Staging Silence: Arab Women's Cancer Experience

Abstract

This paper offers a critical reflection on the play I Am Waiting for You [Wasafuli Al-Sabr] which was written by the author and directed by Lina Abyad. Based on extensive interviews with real-life female cancer patients from the Arab world, the play was the first dramatic staging of Arab women’s experience of cancer. To summarise, the paper begins by underlining that the history of women’s cancer in the Arab World has hitherto been a history of silence – of shame, taboo, prohibition, and repression – before going on to reflect upon the creative, textual, and dramatic strategies the play deployed to make this silence ‘speak.’ The essay then focuses on the ways in which this unspoken and unexpressed experience of cancer itself became a (necessary) artistic medium by which the subjectivity of women who had experienced cancer could be articulated. In particular, the essay addresses three layers or forms of silence in the play: (1) the silence of the women the author interviewed; (2) how silence functioned as a structural device or trope within the play and, finally and most importantly, (3) how this silence could be resisted, if not verbally, then at least physically and materially.