Renewed Awareness Toward Salvation: The Journey of The Story of Zahra from Page to Stage

INTRODUCTION

            Banned in many Middle Eastern countries after its publication due to the provocative nature of the text, Hanan al-Shaykh’s novel The Story of Zahra explores the life of Zahra, which spans multiple decades and continents. In 2019, I co-adapted the final chapter of the book with Matthew Spangler, which focuses on Zahra’s life during the Lebanese Civil War. This article examines the invigorating and boundary-pushing process of adapting and directing this challenging text at the Palestinian National Theatre El-Hakawati in 2020. While often mischaracterized as a Western import, Middle Eastern feminism, as practiced in my artistic work, emerges from local socio-political realities and cultural contexts. It is not a replica of Western feminist frameworks, but rather a situated and evolving praxis that responds to the lived experiences of women. In adapting The Story of Zahra, we drew upon feminist theory and Brecht’s alienation effect to create a critical distance that invited audiences to reflect on structures of gendered and political oppression. In this context, feminist theory foregrounds women's voices and insists on their centrality in cultural narratives and social transformation. Similarly, Brechtian theatre seeks to expose systems of power and challenge theatrical conventions. To this end, we employed three levels of narration that aimed to bring all these elements to the stage. Together, these approaches enabled a form of political theatre that confronts injustice and imagines possibilities for feminist expression in the Arab world.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

            The play The Story of Zahra premiered in Jerusalem at the Palestinian National Theatre El Hakawati in February 2020, just before the COVID-19 lockdown. It later toured Palestine in October 2021 and was performed at the Journées Théâtrales de Carthage in Tunisia in December of the same year.

I first met Lebanese author Hanan al-Shaykh in 2000 while in London directing staged readings at the Royal Court Theatre. Katherine Viner of The Guardian, who interviewed me at the time, introduced us, sensing a shared sensibility. From that meeting, a long-standing friendship developed. I began reading al-Shaykh’s novels and discussing her early life in Beirut, including her decision to leave Lebanon at the outbreak of the civil war.

Born in 1944 into a Shiite family in Beirut, al-Shaykh experienced a turbulent childhood marked by her mother’s departure and subsequent years in boarding school. At sixteen, she began writing for An-Nahar newspaper and later pursued her studies in literature at the American College for Girls in Cairo. After a brief return to Lebanon, she resumed work in journalism, but the onset of civil war in 1975 compelled her to flee to London with her two children.

Her novel The Story of Zahra (1980) was a turning point in her career. Written in Arabic and met with widespread censorship across the Arab world, the novel was deemed controversial due to its unflinching depiction of sexuality, war, and patriarchal violence. The narrative centers on Zahra, a young woman whose experiences of abuse, political instability, and familial trauma expose the psychological toll of life within a patriarchal community. The novel’s raw critique of patriarchal structures led Arab publishers to reject it, prompting al-Shaykh to publish it independently. Since its English translation in 1986, The Story of Zahra has become a canonical work in Arab literature and is frequently taught in university courses across Europe and North America (Spangler, 3, 10).

Al-Shaykh’s literary voice is marked by emotional honesty and feminist conviction rooted in her cultural and political context. As Edward Said remarked, she is “the premier woman writer in Arabic who has done more than any other to explore the misperception of Arab women's lives” (AUB). Her feminism, while distinct from Western frameworks, is deeply committed to giving voice to silenced and fractured female subjectivities.

My connection to The Story of Zahra was immediate. After first reading it in 2000, I envisioned its potential as a stage adaptation. Nearly two decades later, I encountered playwright Matthew Spangler, known for his adaptation of The Kite Runner, and found in him a collaborator who shared my sensibility. When I proposed the adaptation to al-Shaykh, she expressed concern about how such a complex and interior novel could be staged. I assured her that the theatrical form I envisioned would honor the novel’s intensity and fragmentation. With that trust, she permitted us to begin the adaptation process.

