Salah Abdul Saboor’s Play ”Night Traveller” a Blow Aganist Supression
Night Traveller is considered one of Salah Abdul Saboor’s masterpieces, in fact one of the Egyptian theatre’s masterpieces. The plot of the Night Traveller revolves around a passenger in a train where his journey turns into a journey in the dark history of injustice through symbols, characters and the concepts of these characters that ruled the world one day. And the arguing between the Conductor and the Passenger turns into a strange trial in its form and details in order to remind us of the innocent man who defends his existence in life. Salah Abdul Saboor, Egypt’s foremost contemporary poet, was born in 1931. In 1951, he graduated from the Department of Arabic, Cairo University, where he studied classical Arabic literature and poetry. Since his early boyhood, Salah Abdul Saboor tried his hand at writing poetry, but his talent did not reach full maturity until the early 1950’s. though his regular education enabled him to develop a deep awareness of the long tradition of classical Arabic poetry, his distinctively modern sensibility, was the result of wide reading in European poetry, especially that of symbolists and T.S Elliot.
In Night Traveller Salah Abdul Saboor highlights the struggle between man and authority and man’s alienation from his reality. The play sheds light also on the suffering of the Third World Countries in general and the Arab countries in particular. The political regimes in those countries try to widen the gap between the individual and his active involvement in his society. They usurp man’s freedom and identity by every means possible as symbolized in the play by stealing the passenger’s ticket and identity card. In those countries governed by fear, governments kill in man the spirit of action, freedom and rebellion and replace them by passivity and fear.
Night Traveller is a journey through history through the embodiment of historical figures that once ruled the world. It is a journey in the history of fear and oppression from the times of Alexander the Great to the Vietnam War. Salah Abdul Saboor used the past in order to shed light on the present. After the Second World War, the totalitarian governments controlled the destiny of the Arab countries and hindered their progress towards democracy, freedom and social justice. The authority uses cunningness, beheading and clinging to the illegal absolute power rule against the legal rights of the human being. The play is a condemnation to the totalitarian rule in all its forms, ideological and military. It condemns Western hegemony in a time where man is killed and sold by the cheapest prices. Salah Abdul Saboor also shed light through his play on terrorism, the terrorism of the governments that led to social and religious radicalism as they are an inevitable result to the state of chaos in the region.
There are three characters in the play, the narrator who narrates the events, the conductor who embodies the historical figures and the passenger who symbolizes the modern man. The characters of the play are divided into two opposite powers, the oppressor and the oppressed. Moreover, the dominant atmosphere in the play is agony and desperation.
The play belongs to the Theatre of the Absurd as Salah Abdul Saboor was influenced by Samuel Beckett. The “Theatre of the Absurd” is a term coined by Hungarian-born critic Martin Esslin, who made it the title of his 1962 book on the subject. The term refers to a particular type of play which first became popular during the 1950s and 1960s and which presented on stage the philosophy articulated by French philosopher Albert Camus in his 1942 essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he defines the human condition as basically meaningless. Camus argued that humanity had to resign itself to recognizing that a fully satisfying rational explanation of the universe was beyond its reach; in that sense, the world must ultimately be seen as absurd. The Theatre of the Absurd is typified by apparently meaningless plots, repetitive dialogue and dramatic non sequiturs, which together often create a dream-like mood. Night Traveller also belongs to the Black Comedy genre which is a sub-genre of comedy and satire where topics and events that are usually treated seriously are treated in a humorous or satirical manner.
At the time Night Traveller was conceived, the theatre of the absurd was in vogue in Egyptian cultural circles. The works of Beckett, Ionesco and other were produced on the Egyptian stage from the mid-sixties and their influence resulted in the attempt to adopt absurdist techniques in rendering human experience. Many dramatists found in absurdism their target to express the dark reality of the Arab nations.
In the best tradition of Absurd Theatre, Salah Abdul Saboor’s black comedy Night Traveller is a drama of metamorphosis and victimization. In a desolate world devoid of order and meaning, man is seen as a victim of external malignant forces which would not only dehumanize him but compel him to surrender to an absurdist death. Thus, the passenger’s life is sacrificed to an order of existence where the Conductor rules supreme while the Narrator, a modern chorus figure, watches indifferently. The metamorphosis of the Conductor from a simple civil servant to a historical deposit, who usurps God’s place on earth, embodies the poet’s view of a universe which, in the flux of history, has lost both moral law and meaning.
The action of Night Traveller unfolds in a night train, a simple symbol of a barren and senseless journey into the darkness of a meaningless existence. The narrator introduces the passenger as everyman, who possesses no special marks of individuality like every modern man. The emptiness of the passenger’s life is suddenly filled with the despots; Alexander, Hannibal, Tamerlane, Hitler and Lyndon Johnson, who can be summoned from the memory of history ”to impose their greatness and dominate the humble”.
