Dipankar Mukherjee’s ‘Returning to Haifa’ is a Powerful Play About Displacement, History and Human Complexities

Two wrongs do not make a right. On April 23^, I had the privilege to see the U.S. premiere of a powerful play titled “Returning to Haifa,” a 1969 novella by the late Palestinian author and activist Ghassan Kanafani. The story was powerful when it first came out and remains so now as the Israel-Palestine conflict rages on. Directed by seasoned theater director Dipankar Mukherjee for Pangea World Theater and adapted from the original Arabic by two extremely talented scriptwriters Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi, 

“Returning to Haifa” is a compelling story of two families — one Palestinian, one Israeli — forced by history into an intimacy they didn’t choose. The “utterly unsentimental exploration of the complexities of home, history and parenthood” (The Guardian). The backdrop of that one intimate and intense day is the aftermath of the 1948 war when Palestinians were forcibly removed from their homeland by the occupying British forces to honor the creation of Israel after the end of World War II. That singular event still reverberates to date — there were displacements on a massive scale for Palestinians who had to flee their homeland and by European Jewish people, the survivors of the Holocaust.  

Kanafani (1936-1972) is widely regarded as one of Palestine’s greatest novelists, writing some of the most admired stories in modern Arabic literature. He was also an intellectual, journalist and political activist. His novellas and short stories, now translated into dozens of languages, are considered by many today as having been ahead of their time, both in form and content. Kanafani wrote “Returning to Haifa” in 1969, a testament not only to his principled commitment to the politics of liberation but also his deep empathy for the ‘other’ as well as his modern approach to storytelling. He was assassinated by a car bomb in Beirut in 1972 at the age of 36. Kanafani’s obituary in Lebanon’s The Daily Star said: “He was a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen, and his arena the newspaper pages.”

Pangea believes it is “committed to telling stories from multiple perspectives and highlighting those voices who have been unjustly vilified, marginalized, displaced, erased or ignored.” The displaced Palestinian couple who had to flee their home in Haifa, tragically leaving behind their 5-month-old son, as well as the Jewish widow from Poland who was allotted their house and who ended up finding and later adopting the lost son of the Palestinian couple, Dov. 

This story is a call for sowing seeds of compassion and humanizing the stories of ordinary people caught in the conflict caused by the British partition of Palestine and the difficult, often tragic circumstances they were caught in at the time.

The story centers on Palestinian couple Said and Safiyya who were forced to flee their home in 1948. Now, in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, the borders are open for the first time in 20 years and the couple dares to return to their house in Haifa. They are prepared to find someone else living where they once did. Yet nothing can prepare Said and Safiyya for the encounter they both desire and dread.

The Native American actor Ernest Briggs is amazing in his portrayal of the older Said, ably accompanied by his co-ensemble members Mohamed Haji as the younger Said, Rasha Ahmad Sharif as the older Safiyya, Sayli Khadilkar as the younger version and Esther Ouray as the Polish widow. 

Director Dipankar Mukherjee’s artistic team features lighting design by Mike Grogan, set design by Orin Herfindal, costume design by Mary Ann Kelling, sound design by Eric M.C. Gonzales, assistant direction by Sir Curtis Kirby III, with stage management by Suzanne Victoria Cross.  The play made use of warm lighting, stage symbolism like various keys – the one thing that all displaced people the world over leave behind, as well as sound assistance to help define the car journey by the couple.

“This story is a call for sowing seeds of compassion and humanizing the stories of ordinary people caught in the conflict caused by the British partition of Palestine and the difficult, often tragic circumstances they were caught in at the time. Through their rich poetic interpretation of Ghassan Khanafani’s landmark novella, Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi create a layered experience that marks this milestone in Palestine and calls on us to never forget past injustices,” said Pangea’s Mukherjee.

The after-play dialogues between the visiting Khalidi who has a Minnesota connection were engaging as well as informative, with the occasional tense moments of contrary views expressed by some in the audience. Khalidi talked about the nuanced understanding and compassion that Kanafani shows in the play, something that is increasingly hard to do when one looks at the more than 80+ years of the sufferings of the Palestinian people, not accounting for “the utter failure of the Oslo Accord.”

Born in Beirut, Ismail Khalidi is a playwright, screenwriter, and director who studied at Macalister College in Minneapolis. Khalidi’s plays include Truth Serum Blues (Pangea World Theater,2005), Tennis in Nablus (Alliance, 2010), Foot (Teatro Amal, 2016), Sabra Falling (Pangea, 2017), and Dead Are My People (Noor Theatre, 2018). He has co-adapted two novels for the stage with Naomi Wallace; Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa (Finborough Theatre, 2018) and Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer (Actors Theatre of Louisville, 2019). Khalidi’s work has been published in numerous anthologies and he co-edited (also with Wallace) Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora (TCG, 2015). His writing has been featured in American Theatre Magazine, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Mizna, Guernica, Al Jazeera, and The Dramatist. Khalidi holds an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is a Directing Fellow at Pangea World Theater and is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Boston University’s Center on Forced Displacement.

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Kuhu Singh lives in Eden Prairie, Minn., a suburb of the Twin Cities. Bidding adieu to journalism a decade ago, she nonetheless loves to write and express her very strong opinions on social media and blogs and sometimes in a few Indian publications. She is a Senior Digital Marketing Manager for a broadcast retail company. Race relations, diversity, and social issues fascinate and roil her into action. She volunteers her time with certain political and community organizations.