“Noura” was the first play I watched since I came to the US to study abroad. A 90-minute play, it was not too long but enough for the audience to think about the fate of refugees, their identities, their families and especially the meaning of cultures and religion in modern society.
“Noura” tells a story about an Iraqi family who immigrated to the US and has been in this country for eight years. There are three members in that family–– Noura, the mother, Noura’s husband Tareq and their son Yazen. They are very busy preparing for the coming Christmas, but the most excited person is Noura. She will welcome a guest, Maryam, an Iraqi orphan who she has been sponsoring for studying at Stanford but never met.
Everything seems to be so amazing to Noura. She will meet an Iraq and she will bring the feeling of her home country closer. Although having been in the US for eight years, Noura never stops missing her Iraq, so when she knew that Maryam would come and visit her, Noura cannot be more excited.
However, the meeting does not go as well as Noura expected. Maryam got pregnant, and the more important thing was that it was Maryam’s choice, she was not raped or otherwise coerced into it. Noura got angry, and Maryam was not scared of Noura’s anger, she was confident and ignored Noura instead. Maryam believed in her choice.
Noura, however, after talking with her long-time friend Nafa’a, decided to invite Maryam to join her Christmas dinner. Tareq did not like to welcome Maryam because she was a refugee, but he pretended to be happy when Maryam came. Everything changed when he realized that Maryam was pregnant. He said goodbye to Maryam quickly and pushed her out of the house, but Noura gave her a present before she went. While Noura and Tareq were having a conflict about the baby of Maryam, she suddenly came back and returned Noura’s gift. At that time, Noura admitted the truth that Maryam was her daughter with Tareq, but they had her before getting married, so Noura’s family forced her to abandon Maryam. Maryam got shocked, she totally ignored her mother and went away. Noura cried and the play ended in helplessness of Noura about her daughter as well as her identity.
With me, Maryam is the representation of Iraq, Noura and Tareq’s home country. Therefore, whenever Noura sees Maryam, her homesickness encouraged her to come back to Iraq. But the more she wants to come home, the more painful she must suffer. There is no home now because Iraq collapsed in the war, and Maryam was the only person who is still alive in Noura’s family in Iraq. With Noura, Maryam is a person who reminds her about her nationality, her culture and her identity. While Tareq tries to ignore everything related to Iraq, Noura expresses herself as a member who cannot get away and forget all the memories she has about home. The United States is a strange place with Noura, just as Iraq is a place she always wants to return to.
This play also let me know about the fate of refugees. They don’t have any choice. If they’re lucky, they will be still alive. If they are not, they will die, and no one has awareness about their death. Even if they are alive, nobody wants to accept them as a part of their community. “Why do you care a lot about her? She is just a refugee.” Tareq told Noura when she let him know that Maryam would come. In addition, refugees have to struggle with themselves about adapting to a new culture or still keep their own traditions in a new country. Most of them want to forget the past in their home country, but some of them still want to keep as much as possible anything belongs to a place they call “home.” It is not easy to start a new life with refugees, when the old cultural identities and the new ones get stuck.
The thing that makes me extremely thrilled is not the fate of the refugees, but more than that, it is the motherhood. Because of cultural and religious biases, which don’t allow people to get pregnant before getting married officially, Noura accepted to abandon her beloved daughter. People took Maryam out of Noura’s arms when she was a baby, and since that moment, Maryam was an orphan. Noura, from the bottom of her heart, never stops missing her abandoned daughter, and she tries to offset Maryam by paying for her room and board at Stanford when Maryam came to the US. But it is not enough to heal the pain in Maryam’s soul. At the end of the play, she knew the truth, and she ignored Noura like she never existed in her life. However, although Maryam went away, she said many bitter words that could cut Noura’s heart into thousands of pieces, Noura still loves her unconditionally. Is abandoning Maryam her fault, or the culture’s fault? We do not know and cannot judge her or her cultural background.
The play ended when Noura stood up on the table with her confusion “I don’t know who I am.” It let us know that, sometimes refugees pretend they are alright when they have a better life in another nation, but they never forget the pains they experienced, which become a part of their soul. And when the make-believe meets the truth, they don’t know who they are, where they belong to. And so on, that conflict never ends in refugees’ souls.