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WKND Conversations: 'We export so much talent to the West': Palestinian writer-performer Dana Dajani

Dana Dajani, an award-winning Palestinian writer-performer, has carved out a niche for herself on stage and in the literary firmament. Dajani, who lives and works between Amman, Jordan, and London, has a home-grown style to express her creative outpourings. She uses the spoken-word, gesture and body language to convey a gamut of emotions, themes, personas, and fresh perspectives. She took part in the annual Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, which concludes this weekend. In an interview, the writer-actor talks about the drive behind her creative expression and the poetic intersection of literature with the performing arts.

How do you combine the dual role of writing and acting?

I am a storyteller by nature. Under my mother’s guidance, I grew up immersed in books. Reading was my passion. Naturally, that translated to reading out loud. This, in turn, prepared me for theatre. I studied theatre at a university in the US. I moved to Dubai in 2011, a year after I graduated, where the theatre community was still very novice and green. However, the poetry community was well established, and I joined the Poeticians, where I met Hind Shoufani, Farah Chamma, Zeina Hashem Beck, Rewa Zeinati, Hajer Mosaleh, and many more inspirational poets. We all encouraged each other to cultivate and express our own poetic style.

I was drawn to the rhythm and rhyme of spoken word poetry, and I decided to use my theatrical background to bring my poems to life on stage. It’s a contained One Woman Show. Spoken word around the world is quite homogeneous in form — in rhythm, even in themes. I wanted to make every piece of my poetry different. To create different characters, I employed voices, gestures, and movements. I wanted to tell a story from a perspective other than my own. The first piece I wrote, with this in mind, was Love Letters from Palestine.

Which of the creative pursuits do you enjoy the most — writing or acting?

I love transforming into various characters, and theatre has taken me across the world. I have performed on stages across the globe, from the Sydney Opera House, Australia to the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain. I will never fall out of love with theatre. The thrill of being on stage, where the show “must go on”, feeling the energy of the audience connected as one. It’s my first love.

Writing has always been a form of strengthening my self-expression and cultivating self-awareness. Writing has allowed me to give voice to the unspoken, or unrepresented thoughts, feelings, and experiences that have shaped my thought process. When I began to perform my own writing, I found a perfect flow in combining these two forms.

Love Letters from Palestine, a spoken-word poem, is one of your most accomplished works. Give us a sense of the germinal thought behind this work and also about a spoken-word poem as an art form. Is it poetry on the go, an extempore piece of writing?

I have three styles of writing. The first is when I want to tackle a specific theme or subject. I call this writing “On Assignment”, and it tends to be a lot of reading and collecting of words and ideas. Then, I sculpt and reorganise the thoughts and language. I can work on a poem like this for weeks. These poems tend to be my more theatrical pieces of spoken word poetry, and Love Letters from Palestine was one such work.

The next style of writing is “In Flow”, where I’m overcome by emotion or experience. This creates an internal rhythm linked with an idea. I write everything in a stream of consciousness flow. These pieces are rarely edited and mostly delivered complete. I tend to perform them in my poetry and music collaborations, like Type Two Error.

The third style of writing, I call “Poetic Affirmations”. This is a kind of self-organisation practice, where I write myself into, or out of, a certain emotional state. These poetic affirmations will be published soon in a Guided Journal Series. I have spent the last few years creating, what I call, “Write Yourself”. The tactile practice of writing is soothing to me.

How has your experience in theatre influenced your writing?

My natural instinct is to explore how to tell a story through character, through metaphor. I write for the stage. This is for words to be heard, not read off the page. I am very inspired by the Arab Hakawati storytellers who painted episodes and sagas with just their words and melodies, first on the night sky, and then in cafes, enthralling audiences for centuries.

Why did you decide to move to Dubai in 2011? Was it a creatively fulfilling experience to live in Dubai?

After I graduated from university in the US, I wanted to come back to the Middle East and connect with my Arab identity. At the time, I spoke Spanish better than I spoke Arabic. I knew that I had a lot to learn from our region, and I had a strong desire to be part of building our cities and our countries. This was also just the start of the Arab Spring. As Arabs, I find that we export so much talent to “the West'' because there are “better opportunities” abroad. But better opportunities will never exist for us in our homelands, unless we come home and create them.

joydeep@khaleejtimes.com