THE NOVEL The Story of Zahra

Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra is structurally divided into two distinct books, each reflecting Zahra’s changing psychological state. The first book, comprising the majority of the novel, is primarily narrated from Zahra’s perspective. It recounts her traumatic childhood, marked by her mother’s instrumentalization of her in an extramarital affair and her fear of her abusive father. Seeking escape, Zahra travels to Africa to stay with her uncle, but instead of finding liberation, she is further subjected to sexual harassment and retraumatized by memories of earlier abuse, which included two abortions (Larson, 1991). Her experiences also include an emotionally hollow marriage to her uncle’s friend Majed and repeated returns between Africa and Beirut, underscoring her psychological dissociation and inability to find safety or belonging.

Al-Shaykh complicates the narrative voice by including chapters from the perspectives of the uncle and Majed, men who are also portrayed as wounded figures, before returning to Zahra’s fragmented inner world. Through these shifting perspectives and nonlinear chronology, the novel resists classical narrative form. As Sirhan (2024) argues, al-Shaykh “breaks the time continuity” and constructs a plot composed of interwoven threads, reflecting Zahra’s psychological dislocation and aligning the novel with Brechtian techniques of fragmentation and estrangement (2024, 121–126). The second book, set during the Lebanese Civil War, marks a shift in Zahra’s agency. No longer isolated, she begins to engage with the world around her, questioning her past and present: “I am no longer Zahra. In short, my questions and inquiries do not stop” (al-Shaykh 1989, 153). The war serves as a catalyst, prompting Zahra to break free from patriarchal constraints (Sirhan 2024, 112). Her complex and morally ambiguous relationship with a sniper, at once violent, erotic, and psychologically charged, becomes a pivotal point of self-assertion. For the first time, Zahra chooses a relationship, believing she is both reconnecting with her body and preventing further violence. However, her pregnancy and fantasy of family are shattered when she is ultimately killed. As Sirhan notes, her death signifies the delusion of safety in wartime and encapsulates the cumulative violence she has endured (2024, 113).

It was this second book that I chose to adapt for the stage, drawn to Zahra’s growing awareness and active engagement with her surroundings. I was particularly interested in how the war acts as a metaphorical rupture that propels Zahra toward self-reflection and confrontation with her trauma. Her wondering about the sniper in the neighbourhood leads her to have a sexual relationship with him. She fears the sniper, but she keeps going to him as she starts to connect with her body again. Zahra’s “relationship with the sniper [is an] embodiment of her deteriorating psychological state” (2024, 112). She realizes that her relationship with the sniper is the first time she is making her own choices. She rationalizes it by telling herself that, by being with the sniper, she is stopping him from killing people (al-Shaykh 1989, 189). However, she soon ends up dead. As Sirhan puts it, “Her death in the end is evidence that feeling safe in war is a delusion” (Sirhan 2024, 113). Zahra’s demise is a culmination of all kinds of violence that she experiences and witnesses. I aimed to create a performance that would allow the audience to hear Zahra’s voice without judgment, to understand her actions within a broader context of gendered violence and political collapse. Zahra’s story functions as a feminist critique of war and patriarchal society in Lebanon (2024, 125).

BRECHTIAN AND FEMINIST THEORIES IN ADAPTATION

            Feminist theory critiques patriarchy as a system in which women are historically oppressed, marginalized, and socially constructed to serve male interests. It interrogates how culture, especially literature and performance, has represented women through male fantasies rather than female realities. As Simone de Beauvoir famously said, “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman,” a statement Judith Butler expands on to show how gender is produced through repeated social behaviors rather than biological destiny. Gender can be understood as a patriarchal social given that is determined by the repetition of specific actions over time, “embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities...” (188) rather than leaving the existence of natural and instinctive actions that determine a person’s identity. This opens the door to exploring the possibility of a different kind of repetition, perhaps in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style that indicates to us the gender that is renewed in its identity (2007, 188).

