Séminaire EMMA - “The Jew, The Arab — Introducing Ismail Khalidi’s Sabra Falling” par Karim Daanoune
Mardi 17 février 2026 à 18h, en salle 126 Saint-Charles 1 et en ligne.
Lien Visio ESR : https://pod.univ-montp3.fr/meeting/0919-salle-de-reunion-personnelle/11ccfa709a091e863474dc79e4c04f6ee3e509f1c00178ed6065110b6e368ce9
The 2017 play Sabra Falling, by Palestinian American writer Ismail Khalidi, unfolds on the eve of the Sabra and Chatila refugee camp massacre in 1982 Beirut. The play opens with the fall of an Israeli pilot, Eyal, who after ejecting from his jet crashes into the living room of the Akawis, an Arab family in the Sabra camp. Eyal is the spitting image of Sofyan’s deceased son, Eyad Akawi, who was murdered by the Israeli army three years prior because of his political and literary activities. Whereas Sofyan believes in the return of his son, the rest of the family—his wife Leena, their son Hani, a fighter in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Eyad’s fiancé Dalia—know too well who the stranger is. Hani and Dalia want to get rid of the enemy or use him as a bargaining chip, but Leena insists on tending to the wounded pilot, who suffers temporary memory loss. Sofyan, a mourning playwright in lack of inspiration, hands the soldier, his son’s typewriter so that Eyal can resume Eyad’s writing activities and fight oppression without shedding blood. The last character in the play is the ghostly figure of an Israeli General, who appears before Eyal to refresh his memory and order him to carry out his mission, namely, to drop the typewriter and kill the Palestinian enemy.
The aim of this talk is to introduce the historical context and to present some of the main themes of the play. I will argue that in Sabra Falling, Khalid reflects on the necessity of opposing the power of the sword with the power of the pen, by establishing a counter-history that not only seeks to memorialize the dead, but also to denaturalize “the enmity between Arab and Jew” (Anidjar).