Q&A with William Nour, playwright of “Rosette”

“Rosette,” a new play that opens this weekend in Minneapolis, will be performed at the Mixed Blood space and is produced by New Arab American Theater Works, which describes the play as the story of “a young Palestinian woman born in 1948, the year of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”

Arts journalist Jacob Aloi sat down with playwright William Nour to discuss this deeply personal play.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about “Rosette.”

Rosette is a name I love because it’s my grandmother’s name. My maternal grandmother is her namesake.

And Rosette is a young woman, about 16, who goes to high school in Haifa, after the occupation in 1948 and (the Nakba). She’s learning about herself, about her family, about the culture, about the new world that’s emerging around her. And this young woman reminded me of myself. So a lot of this play is autobiographical in the sense that these are stories from my family.

I remember growing up in Haifa, and we would go to Nazareth to visit my family. And on the way to Nazareth, my parents would wake me up because I would often fall asleep as a child. And it was like, “Hey, wake up! Wake up, look. This is our village,” and we always had to look at the village on the way to Nazareth.

This is the village from which my family was displaced and destroyed during the war, like 530 other villages.

And they pointed to my grandmother’s house that had been shot up… the church was still there, and the convent and those two were not destroyed. Everything else was destroyed in the village, and we, as my family, when they were displaced, fled to Nazareth, which is about three miles away, but they were (never) allowed to go back, even though it’s only three miles away.

The main character grows up in a post-Nakba world. Why did you really want to focus on someone who grew up in a world that only knew profession.

She doesn’t remember anything that interested her, so she finds out about it from her parents.

Normally, many sentences in Palestinian society would begin with the words, “Before the occupation, we were this and that,” and she finds herself in a city that is now predominantly Jewish, once predominantly Arab, learning European customs, and the culture changing. She has many questions.

In addition, half of her family lives in refugee camps in Lebanon, so they receive cassette tapes and reel-to-reel tape recorders from Lebanon, from refugee camps near Beirut.

We received similar tapes from our family, I still have them and some of them will be aired in the play.

It’s a coming of age story. It’s about someone figuring out who she is and understanding where she comes from, but in the context of living under occupation and not knowing their culture in the way her parents knew theirs. Can you talk more about how you dealt with that?

I went to Catholic school. We weren’t taught that we were Palestinians. We were called “Israeli Arabs.” This is what they call divide and conquer. They are Palestinians, and now they are Israeli Arabs. We happen to be Israeli Arabs.

So as a young kid I was ashamed to say I was Palestinian because Palestinians were always mentioned in the news as terrorists. So I denied my Palestinian origin and said I was an (Israeli) Arab until I was about 20 when I met a dear friend who asked me, “Why do you say that? Your parents were Palestinians.” And then I started to accept my identity as a Palestinian and be proud of it.

It’s something that I’m developing and writing, you know, learning about myself. And why do I have these ideas? Some of the things come from my father and my mother, because they taught us… my parents were very open.

In the play we will see a Christian family and a Muslim family. Before the occupation they lived next to each other, and after the occupation they still live next to each other.

Because they were like siblings, but when it comes to marriage, oh, you can’t do that, of course, right? Yes. But for me personally, religion is arbitrary. You know, you’re just born into that house.

Last year, with the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the West Bank, I was curious to hear how you were coping and how this work of art became part of your experience during that time.

It was a very difficult time.

My other love is writing poetry. I’ve written a lot of poetry, I’ve read poetry and I’ve gone to mourning circles with friends and protests, of course, and I want to visit my family.

They live in Haifa, but I’m honestly afraid to go there because I’m an Israeli citizen, I have dual citizenship. And on the way to the airport, there were Jews who were arrested just for expressing sympathy on Facebook… And then there’s Gaza, which I don’t know if I can… how can you talk about Gaza? I don’t know. There are no words.

Poetry is what I used to talk about it. I write it because I love my family and I love being able to say, to say something about our humanity, not begging, but just telling a story.

If I don’t tell the story, we will hear it from someone else.

Is there anything you want audiences to engage with or take away from this performance?

We need to educate ourselves and start paying attention to what is being said in the news about Palestinians and our role in their disenfranchisement and occupation.

Because America plays a very complicit role in the occupation of Palestine, we essentially finance it.

I just wanted people to come and watch this story and see these people going about their daily lives, cooking, laughing, singing and taking care of each other.

The life of Palestinians is the same as the life of any other human being, with the difference that the occupation is always in the background, or right above us, right above our heads.

Everyone has hope. They want to get married and have kids, get a job, travel like everyone else, but there are always these limitations and we live with them.

Even though we have these limitations, we still have hope of overcoming them, you know, for freedom and self-determination.