Women face many challenges in liberating their bodies from this patriarchal oppression. Still, they must also liberate themselves from their personal perspective, feelings, and opinions acquired through their experiences and backgrounds, which have shaped how they see themselves and their relationship with the world around them. As female subjectivity in general has been shaped within the patriarchal male vision, to be able to become free of it, there is a need for women “to escape the confines of the subjectivity patriarchy sets up for them” (Fortier 2002, 111). Judith Fetterley’s theory of the “resistance reader” was paramount to me throughout this process. Women throughout history adapted the vision of the dominant patriarchal culture. Even when women were allowed to participate in culture, they carried within themselves the male perspective; they wrote from a male point of view. Therefore, in order for women to liberate themselves from that, they must read against what they read, to be able to understand, realize, and criticize how literature has been written from a male perspective, even if women wrote it. Through this act of resistance reading, women can be liberated from patriarchal authoritarianism (Fortier 2002, 108).

Theatre has long played a role in reproducing patriarchal narratives, but feminist theorists like Hélène Cixous insist on a woman-centered language and form that emerges from women’s embodied experience. The Story of Zahra employs feminist language techniques because it is a language whose characteristics are the opposite of those found in classical male language. It is free from all the rules of language or the rules of conventional theatre.  Its content and form are based on female body characteristics. Just as the “phallocentric” male language takes its components from the male body from which it grows and expresses itself. Similarly, female language draws its components from the characteristics of the female body and sexuality. Just as the male body has created a theatrical form that serves the thinking of men, and this form is the one that is accepted in society, the linear and unidirectional. Feminist writing contrasts with this, the woman’s body is connected to forms that are “circular, cyclical, polyphonic, associative, repetitive, abstract, soft, and constantly changing” (2013, 139). The connection between the body and language is not only metaphorical, but it applies to both men and women, and Cixous explores this idea in depth. Cixous points out that the feminine metaphor that creates the form and manner of expression has a direct and literal connection to the woman's body as a source of creation, inspired by the characteristics and sexuality of women, and this, of course, affects the form of expression in female writing and productions. Through feminist writing, we come to understand that women must rewrite themselves; they must begin expressing themselves from their bodies and their rhythms, from their relationship with motherhood, and their spiritual, emotional, and intellectual development as females. They need to establish their history and rediscover their identity and voice. This differs significantly from the straight male line with a conventional plot. This feminist aesthetics opens up space for dramaturgies that reject the classical, male-oriented structure in favor of more fluid, experiential ones. Cixous’s call for women to “write themselves” has profoundly influenced contemporary feminist theatre, particularly as it intersects with Brecht’s epic theatre.

While Brecht did not focus on gender, feminist practitioners appropriated his alienation techniques to critique gender as a constructed sign system. Materialist feminism, in particular, found in Brechtian theory a valuable toolkit for exposing systems of oppression, economic, social, and gendered, through performance. As Aston and Diamond argue, feminist-Brechtian theatre not only aims to represent women differently but to expose and dismantle the patriarchal mechanisms that shape representation itself. Brecht's technique helps to present women in a different way towards revolutionary and social change. As Brecht said: “The production took the subject matter and the incidents shown and put them through a process of alienation: the alienation that is necessary to all understanding” (Willett 1964, 71). Brecht himself did not focus on gender, but rather his work was about a political theatre based on the call for class liberation and a revolution for the oppressed working class. In this way, Brecht failed to recognize that gender discrimination is a crucial component of the working class's struggle. Therefore, the possibilities that could be applied through his theatre theory for the benefit of the materialist women’s movement originated from the feminist movement itself and were utilized to advance feminist projects. Brecht’s theory and his alienation effect technique for the performers “demonstrate systems of social oppression through the medium of performance” (Aston 1999, 13).

