By Niwar Ameen

Sept 6, 2024

Having lived a chunk of my life in the Middle East, watching Rzgar Hama’s A Smoke Behind the Rope felt like a gut-wrenching homecoming. It wasn’t merely a play; it was a raw nerve exposed. The performance, with its brutal honesty, pulled me into a world I knew all too well, a place where shadows are long and hope is a fragile ember. To critique such a piece feels almost like betraying a shared silence.

Two innocent souls, trapped in adjacent cells, counting down. Golnaz and Farhad, strangers bound by a death sentence, weave a lifeline from shared laughter and impossible dreams. Their words, a desperate waltz with the void, reveal the marrow of their existence. A Smoke Behind the Rope, staged at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre from July 5 to 9, was a poignant echo chamber for the silenced. Rzgar Hama’s script felt like a fever dream, a haunting visitation from the spirits of those who’ve dared to question the un-questionable. Words like “revolutionary” aren’t just ink on a page or mere hums here; they’re pulse points of a living organism, pulsating with defiance against the oppressive regimes that still strangle the world today.

A stark, minimalist stage mirrors the characters’ isolation. Two bare cells, two revolutionaries, a world distilled to its bleakest essence. Yet, within this barren landscape, a vivid world of imagination emerges. The play masterfully blends gritty realism with ethereal flights of fancy. Dialogue, raw and immediate, is punctuated by surreal interludes, where the boundaries between the tangible and the ethereal blur. This juxtaposition, steeped in Eastern poetic sensibility, heightens the emotional intensity, transforming the prison into a microcosm of the human spirit’s resilience. By stripping away excess, the play intensifies the focus on the human condition.

Golnaz, a spectral echo of countless Middle Eastern women, imprisoned for defending her honor, becomes a splendid symbol of the region’s endemic gendered violence. Her character resonates with the defiant spirit of the “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” (Woman, Life, Freedom) movement, a seismic shift in the region’s consciousness. Shared with Farhad, her neighboring cellmate, is a vulnerability that illuminates the claustrophobic world of women trapped in patriarchal structures. A chilling scene, where a judge dismisses her claim of self-defense as an excuse for murder, underscores the systemic injustice women endure. Her subsequent stratagem to fabricate a marriage is a desperate act of self-preservation against the fear that shadows women’s lives in these societies.

Trapped within concrete and despair, Golnaz, with Farhad as her ill-fated confidant, refuses to surrender or be defined by victimhood. Her cell becomes a stage where humor and imagination are weapons against the dehumanizing grind. Her spirit, a flicker against encroaching darkness, expresses the plight of Kurdish women who’ve dared to challenge the monolithic power structures of Iran, Turkey, and other authoritarian regimes. Decades of state-sanctioned violence have forged an indomitable Kurdish spirit in a fight against cultural erasure. Beyond the Kurdish struggle, a mosaic of minorities—Baluchi, Baha’i, Assyrians, Armenians, Zoroastrians, Christian, and LGBTQ+—share a collective wound inflicted by regimes hell-bent on conformity. Golnaz and Farhad stand as proxies for these marginalized voices, their story a mournful anthem of resistance.

The final scene is a sepulchral silence. The world outside, a cacophony of life indifferent to their plight, seeps into the cell. Two souls, tethered to the precipice, grapple with the inevitable. A Smoke Behind the Rope is a visceral assault on the senses, a demand for witness, forcing an uncomfortable intimacy with a shared mortality. It’s raw, real, and rough around the edges. As the inevitable hour approaches, you cling to your seat, the bitter silence almost burning your lips long after the curtain falls.

Note: the play is hosted at the Vancouver Fringe Festival 2024. For more information, Click here