Makram
Khoury: Balancing Keeps Me Sane Palestinian-Israeli actor Makram Khoury is one of Israel’s most respected actors, playing leads in all the major theatres as well as acting in films and on television. He was the youngest artist and the first Arab to win the Israel Prize, the highest artistic honor in the country. He played the father in the devastating scene from Murder I saw at the Cameri, and I also saw him act in Hanoch Levin’s last play, The Whiners. Khoury is an actor’s actor: subtle, powerful and protean. He embodies many of the paradoxes of Israeli society. “I was born to a Christian-Arab family—look how complicated it is!—who belonged to the Greek Orthodox church: Greek Orthodox, Christian, Arab, Palestinian. I was born in 1945 in Jerusalem at the time of the British mandate.” He and his family fled to Lebanon during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. After five months of unemployment, Makram’s lawyer father decided to risk returning rather than live in a refugee camp. “The Israeli border patrol used to shoot people who would come back, but we managed somehow. Nobody believes that I remember the fear, how the camel started to cry, ‘Aroo aroo!’” Makram’s family found housing in the northern Israeli city of Acco. When he graduated high school in 1963, he went to study at Hebrew University but soon dropped out to act. He trained with Jacqueline Kronberg–an American teacher who had worked with Second City–and also got involved with an Arab theatre in Haifa. Eventually he went to England for more training. When he returned, even though he soon began getting work at the Cameri and the Haifa Municipal Theatre, he experienced an identity crisis. “I was a guy who had trained in England and lived as a free person for three years. Now, in Israel, I was a member of a minority—a Palestinian Arab—not only a second class citizen, but a third or fourth. I had problems with being who I am. I had trouble with my Arab accent and maybe now a European accent. People thought I was South American.” The Cameri arranged coaching for him in voice, diction and Hebrew. “I had been blaming myself and asking, Why can’t I do Arabic theatre?” But no professional Arabic theatre existed in Israel, only amateur companies. To fulfill himself as an actor, he had to work in Hebrew. “I had to prove myself, which I couldn’t do in Arabic theatre. So I came to a compromise with this situation through dreams.” With help from his friend Anton Shamas, a distinguished Palestinian-Israeli writer, he decoded a message from his own unconscious. “I saw myself as a clown in a circus sitting on a unicycle going around a circle, balancing with my arms spread out, saying, ‘I’m breathing, I’m alive!’ Then I saw a coin with two heads on the handlebars. On one side it said ‘Israeli-Arab,’ on the other, ‘Israeli.’ Acting managed to cure my wounds, to cure my soul, in a way. Working in Hebrew enriched me. I can deal with the two cultures. It’s part of me. Balancing keeps me sane. To say, ‘I’m Israeli,’ I would fall. To say, ‘I’m only Arab,’ I would fall.” Maintaining this balance is particularly challenging for Makram since the new intifada began. “I started to blame and hate my colleagues. I said: How will I go up on the Israeli stage and act in Hebrew? I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. Then I see all these bombs, these terrorist acts that I disagree with, like many other Palestinians, and that brings me back to the balancing.” For the
last four or five years, Makram has taught acting to
young Palestinians in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
“Once a week I go there, no matter what.” He
has learned alternate routes to avoid the Israeli
blockades. “I have many friends there, and
that’s why I’m in pain now. But still, I
can’t be one-sided. If I were, I would lose many
other things in my character. My soul will be wounded,
too. So I have to keep peace with both.” –C.F. |