Against Foreclosure: A Review of Saadallah Wannous’s “An Evening’s Entertainment for 1967”
“A police officer asked me while I was in prison, ‘who seduced you to join these
uprisings?’ I tried to think of an answer that didn’t pertain to the blood we saw, to what
they [the regime] did to us, to Hamza Al-Khatib and to Atif Najib… so I thought about it
a bit, and then turned to him and said, ‘Saadallah Wannous.”
- May Skaf, 2015
“I reject the commercial marketing of dishonest optimism.”
- Saadallah Wannous, 1991
A few years before her untimely death, politically outspoken Syrian actress May Skaf
gave an interview with her maternal cousin and renowned reporter, Dima Wannous. During that
interview, Skaf went out of her way to cite Dima’s father—the equal parts notorious and beloved
Syrian playwright, Saadallah Wannous—as inspiration for her costly choice of partaking in the
2011 uprisings in Syria. Devastatingly, Skaf’s decision to support the uprisings led her down a
path of state persecution, social isolation, and ceaseless heartbreak, until she passed away from a
heart attack in Paris in 2018. Her death cannot be separated from a deep, incurable malaise at
what had become of Syria, in all of those war-ridden years that followed the charged early days
of 2011. 3 Nevertheless, Skaf’s specific citation of Saadallah Wannous as the posthumous initiator
of her move to the streets is no accident. Indeed, Wannous’s earlier works operated with an
unambiguous end-goal of political agitation, particularly his 1968 opus An Evening’s
Entertainment for the Fifth of June. The play responded to statist failure by creating the
conditions of possibility for a bottom-up revolution at the hands of an audience, clearly
anticipating the grassroots mass politics of 2011. As such, a contemporary reading of the play
invites an alluring intergenerational slippage between the hope and despair of a post-2011 Arab
2
world, and the all-too-familiar heaviness that accompanies the tragic outcome of the 1967 June
War, demanding more from the reader than premature evaluations of failure.
In An Evening’s Entertainment for the Fifth of June, Wannous worked self-consciously at
the forefront of the long shadow of 1967, a war that devastated the affective infrastructure of the
Pan-Arabist project and launched new political and cultural developments in its wake. To the
shock of the Arab masses, who had been saturated with commitment and excitement towards the
Nasserist project, the Israeli settler-colonial army succeeded at taking over the West Bank, Gaza,
and the Syrian Golan Heights. 4 Crucially, the June War of 1967 did not simply represent Pan-
Arabist defeat and an expanded Israeli settler-colony—it also served as a starting point for the
New Arab Left, epitomized most visibly in the militant Palestinian Revolution launched from
Palestinian refugee camps. 5 In tandem with these developments, the events of 1967 led towards
two significant political and cultural turns in Syria. First, it created the conditions of possibility
for Hafez Al-Assad’s long-reining counter-coup against his ideological opponents in the Syrian
Ba’ath Party, who were to be blamed for the “setback” and presented as the sacrificial lamb for
the Assadist “corrective movement.” 6 Second, the June War created an ideological tide within the
New Arab Left that directed sharp critical analysis towards the internal social fabric of Arab
societies. 7 These developments are important to keep in mind when reading An Evening’s
Entertainment for the Fifth of June, which responded to the defeat in parallel terms. Wannous
particularly jettisoned the nationalist celebratory aesthetic of Nasserism, which relied on a
healthy dose of what he would later call “dishonest optimism”: “the speeches, radio broadcasts,
declarations… language falling apart as if it were composed solely of sand and foam.” 8 Armed
with Brecht, Wannous responded to 1967 instead by aiming his sharp pen internally, searching
3
for the conditions of political agitation in language that seemed to otherwise provide little more
than violently empty promises.
