Laughter Under the Bombs: Diaries of a Dramatherapist [Paperback]

In a simple, unambiguous style, yet as subtle as it can be, Abdunnur shares details of lives interrupted by the 2006 war on Lebanon, the miseries of it, the families displaced from their homes in Southern Lebanon and Beirut's poor suburbs, areas of which Israelis striked the most. Abdunnur tells of his theatre under the bombs with children who have been displaced, and families who felt they lost their dignity and were located to the stuffiness of Masrah Al Madina [the Madina Theatre] on Hamra Street. Laughter Under the Bombs, shows a spirit of resistance shared by the children, the volunteers, the families, all formated in a diary-like manner of writing. Combining a detailed description of bodily gestures and conversations in his "theatre for healing" efforts, he tries to comprehend and explain what he has witnessed of children experiencing such injustice, killing, chaos and anomie. What happens? Do they survive? Do they deal with the trauma and how?
It is not the first Israeli aggression against lebanon, and definitely not the last. Abdunnur, a Palestinian, who was around 5 during the israeli invasion of 1982, recounts both tragedies in his life, the present and the past. We learn from his mother's wisdom in facing the Nazi-like Israeli aggressions, who refuses to be an innocent victim, a subject, but a resistant, and active individual against the reality imposed.
Against the Israeli machine of death and terror, we find Lebanese and Palestinians together fighting off decades of injustice. A time of relentless suffering, of loss becomes a time for unity. The effort humanizes the victims, the children have names, they have friendships, they love, they dance, they laugh, they have life histories, they have opinions, at a time when people of the region are oppressed, silenced, and are stripped off their individuality.
I hope that Laughter Under the Bombs gets to be translated to Arabic to make itself known to the people of whom Abdunnur writes about, and to the Arab world en large. I also would have hoped to read more of Abdunnur's experiences of 1982, and that he had made his work more politically engaged in writing about the injustices in Lebanon and in placing this Israeli aggression in context. Abdunnur does little to place his memoirs in a larger political context- the aggression did not just happen out of the blue, but is part of series and episodes of Israeli crimes against humanity. I felt that the book was written in haste and that it could have been more well written.

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