The Diaspora
Ala'a Al Qaisi puts Gaza's karate champion on Melbourne stages
Image credit: Brunswick Mechanics Institute, Melbourne — Mattinbgn via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0) · License
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The clip that changed the direction of Ala'a Al Qaisi's work was shot on somebody's phone in Gaza. A father sat at a hospital bed beside his daughter and described the right leg she had lost.
Al Qaisi, a Palestinian writer and director who grew up in Jordan and has lived in Australia since 2010, told the Arabic service of the Australian broadcaster SBS that she recognised her own father in the man on the screen. She had buried him two months before the war began.
"My eye fell on a video of Nagham Abu Samra's father beside her, telling her story, the story of her amputated right leg, and I saw my own father in him," she said in that interview, published in January last year. "In that moment I chose to carry Nagham's story, and I began to write."
What she wrote is now a play called The Return, and this week it opens on a circuit no metropolitan arts page had on its schedule. A nineteenth-century mechanics institute in Brunswick, a community centre in the outer-southeastern Melbourne suburb of Keysborough, a performing arts centre in Ballarat, a small theatre in Castlemaine out in the central Victorian goldfields.
The champion the play is built around#
Nagham Abu Samra came from Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, and she was the best karateka her country had. Reporting her death, Al Jazeera called her the Gaza Strip's karate champion and a member of Palestine's national team, a woman who had just finished a master's in sports education and had founded a training centre to bring girls in the Strip into the sport.
The production describes her as having been on track to represent Palestine at the Olympics.
On 18 December 2023 an Israeli strike hit the house in Nuseirat where the family was sheltering. Her sister Rozan was killed outright.
Nagham lost her right leg and never came out of the coma that followed. She was treated at al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, was moved on 7 January 2024 to a hospital in El-Arish across the Egyptian border, and died there five days later, The National reported.
Her father Marwan told the paper about the ambulance out: "It was a scary and terrible journey. We almost lost Nagham. The ventilator that was brought on board the ambulance was not working." He had already buried his wife, who died of cancer, and Rozan.
That is the whole architecture of the case: a champion, a permit she needed, and the weeks the permit took.
A play made by the people who staged it#
The Return does not stage the strike. It puts Marwan on stage waiting for his daughters to come back out of the clouds, and it lets the dead speak — magical realism, poetry, music and, the presenters promise, unexpected humour. It carries a content warning for war, grief and trauma, and it is recommended for audiences of 15 and over.
The company is small and largely built out of Sydney's Arab and Palestinian creative circles. Al Qaisi writes, directs and performs Rozan; Rashid Taki plays Marwan in the Victorian season, after Sergio Silva played him in Sydney; Mohammed El Kesm and Ahlam Hijazi complete the cast. Jasmine H. Low produces, and Fairuz Hussaini built the soundscape.
Its history is a tour of exactly the kind of room a community owns. The play ran at the East Sydney Community and Arts Centre in Darlinghurst on 21 November and 21 December last year, and at Flight Path Theatre in Marrickville on 9 and 11 December, at $40 a ticket.
The Victorian season is presented by The Return Project with the volunteer group Free Palestine Melbourne. It runs on 15, 16, 17 and 20 September at the Brunswick Mechanics Institute, on 18 September at the Ballarat Performing Arts Centre, on 19 September at the Chandler Community Centre in Keysborough and on 22 September at the Phee Broadway Theatre in Castlemaine.
Two panellists join Al Qaisi on stage for a discussion after every performance.
Almost nobody in the national press wrote about any of it. The Dandenong Star Journal, a suburban paper in Melbourne's southeast, ran the Keysborough date in July under a plain headline about one family's heartbreak, and Green Left carried Al Qaisi's own account late last month after she appeared on its community radio program. The audience notices arrived the same way, by hall and by word of mouth.
I saw my own father in him. In that moment I chose to carry Nagham's story.
Ala'a Al Qaisi, to SBS Arabic
What the diaspora is actually supplying#
Australia's Palestinian community is not large. The 2021 census counted 15,607 people of Palestinian ancestry and 2,959 residents born in Gaza or the West Bank. The Cultural Atlas reference project notes the count runs low, because the census form offers Palestinians born inside what is now Israel no box to tick.
What that community has built instead of scale is a booking circuit — mechanics institutes, community halls, regional theatres and a volunteer network that fills them — and what it is putting through that circuit is a record.
The scale of the loss it is answering can be counted. In June the Palestinian Football Association put the number of Palestinian athletes killed since October 2023 at 1,009, of whom 567 came from football alone. Very few of those lives will get a monograph, an inquest or a stage.
Al Qaisi has spent her career on subjects that get talked around rather than about. Her short films Walk in My Shoes and Pink Swing came out of Sydney Film School, where she took the school's Courage, Curiosity and Compassion Award in 2013.
Her short Cinderella was taken into the Malmö Arab Film Festival's development project for short films, and in 2020 the Monaco-based International Emerging Film Talent Association picked her out at the El Gouna festival in Egypt.
Her next work returns to the same subject and calls her by name: Nagham of Gaza, a play and a documentary, still being raised. The fundraising she launched in January last year has drawn A$3,280 from 25 donors against a A$20,000 target, with tax-deductible donations routed through the Australian Cultural Fund.
One evening's contribution to it was a Palestinian dinner at the Addison Road Community Organisation in Marrickville, where she and the author Reem Borros talked about soft power as a form of resistance.
The praise the production carries is not from critics. Dr Iqbal Barkat, a senior lecturer at Macquarie University, is quoted by the presenters saying the play resonates with the cost of remaining human, and Robert Martin, an activist who sailed on last year's Gaza flotilla, says it leaves a lasting impression.
In Keysborough on Saturday the room will be a community centre with a low stage, and the man waiting for his daughters will be an actor in front of a few hundred people who mostly know each other.
Nagham Abu Samra never got her Olympic heat. She is getting, in halls her family will never see, the one thing an occupation cannot confiscate from a distance: the story told out loud, with her name on it.
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