Revolutions Without Revolutionaries: Actor Khalid Abdalla, Palestine, and Iran
A reflection on Khalid Abdalla’s Nowhere, and what protest leaves behind when it does not topple power. From Egypt and Palestine to Iran, on endurance, repression, and the long life of dissent.
I had the privilege of watching writer and actor Khalid Abdalla’s autobiographical one-man play Nowhere at the Oxford Playhouse. Contrary to its name, the play, using unexpected but marvellous tools of modern theatre, took us everywhere that is politically relevant to our understanding of who we are.
We as friends. We as revolutionaries. We as failed political agents. We as political prisoners. We as immigrants. We as forced immigrants, our countries rendered unliveable under authoritarian regimes and neoliberal miasma. We as asylum seekers fleeing civil war and genocide. We as hopefuls and optimists. We as citizens of everywhere and therefore, as right-wing populists want us to believe, “nowhere.”
Abdalla, an Egyptian born and raised in Glasgow, showed us during the pl…
