Editor’s Note: This story was produced with the support of the Round Earth Media Program of the International Women Media Foundation.
In February, Rawya El Chab arrived for an interview in Brooklyn after conducting her performance class for children in Sunset Park. Many of her students are children of immigrants, and recently, some have been unusually quiet. When El Chab inquired, they expressed fear that ICE might take their family members.
This fear reminded her of life in Beirut during the 1980s under Syrian and later Israeli occupation. “We could feel the presence of a force that was censoring our speech,” she recounted.
This sensation of being watched is a recurring theme in much of the art produced by the 45-year-old over the past two decades. Her work has taken her from interactive theater forums in Palestinian refugee camps and rural Lebanese villages to explorations of clowning and mortality with older adults in nursing homes.
El Chab continually reinterprets stories about others through her work. In an early scene of Crossing the Water (2025), her performance at The Brick in Brooklyn last winter, she rows across the River Styx, assuring the audience amidst a deep rumbling, “Don’t worry. It’s not the first time I die.”
For her, mythology and storytelling are significant. “Storytellers like to travel, and like to carry their stories, and like to hear other people’s stories,” she stated.
This performance, the second in a trilogy about the rise and fall of the Lebanese Left in the 1980s amid the Civil War, the emergence of Palestinian resistance, and the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon, concluded its run in December. With ongoing conflict in southern Lebanon, where El Chab’s family originates, she feels compelled to counter the distorted images of her homeland.
“While these people are being erased,” she said, “I want to anchor this reality by telling these stories.”
This history is deeply personal for El Chab. During Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, her father, a newspaper writer fearing retaliation, fled to Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, followed a year later by El Chab and her mother.
The series idea began with a discussion about her cousin Loula Abboud, a Communist fighter who died in a suicide bombing during the Civil War and became mythologized as “the Pearl of the Bekaa.” El Chab first explored this legacy in a 2024 performance blending science fiction and dystopian themes, opening her trilogy.
In Crossing the Water, El Chab recounts the Israeli invasion and occupation of Beirut in 1982 and her subsequent escape with her mother in 1983. Her memories, primarily from later stories, are shared through various roles: portraying wary neighbors in Beirut, satirizing politicians with caricatures, and depicting herself as a child navigating checkpoints to reunite with her father.
El Chab’s work largely focuses on the transitions and losses associated with emigration, aiming to highlight the human aspect of her experiences and those with similar journeys in this region.
Initially intended for New Yorkers unfamiliar with Lebanese history, El Chab discovered her series resonated broadly. “It felt like, ‘oh, this is a story about us,’” she noted. Audience members from Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian backgrounds approached her after performances, expressing their appreciation for stories told from their perspective.
“People from diverse backgrounds come to me: ‘Oh, you know what? My father who survived Pinochet tells me about this;’ ‘my aunt who was in Russia when Stalin died had a birthday under the table’,” she said. “These stories emerge because people listen to these specific narratives.”
“We need to dehumanize people to kill them,” she continued. “Through my stories, I aim to convey the complexities — the humanity of those I lived with, and share it with others to create space for this reality too.”
That’s the method she employed in Crossing the Water. “I wanted to tell the story from the point of view of my heroes, who are my parents and their generation, these men and women who participated in the struggle and who never really had their point of view told on stages in New York,” El Chab explained.
El Chab often incorporates props in her performances. Paper cutouts of tanks, boats, and human figures illustrate Lebanon’s colonial history. A large hand puppet, its arm humorously pointing skyward, conveys the threats of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the speeches of Amine Gemayel, president of Lebanon at that time.
Puppets enable her to grasp the essence of political rhetoric. “It helps me get to the soul of it. Like, this is what this person is doing by saying all these words, by using all this jargon, by using all these terms,” she said, mimicking the exaggerated hand gestures that her puppets use.
El Chab herself becomes a shadow puppet, narrating her family’s reaction to the Israeli invasion in Arabic. “I wanted to give them something that has to do with a rhythm, an energy that I could not have given with a translated sentence,” she explained regarding her choice not to translate into English.
Humor permeates her work. El Chab often embodies a clown to engage audiences in complex, challenging topics.
“The clown is a playful way to discover the world,” said Jesse Freedman, her longtime collaborator and the director of Crossing the Water. “That kind of mischievous curiosity that a clown has, to fully explore something to the point of absurdity, is, I think, how both of us similarly make work.”
