Global

Ain Al-Hilweh is known as the "Capital of Palestinian Shatat."  

 The term might not stir many emotions among those who do not fully understand, let alone experience the harrowing existence of ethnic cleansing and perpetual exile - and the tremendous violence which followed. 

 'Shatat' is roughly translated into “exile” or “Diaspora”. However, the meaning is much more complex. It can only be understood through lived experience. Even then, it is still not easy to communicate. Perhaps, the Kafkaesque blocks of concrete, zinc and rubble, towered one on top of another and serving as ‘temporary shelters’ for tens of thousands of people, tell a small part of the story.  

“The greatest danger to human civilization and the planet is the inability to believe that tomorrow can be different . . .”

So writes Derek Johnson of the Global Zero movement, an organization committed to a world free of nuclear weapons. Let’s put it this way: If we can cooperate in our own collective suicide — a.k.a., nuclear war — surely, surely we can cooperate in creating a world that transcends such a possibility. Or are cynicism, war and profit so thoroughly worked into the human social structure that I’m kidding myself? You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, people say, superstitiously (it seems) condemning themselves, or at least their children, to inevitable self-annihilation.

Hard on the heels of the Debbie Allen-directed Fetch Clay, Make Man (see: https://hollywoodprogressive.com/stage/champ-and-the-chump), which depicted Stepin Fetchit, the star who personified the silver screen’s shuffling, lazy, buffoonish caricature of Blacks during the 1930s/40s, another play about motion picture racial tropes is being revived. As AmeriKKKa undergoes a spate of anti-Asian hate crimes, writer/actor/ director J. Elijah Cho’s terrific Mr. Yunioshi is an acerbic, sly skewering of stage and celluloid stereotypes of so-called “Orientals.”

In his one man show, Cho incarnates 1920-born Mickey Rooney, who started out as a child performer, became a sensation at MGM where he starred in musicals, the 16-picture Andy Hardy “all-American boy” series, et al, and was the world’s top box-office draw from 1939-1941. The oft-married Rooney’s career spanned nine decades, from vaudeville to the silent screen to technicolor, television and beyond.