Spangler and I focused on form: the novel’s nonlinear structure, psychological depth, and estranged timeline, working to align them with epic feminist strategies. Although, two major feminist performance strategies include “reading against the text” to subvert patriarchal narratives and “re-dressing,” which reframes characters to highlight and complicate gender constructions (Sue-Ellen Case; Alisa Solomon), we didn’t need to “read against” the original text because the feminist voice was already there. Nor did we re-dress the characters.The play centers on Zahra as the narrator of her own story, recounting the war in Beirut and the instability of her relationships, especially with her brother Ahmad, who joins a militia, and with the sniper. Initially, the play followed a linear narrative structure, with Zahra as storyteller and expanded roles for Ahmad and the sniper. Yet something essential was missing. We realized the audience lacked access to Zahra’s interiority and the reasons behind her actions. In response, we incorporated three monologues that draw on material from the first book of the novel. These monologues function as Zahra’s inner voice, offering insight into her trauma and charting a trajectory toward self-awareness and strength.   

We mirrored the novel’s temporal fragmentation, echoing its shifts between past and present. As al-Shaykh “removes the boundaries between times ... inside the character” (2024, 126), the novel’s structure becomes a map of Zahra’s fractured psyche. We followed suit onstage, echoing this disjointed timeline to reflect the character’s trauma and inner life. In the novel, as in our performance, memory and the present interweave. This dramaturgical approach resonated with what Aronson-Lehavi describes as “the interpretive process” of adapting a text for the stage (2013, 120). We developed the script through workshops with actors in May 2019 and a subsequent gathering with readers of the novel. These engagements made clear the importance of contextualizing Zahra’s actions for the audience, particularly in light of ongoing debates around gender-based violence and so-called “honour killings” in Palestinian society. The adaptation resonated deeply with Palestinian women, who recognized Zahra’s pain as reflective of their own experiences. As Spangler initially questioned the relevance of a Lebanese narrative to Palestinian audiences, I argued, and was later affirmed by the response, that Zahra’s story transcends national borders through its feminist lens on oppression, silence, and survival (Spangler, 7). Ultimately, adapting The Story of Zahra for the stage enabled us to amplify a silenced voice, offering a form of feminist resistance that challenges both patriarchy and war. The project not only brought Zahra’s journey into the public realm but also fostered dialogue with audiences about the entanglement of personal trauma and collective history.

The stage adaptation traces the psychological and political journey of a young woman navigating a lifetime of patriarchal violence amid the chaos of the Lebanese Civil War. As Zahra gains momentary freedom from familial control, she seeks autonomy and meaning, only to confront forms of exploitation. The production, as noted in the programme, “explores how women are particularly brutalized in times of violence and oppression.” The performance unfolds across four dramaturgical stages, charting Zahra’s evolving consciousness and ultimate demise.

Stage One introduces Zahra in wartime Beirut, recounting the fear she experienced in her childhood. Through direct address and domestic scenes, she speaks of the structural oppression she endured, particularly from her father. She provides glimpses into her complex relationship with war, trauma, and desire. In a moment of confronting all of this, a memory of her mother using Zahra as a child to cover up an extramarital affair, taking Zahra with her when meeting her lover, resurfaces in her mind. Her fear and the violence she experiences are what prompt her to leave, looking for a fresh start.

Stage Two presents Zahra living independently for the first time. In an abandoned apartment, she initiates a hesitant relationship with the sniper, initially driven by fear, curiosity, and a longing for connection. The arrival of her brother Ahmed, a civil war combatant, reveals further layers of patriarchal aggression and ideological disillusionment.

Stage Three delves into Zahra’s past, particularly her abuse in Africa by a relative and a failed marriage that compounded her trauma. The deepening of her relationship with the sniper appears, to Zahra, as an act of volition, “the first thing she has chosen in her life.” Yet, as she challenges him about his past and observes her brother's further descent into brutality, the limits of her autonomy become increasingly visible.            Stage Four sees Zahra confront the most harrowing episodes of her youth: sexual exploitation, forced abortion, and psychiatric abuse. These memories culminate in Zahra's pregnancy by the sniper. Her fantasy of a future rooted in choice and love unravels and, in the story’s final moments, Zahra walks through the streets only to be shot. The ambiguity of the final act underscores the impossibility of liberation within a society shaped by war and patriarchy. Her desire for a new life ends in silence, possibly at the hands of the very man she thought had offered her freedom.