The Lebanese Civil War, from 1975 to 1990, began with sectarian militia clashes on the political right — the Phalange, supported by Israeli and US forces – and the Left, a coalition of pan-Arab, leftist organizations allied with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), led by Yasser Arafat. The conflict, which escalated to widespread violence and multiple Israeli invasions, resulted in 150,000 deaths, the displacement of a quarter of Lebanon’s population, and significant destruction in Beirut.
Western media often depict the war along sectarian lines, with Lebanese Christians supporting the government and Muslims siding with the Palestinian cause. However, El Chab, whose father is Shia Muslim and mother is Christian Orthodox, believes these religious divisions oversimplify the conflict’s political origins.
“This is the culmination of identity politics: civil war,” she noted. “It’s easy to come here and say, ‘But these Muslims, they want to kill all the Christians.’ But a lot of Christians weren’t okay with what was happening. Most of the resistance started in Christian villages.”
In the civil war’s early days, coalitions emerged that transcended religious boundaries, explained Jeremy Randall, a historian and associate director of the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at CUNY.
However, under the pressure of invasion, alliances began to fracture, making sectarian identity more prominent. “The end of the Civil War in many ways reaffirmed the sectarian state and, if anything, ossified it,” he added.
As El Chab envisions alternative paths for the Lebanese Left, he believes it offers hope for a post-sectarian future. “What would happen if that path got changed slightly? And what kind of alternatives could arise from that?”
El Chab has lived in various places, including Beirut, Abidjan, Paris, Conakry in Guinea, and New York. Her family, primarily from Southern Lebanon, has a long history in Leftist politics, with several relatives fighting against the Israeli invasion and the right-wing, nationalist Phalangist party, which worked with Israel against Palestinian forces in the South.
In 1983, as El Chab and her mother left Beirut, Israeli soldiers occupied the city, making life intolerable. Neighbors grew suspicious of familiar faces informing on them.
El Chab vividly recalls a man in a balaclava standing on a tank by the road out of Beirut, with a line of bodies beside it. Her mother held her tightly as they passed by.
This haunting memory, fearing her mother’s brother was among the deceased, deeply affected her. Though he was not, the trauma lingered.
She incorporated this scene in Crossing the Waters, reconstructing memory through interviews with relatives.
After spending some years in the Ivory Coast, the family returned to Lebanon in 1985, moved to France in 1988, then to Conakry, and finally back to Lebanon, where El Chab remained until 2018.
In Conakry, at eight or nine years old, El Chab was drawn to theater. “I started doing theater and art in school because I had a hard time sitting down,” she explained. “When there is a story being told I can listen.”
Back in Lebanon, she visited villages in the South with her family, attending small living room performances. Women played men; others mourned over bodies as if real. “You had to purge,” she said. “You cry for yourself, but you also cry for that big loss which was even bigger than yours.”
With her French teacher, she formed a school theater group, later working in independent productions in Beirut. In 2018, she relocated to New York to reach a new audience.
In her next project, El Chab plans to delve into the history of the Al-Jarmak Battalion, a Leftist coalition within the PLO in the 1980s. “It’s a very interesting experience that gathered people that had different ideologies, but who came under the same umbrella of, ‘we want to liberate our lands,’” she noted. She views this movement as a counterpoint to today’s fragmented social movements. “Today, everyone goes with their own communities and people like, what’s my identity? What’s my religion? What’s my sect? What’s my sexual identity? And we’re creating these divisive little groups that make it impossible for all of us to have universal healthcare.”
With war displacing nearly a quarter of Lebanon’s population again, El Chab feels a renewed urgency in her work. Western viewers, she says, only see Lebanon through images of destruction.
“These villages and towns are thousands of years old. This is what they are destroying. They’re destroying towns where some people believe Jesus was walking, and they’re erasing them,” she explained. “There are trees that are older than all of us that have been uprooted. There are animals that we don’t know of that are being erased over there.”
El Chab sees her work as a way to reconstruct memory amidst destruction. “I want to compete with that reality that is trying to make people believe something else.”
Emigration also entails loss. The December performance of Crossing the Water concluded as it began. In the spring of 1982, El Chab rows laboriously through the projected murky waters, reminiscent of her and her mother’s plane journey to the Ivory Coast to reunite with her father.
“Today I am not the same person I was seven years ago,” she reflected. “And telling the story to my new family, to my new friends, to my new people and community is healing. It’s a way for me to enter this community and open my book and my heart to them.”
