February 29, 2008
By Jack Helbig
Yussef El Guindi is an educated cultivated man, with a graceful way of speaking and a refined English-accent many Midwestern Americans, with our broad, awkward vowels, would give anything for.
He is also an Arab-American. And that means he has had to face more than his share of profiling and stereotyping.
Right now, since his career as a writer is taking off, he is bothered by how Arab-Americans are portrayed in movies, on television and in the theater. And since he is a writer he is in a position to do something about it. Which he does in his new comedy, “Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat,” opening March 1 at the Silk Road Theatre Project in the city.
“I first had the idea when I pitched a story to an editor about how Arab-Americans celebrate Thanksgiving,” El Guindi says, “I wanted to write about the different flavors and different customs, the different foods we serve. The editor said, ‘Lets focus on the women. Do the women want to be veiled in the kitchen?’ There was this framework in place about what kind of stories can be written about Arab-Americans. It has to be about how Arab-American women are oppressed. And how the men act around them.”
Frustrated, El Guindi wrote the first part of a play about an Arab-American writer railing against the limitations being placed on him by what he could and could not write about. Then he set the play aside and worked on some other plays while his ideas gestated.
“When I returned to the play,” he says, “it just kind of unrolled. The play now concerns three Arab-American writers. One writer is railing against the frameworks I was talking about. Another has compromised and is willing to write whatever will sell. And the third writer is being asked to change her story to fit into that framework and is not sure what she wants to do.”
“The play,” he says, “is really about the representation of Arabs and Muslims in the mainstream in the American media. And about how negative narratives in the mainstream media affect how the rest of America sees us. They think all our women are oppressed and all our men are oppressive. In part this play is about struggling against that.”
In a way, much of El Guindi’s work is about that. His previous play at the Silk Road Theatre Project, “Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith,” was a humorous look at a dysfunctional Arab-American family that intentionally broke all our expectations of what an Arab-American household was like.
“I always wonder, why do we need to pigeonhole people? Is it some kind of mechanism for figuring things out quickly? So we have to be reductive. Or is it the old American tradition that new immigrant groups always face like a reverse welcome mat — a gauntlet you have to pass through before you are accepted? Every immigrant group has been given its own set of stereotypes, its own framework that people accept about them. The problem is how to break out of that framework.”
For El Guindi, writing is clearly how he intends to break those stereotypes, even as he entertains his audience.