At its most vigorous and voraciously readable, An Evening’s Entertainment for the Fifth
of June materializes a theater of agitation through improvisational audience participation and
real-time theatrical construction. The play centers on a director authoring a romantic play about
1967 in real-time, walking the audience through his thinking as the stage around him transforms
in accordance with his pen. However, Wannous takes the fourth-wall breaking even further by
writing in a collection of audience member characters who constantly interrupt and argue with
the self-important director, culminating in a revolution by the audience. This method results in
rapturous moments of dialogue in which audience members, characters constructed by the
director, and the director himself interrogate the events of 1967, the purpose of art in times of
war, and diverging strategies for defeating the Zionist entity. For example, there is an extended
scene in which Palestinian peasant characters written by the director argue with audience
members about the strategic importance of armed struggle, and whether or not Arab armies, Arab
governments, or the Arab masses should be held responsible for “retreat.” 9 During this argument,
the director remains keen on having a band play celebratory nationalist music for “the noble
soldier,” until the musicians agree to stop playing and let the argument run its course. 10 Saadallah
hoped that these moments of dialogue would be more than a simple exercise in formalistic
innovation—in his own words, he would have been happy if the attendees had hijacked the play
altogether and started a demonstration instead. 11 Indeed, the moments that invite improvisation
are among the play’s most exciting, almost pushing the reader to annotate their own dialogic
intervention.
4
Despite the invigorating process of writing the play onto paper, Wannous expressed his
disappointment at the resulting real-time performances—yet, counter to Wannous’s own
evaluation of his work, An Evening’s Entertainment remains both magnificently potent and
fiercely prescient. Wannous proclaims his search for action in language to have been a failure,
because his audience did not erupt in demonstration after the play’s staging. I believe Wannous’s
evaluation of failure to have been premature, if only because his work continues to be cited by
Skaf and many other Syrians as a point of departure. In fact, to treat Saadallah Wannous’s theater
of agitation as a foregone conclusion would be to foreclose the long-term possibilities opened by
any revolutionary moment in the past century, much less the continuously haunting Arab revolts
of 2011. Pace Wannous, I insist that it is not dishonest optimism to say that his words continue to
create transformative possibilities today—whether that be an insistence on contemplating the
role of art in times of war, or fiercely advocating for a dialogic infrastructure in service of
collective action.
5
Endnotes
1 “Meeting with Syrian Actress May Skaf and a Conversation About the Future of the Revolution” Orient
News TV, May 24, 2015.
2 Omar Amiralay, dir. There Are Many Things One Can Speak About, 1997, Paris: La Septe/ARTE, Grain
Le Sable.
3 Maktabi, Rima. “May Skaf's Cousin Reveals the Syrian Actress's Cause of Death.” Al-Arabiya, 20 May
2020, https://www.alarabiya.net/arab-and-
world/syria/2018/07/27/%D8%A7%D8%A8%D9%86%D8%A9-
%D8%AE%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A9-%D9%85%D9%8A-%D8%B3%D9%83%D8%A7%D9%81-
%D8%AA%D9%83%D8%B4%D9%81-%D9%87%D8%B0%D8%A7-%D8%B3%D8%A8%D8%A8-
%D9%88%D9%81%D8%A7%D8%A9-
%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%81%D9%86%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%A9-
%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A9.
4 Sara Salem, Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony (London: Cambridge University
Press, 2020).
5 Nasser Abourahme, “Revolution After Revolution: The Commune as Line of Flight in Palestinian
Anticolonialism,” (Critical Times (2021) (4 (3): 445–475).
6 Hanna Batatu, Syria's Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
7 Epitomized perhaps most infamously through Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm’s polarizing 1968 book Self-Criticism
After the Defeat. Fadi Bardawil writes about this development of the Arab Left in his recent book.
Bardawil, Fadi. Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2020.
8 Omar Amiralay, dir. There Are Many Things One Can Speak About, 1997, Paris: La Septe/ARTE, Grain
Le Sable.
Saadallah Wannous, “The Dream Falls Apart,” in Sentence to Hope: A Saadallah Wannous Reader, trans.
Mysers, Robert and Nada Saab, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 392.
9 Saadallah Wannous, An Evening’s Entertainment for the Fifth of June, (Beirut: Al-Adab, 1980),
90-138.
10 Ibid, 92-112.
11 Saadallah Wannous, “The Dream Falls Apart,” in Sentence to Hope: A Saadallah Wannous Reader,
trans. Mysers, Robert and Nada Saab, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 393.
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