As the action unfolds, certain startling events take place. The conductor-passenger relationship in a historical perspective and relate to the Nietzscean notion to the death of God. After the opening scene where the passenger is intimidated by the Conductor who assumes the character of Alexander, he reverts to his original identity and asks for the passenger’s train ticket. Surprisingly, he swallows the ticket and asks for his identity card. The passenger refuses giving it to him fearing that it would end like the ticket.
History is devoured by dictators symbolized by the Conductor, it is a process in which moral law and human identity are lost. If the flux of history is supposed to impose an ordered pattern on human existence, it becomes in Salah Abdul Saboor’s play a tool in the hands of the dictator to dehumanize the common run of people.
In the final stages of the action, the Conductor commences a chat with the Passenger about the question of who killed God in this part of the world and stole his identity card. The conversation is weird and yet thought provoking. As the Conductor finally reveals his tenth coat to establish his identity as absolute dictator, and ironically laments his fortune for having to lead a lonely life at the top, afraid of being killed by friends and foes alike, he decides to make a scapegoat of the passenger. He stabs the passenger with a dagger and then declares that he is the one who killed God and stole his identity card. This final revelation renders the passenger a tragic victim of the dictator’s usurpation of God’s place on earth.
Jean Cocteau once referred to the poetry of the theatre and poetry in the theatre. Night Traveller is a poetic drama which does not lack the poetry of the theatre; it achieves that penetration into the depth of contemporary reality and universality which are the works of true poetry. Salah Abdul Saboor said about choosing poetry for his play,
”Because poetry has been the medium of drama until the last century, and because drama has recently been trying to back to the original sources, helped by the change in the meaning of poetry, where poetry has ceased to be synonymous with verse.”
The play revolves mainly around dictatorship and what it does to human beings. Dictatorship is a form of government in which one person or a small group possesses absolute power without effective constitutional limitations. Problems in the Arab world are caused by absence of democracy, so the main disease in the Arab world is dictatorship and the symptoms and complications are injustice, corruption, fear, poverty and terrorism.
In the beginning of the play, Alexander the Great is summoned from history and appears in the conductor’s shape. He has all kinds of weapons and tells the passenger what happens to people when they disobey him,
Conductor:
Forgive me! This has killed my dearest friend!
I gave the rope to my friend, just to play with it, you know.
But he misused it!
Do you know? The tribute I paid him on his death
Has passed for a literary masterpiece;
I didn’t write the tribute myself, mind you,
But I watched my minister do it;
I ordered bread and wine for him until he finished it,
And until he taught me to deliver it tragically
And grammatically;
Grammar is not my strong point, you see;
My minister was ambitious, however, and asked for a province
In return for my going down in history as a writer
Well, I gave him the whole earth wherein he lies:
Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.
Upon hearing this bloody accounting the Passenger is intimidated and tries to be nice to avoid the Conductor’s wrath,
Passenger:
What do you want from me my Lord?
I beg your pardon, people like you can’t want anything
From people like me!
What I mean is: which way is your kindness inclined?
How would you honour me?
And this is the essence of the dictator citizen relationship. A maimed relationship prevailed by fear, suppression and humiliation. The ordinary unarmed man represented by the passenger fears the power of the dictator who has many dangerous weapons that can destroy him in no time. That kind of unquestionable authority leads people to become passive and irresponsive as they have lost their potential to act, to be in control of their own destiny. An example of passivity is the narrator who immediately follows the Conductor’s orders to help him in carrying the Passenger’s body. The Narrator soon justifies himself and says addressing the audience,
Narrator:
What should I do?
What can I do?
He holds a dagger;
But I am unarmed like you;
I have nothing but my commentary;
What should I do?
What can I do?
Night Traveller also delves in the dictator’s psyche as a human being. Being in power does not mean that the dictator is happy and comfortable. The dictator knows that due to his oppression and injustice his enemies grow everyday and he fears treason even from the nearest friends and see it in every corner. Such feeling makes him paranoid, the conductor tells the passenger confidentially,
Do you know that sometimes
I have to go to bed without sleep, except for a few hours a week!
Oh! I don’t want you to think that I’m afraid to be killed in bed!
I am not afraid of death,
But one must be careful;
Indeed, I’m not afraid of my enemies;
I’m afraid of my friends rather!
Their hearts are gnawed by envy,
They may smile in my face
But black spite will remain in their hearts.
I am lonely;
It’s a lonely life,
I am lonely!
The play discusses the issue of suppression and submissiveness. The conductor practices all kinds of suppression and the passive passenger is becoming more passive, more submissive and more defeated in an exaggerated way in the face of dictatorship. Dictatorship does not stop at the dictator, it extends to involve the nation that allows itself to be deprived of the freedom of choice. Despite this fact, Salah Abdul Saboor denied the ordinary man any responsibility for the injustice that befalls him and showed him as a total victim with no accountability for his actions.
Source: www.buzzle.com