This adaptation stages Zahra’s narrative not simply as a personal tragedy, but as a broader critique of the intersecting violences of patriarchy, war, and colonial modernity. Our approach drew upon Brechtian techniques to reject psychological realism in favor of critical distance. Zahra’s monologues, direct address, and the disrupted timeline invited audiences to reflect on structural violence rather than become absorbed in a singular character’s tragedy. By fragmenting time and foregrounding Zahra’s consciousness, we disrupted narrative closure, instead emphasizing the broader critique embedded in her story.           

By staging The Story of Zahra, we offered a feminist form of resistance, confronting the entangled violences of patriarchy, war, and colonial modernity. Our staging emphasized Zahra’s social entrapment not as her private trauma alone, but as a shared, political condition. I resisted Spangler’s initial idea of staging it as a monodrama, knowing that isolating Zahra would risk individualizing her struggle. The play stems from Zahra’s logic, and if we isolate her on stage with all her conflicts, the risk is that the audience will interpret her struggle as purely internal, absolving the public and political context of responsibility. However, if we surround her with other key characters, we can more clearly see the effects they have on her. This multiplicity aligns with Brechtian dramaturgy, where individual psychology is always presented in relation to historical and material conditions. Instead, I built an environment around her, soundscape, spatial design, and supporting characters, that demonstrated how society actively constructs her reality. Even the choice to use the Lebanese dialect, rather than the Palestinian one, created an intentional estrangement effect for local audiences, prompting them to analyze rather than empathize uncritically.

The Story of Zahra on stage becomes an example of feminist epic theatre—disrupting traditional narratives, centering women’s experience, and provoking critical engagement with gendered violence as a structural, not merely personal, problem.

THREE LEVELS OF NARRATION

In the script, there are three levels of narration: storytelling, Zahra’s interactions with other characters, and her memory monologues. Zahra’s storytelling guides the audience toward what the character herself wants us to see and know. This level of narration spans the entire stage space. While this section addresses the levels of narration from a scriptwriting perspective, I find it impossible to separate the text from its theatrical realization. Accordingly, I interweave elements of the production into the discussion of each narrative level.

The first drafts of the script were written in English, after which I began translating the text into Arabic, initially using the Palestinian dialect. I later decided to shift to the Lebanese dialect, finalizing the script in collaboration with al-Shaykh during a trip to London. This process contributed to the script’s alienation from Palestinian audiences from the outset. In Brechtian terms, this linguistic shift functioned as a distancing device, interrupting the potential for immediate identification with the character or setting. Rather than fostering emotional immersion, the language aimed to provoke critical observation.

As previously mentioned, the novel posed significant challenges to patriarchal norms and was banned across much of the Arab world. My objective in adapting the novel for the stage was to add a critical dimension: to allow the audience not only to track Zahra’s actions but also to hear her internal commentary. It was essential that the audience listen to the play’s ideas, though this had to be handled with care. As Ayat Yaghmour observed in her review: “The play included many hints that were sometimes used to avoid the explicitness of the action and not to disturb the audience, and at other times the hints were used to attract the audience, awaken their imagination and provoke their intelligence” (2020). Her comments pertain to the performance, but also highlight the way the script strategically withholds emotional resolution to encourage reflection. Rather than passively judging Zahra, viewers are encouraged to consider the social structures that surround her. In this, the production pursues transformation through critical spectatorship rather than passive empathy.            The second level of narration consists of Zahra’s interactions with other characters, situated in spaces such as the family home and the sniper’s rooftop. This layer introduces dialogic tension and reveals embedded social hierarchies. It aligns with Brecht’s principle that characters should not merely express psychological interiority, but instead represent broader social forces. From this perspective, Zahra is framed as a woman attempting to escape the constraints imposed upon her, even as she remains ensnared by the violence of war and patriarchal expectations.

