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News :: Israel / Palestine |
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Humanitarian Clowning In Palestine |
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by A Trull
Email: android (nospam) clamcenter.org (unverified!) |
13 Dec 2002
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Gesundheit! Institute arrived in Palestine, bringing medical supplies and arguing for langauge by clowning. |
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In Gaza City on Thursday, Susan Parenti, a composer and clown, squeezing an accordion, chased two shrieking girls down the street.
Children at a school for the deaf mobbed a dozen clowns in a playground, pulling at their joke noses and ghoulish grinning masks. Math teacher Bassem Qurraz said it's the first time the children have laughed together since violence began two years ago.
``Everybody has touched the pain,'' he said, explaining that many of his students know someone who's died or been hurt in fighting.
At another school, Nour Abu Ramadan, 14, smiled as Patch Adams, doctor with a purple ponytail, coaxed a thoroughly embarrassed woman wearing a headscarf to dance a jig with him in front of the students.
A clown doused in bright color, when asked what she was doing there, said; "we clowns come to Palestine to recognize the history and politics working against the people living here - and to argue for what is not being done; meeting the need for peace with conflict. Peace is a need, as is hunger, tiredness, and thirst. Hunger is a need that must be met with food, tiredness a need to be met with sleep, and thirst to be met with drink. Peace is a need that must be met with conflict. We can only have our conflicts without violence. Violence kills conflict - and us."
For these clowns silliness is not a distraction from the violence of everyday life here. It is a way to add what is necessary; something different. Susan Parenti the clown with the accordion sang it this way; "We try to make somehow up for, rather than something out of our differences." Parenti, not a naive clown, emphasized the problem is not just a long history of religious conflict between Israel and Palestine, but that this conflict is being used by a small group of people who want to control the language. "Everyone must learn to articulate themselves in the face of available language. Our thoughts conform to the available language. And who is making available our language? What's required is ideas. We want care for ideas and ideas to care for wanting." Parenti says she does this work with the School for Designing a Society in Urbana, Illinois.
The trip was organized by the Gesundheit! Institute, a free, silly hospital which proposes caring health through the joy of service. |
