Portrait of a woman history overlooked
‘‘I was shocked that she wasn’t a household name,’’ says playwright Hannah Khalil of Gertrude Bell, whom she discovered on a visit to the National Portrait Gallery. She talks about A Museum in Baghdad
GERTRUDE Bell was a pioneering writer, traveller and archaeologist, born in the mid-19th century. She loomed large over the politics of what is now the Middle East, but, perhaps interestingly, did not believe in the vote for women.
Her story is now being told in the world premiere of A Museum in Baghdad, being presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company for three months.
Set across two time periods: 1926, when the Museum of Iraq in Baghdad was first opened by Gertrude, and 2006 when a fictional team, led by museum director Ghalia Hussein, are attempting to reopen the museum after the American invasion and looting, the play asks important questions.
Playwright Hannah Khalil picks up the story...
How did you come to write this play?
I was inspired by a portrait of Gertrude Bell at the National Portrait Gallery. I had never seen this woman before, and when I discovered who she was and that she was really important in the history of the Middle East I did a lot of research and found that she was responsible for drawing up the lines of what became Iraq, and that she had set up the museum in Baghdad. I thought, ‘The museum, what a brilliant place to explore the notions of colonialism and belonging.’
The play looks hard at Britain’s colonial relationship with Iraq and raises complex questions about how to acknowledge our colonial past. Has writing the play made you think differently about aspects of British history?
It’s easy to see colonialism in very black and white terms but the truth is the European colonial influence on the world is a myriad of greys. Without it my Irish mother and Palestinian father would probably never have come to London and I wouldn’t exist! But we also probably wouldn’t have the deep divisions in the Middle East – and wider world – that exist today. Ultimately it feels to me like even if some of the individuals involved in colonial projects had good intentions, the overall aim was for Europe to benefit from those colonized countries’ assets.
You’re setting the play in both 1926 and 2006. Why is that?
In 1926 just after Gertrude opened the museum she committed suicide, which makes that time feel a very tense period to look at. What happened in her personal life and politically to lead her to end her life? 2006 is the moment of trying to reopen the museum post looting.
Both these periods of time are extremely significant in the history of the Middle East. We rarely touch on Middle Eastern stories in the consideration of history in Europe and when we do it’s always from a Western point of view, the soldier or diplomat discovering fair Arabia. Iraq in both these periods is overlooked and absolutely shouldn’t be.
Several of your protagonists are women. How conscious were you of wanting to foreground both Arab women, and women who have demonstrated pioneering leadership?
Arab woman are all too often overlooked in life and in history, but they’ve played a key role of course. If Arab men are stereotyped, Arab women are doubly so, and that stereotype of the meek, subservient veiled lady is not one I recognise or have ever met in life.
One of the characters in A Museum in Baghdad is inspired by a real-life Iraqi female archaeologist who worked to rebuild the museum after the looting; a powerhouse of a woman, determined and strong. This is much more representative of the Arab women in my life.
And Gertrude Bell is such an important historical figure. It seems she was overlooked by the feminist movement in the Seventies when they were reclaiming female historical figures because of her anti-suffrage stance. I set about learning about her and was shocked that she wasn’t a household name – certainly if she’d been a man everyone would know who she was, as they do her contemporary TE Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia). So, I absolutely wanted to bring her story to the fore in this play too.
How aware were you of wanting to counter the stereotypes that we see in our dramatic fiction of Arab culture and of characters of Middle Eastern heritage?
Very. Trying to redress the balance of the way Arabs are portrayed on stage and screen is one of the reasons I started writing in the first place. I have always considered representations of Arabs and Muslims to be completely stereotypical and narrow (especially in film and TV) and I’m so sad that it’s not getting better, it’s getting worse, so I want to try and do my own little thing about that.
What are the challenges of writing about a part of the world that is still suffering relentless violence and still navigating sectarianism?
The responsibility of writing about live issues is something I cannot forget and I don’t take lightly at all. I arm myself with knowledge and sensitivity, try and interrogate choices I make in my work very carefully and take advice from the many knowledgeable and supportive collaborators.
●●A Museum in Baghdad runs in the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until January 20.