are contextualized in the Egyptian playwright Fathia al-Assal's play The Women 's Prison (1993) in which institutions prove to be containers of power structures, punitive forms, strict social and political disciplines, and modes of resistance. Significantly, the Foucauldian thought takes an oppositional stance to dismantle the diacritics associated with power and punishment through delving deeply into the disciplines which constitute them. Under such a prism, the study investigates how institutions shape the human psychology of Egyptian women through an oppressive consciousness, thereby generating dissonance in characters and engaging the reader's empathy with their plight. The play comprises a plethora of women prisoners who advocate political protests and the restructuring of state institutions being part of the overall power structure under which they exist. The playwright integrates polyphonic voices from different social categories to give her fragmented characters an opportunity for articulation and self-representation. Being socially outcast, these women are ostracized by the authoritarian state, so they are put in jail, an oppressive institution in which the playwright gives a voice to the marginalized, voiceless women. Thus, the play is an indictment of the burdensome power dynamics and punishments which weigh upon variable slices of Egyptian women. Moreover, the playwright is attentive to power relations under patriarchy and materialism and how these structures force women to fall into the abyss of crime, thereby depicting their non-conformity as a survival and anti-oppression mechanism.
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