Spatial design played a central role in supporting this tension. At first, characters moved freely across the stage, which represented the family home. After the family departs Beirut and Zahra remains behind, the stage is divided, and the city’s streets and neighborhoods begin to emerge between these spaces. This spatial reconfiguration follows Zahra’s journey as she begins to step outside the home, yet remains trapped between the male authorities in her life, her brother and the sniper, and the larger social structures represented by the community. The non-naturalistic scenography and choreographed spatial divisions invite the audience to consider their own relationship to what unfolds before them. Rather than being lulled into empathetic identification, spectators are encouraged to question. Zahra’s direct address to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, serves as another Brechtian device that foregrounds theatricality and resists illusion. 

The third level of narration takes the form of Zahra’s memory monologues, which shift into a distinct aesthetic register. These moments occur at the front center of the stage, within a focused circle of light, where the character confronts herself and delivers unfiltered reflections that disrupt narrative continuity. In developing the soundscape for these scenes, I collaborated with musician John Handal. Rather than conventional music, we sought an ambient, environmental texture, something that would avoid manipulating emotions and instead cultivate a space for thought. Music appears only during these memory monologues, consisting of a single, recurring note: minimal and insistent. In these instances, as Zahra faces her past in order to move forward, the sound design compels concentrated attention.

The final scene collapses all three levels of narration into a single dramatic moment. Zahra is shot, and as she falls, she reveals her thoughts in her dying breath: “I close my eyes. Eyes that were never truly open. I feel the rain” (Spangler and Ghazaleh, 56). Her past and present converge. The rain, descending from above, suggests a gesture of purification. Yet rather than allowing the audience to sink into sentimentality, the production exposes the theatrical mechanism, showing how the rain effect is produced on stage. There is no catharsis. Instead, the moment is designed to agitate, directing the audience’s attention toward the structural violence and patriarchal control that have governed Zahra’s life.

Tahseen Yaqeen notes this effect in his review: “Here, we will find ourselves, as we watch this creative play, wondering about the historical moment, not of the civil war, which seems not to have ended yet, but about the place here and the time, Palestine 2020?” (2020). The epic theatre techniques employed in the production, disruption of illusion, direct address, stylized scenography, and fragmentation of narrative structure, were deployed in pursuit of the alienation effect, toward the broader goal of constructing an epic feminist theatre.

CONCLUSION

This experience marked an important moment of reflection for me as a Palestinian woman and theatre artist. It offered the space to reconsider the creative journey behind The Story of Zahra and to re-examine the Brechtian and feminist theoretical frameworks that have long shaped my artistic practice, whether consciously or not. Brecht’s theory of the alienation effect has always spoken to me; his insistence on breaking theatrical conventions to expose injustice aligns with my desire to make theatre a space for social critique and transformation. At the same time, feminist theory, though I did not always name it as such, has coexisted with me throughout my life. My rebellion against patriarchal structures was never about claiming rights for women alone, but about demanding the freedom for everyone, including men in my society, to live without oppressive expectations.           

In adapting The Story of Zahra for the stage, I found these two theoretical lineages converging. The performance not only retold Zahra’s personal tragedy but also offered a broader feminist critique of patriarchy, war, and colonial modernity. Using Brechtian techniques, we rejected psychological realism in favor of critical distance, inviting the audience to reflect rather than simply empathize. The process of bringing this controversial and groundbreaking novel to the stage was full of challenges, but ultimately created a space where Zahra could be heard, not judged. In retrospect, this work affirmed for me that feminist epic theatre is not only possible, but necessary: a form that disrupts dominant narratives, centers women’s voices, and invites audiences into active, critical engagement with structural violence. It is through this kind of theatre, rebellious, reflective, and deeply human, that we can begin to imagine possibilities for liberation.