Great Love Indeed: A Q+A with The Heart Team About Their Latest Season The Gaza Monologues Revisited
Consider this a warm-up-eletter for the review of Great Love | The Gaza Monologues...next week there will be more to share, more to say, about the latest series from Mermaid Palace
Next week I’ve got a full story about The Heart’s latest series, Great Love| The Gaza Monologues Revisited. The final episode for the season will drop later this week.
But as a warm up, I’ve got a wide-ranging Q+A from The Heart Team that worked on the latest season: boss lady Kaitlin Prest, Aliya Pabani, both a contributor and consulting producer on the series, and Tarneem Jaber, who wrote A Letter To Gaza.
Tarneem is featured in the series alongside her two siblings (Hamza and Ahmad). But in true Mermaid Palace style, after Kaitlin Prest met them in Cairo to record an ‘interview’ and record their original material, based on the belief that they had the hearts of artists and could quickly learn what they needed, they went from contributors to collaborators. Prest hired Tarneem and Ahmad to be part of the production team.
The Trailer Great Love: The Gaza Monologues Revisited launched July 25, 2024, and the first episode followed on August 15, 2024. Although officially the Prologue to the series, if you do happen to listen to it first, it does a good job of explaining what the series is all about, and what moved Kaitlin Prest to begin to make this series, to make audio in a way that she had never before.
The Gaza Monologues were created by Ashtar Theatre, a Palestinian Theatre based in Ramallah, in 2010. The theatre worked with a group of youth to write their experience in the form of monologues. Three are 31 in total. They have since been performed in more than 40 countries and translated into more than 18 languages.
In November 2023, in response to October 7, 2023, Ashtar Theatre sent out a global call to perform and share the Gaza Monologues. Their website provides the raw material—the monologues transcribed and translated. The Heart heard their call. This series is what followed.
The following is a series of questions and answers, gleaned mostly from voicememos that we traded back and forth over a couple weeks. They have been edited for length and clarity (emphasis my own).
[Samantha Hodder]: I have now listened to a few different versions of Gaza Monologues. Tell me what’s different about yours, or maybe, what different thing you were going for in your production, which added to the many voices out there offering their support and solidarity to the Gaza Monologues wider project?
[Kaitlin Prest]: What's different about this audio adaptation of a selection of Ashtar Theaters’ Gaza Monologues is that I guess in what is becoming more and more what we could call a “Heart-like” fashion, or a KP-like fashion. It's hard for me not to talk about craft, and this really isn't about craft. I'm just using what I have at my disposal to do what I know how to do.
I try to do something, anything….at least the bare minimum at the bottom line is to not do nothing, and to not justify doing nothing, or minimizing how atrocious what's happening in Gaza and Lebanon [now].
As a maker, artist, it's getting harder and harder for me to maintain the artifice that's involved in putting something out into the world as a polished product. Like the ‘suspension of disbelief;’ we even have the suspension of disbelief in documentary because you present the documentary as though it is unedited, essentially. That's what you're going for.
At my core, I started as a documentarian. I started as someone who was setting out to tell the truth, [but] maintaining that artifice is getting harder and harder for me to do. And so part of my creative practice involves another layer of honesty, which is the honesty of who's making this, how they're making it, and what is the context around it.
So I guess with the monologues, I chose not to forget the fourth wall. Instead of trying to create the artifice—or the suspension of disbelief—that we were actually going back in time to 2010 [when the Gaza Monologues were written], to live inside the minds and testimonies of these young people. Instead, I would approach it as a document that was written 14 years ago now, that was being interfaced with by people from today, and then thinking about who the people from today are interfacing with the document, and what their relationship is to the document and the truth inside of that document.
That approach was a way of accessing, or inviting, people to speak to what's happening now, to kind of bridge the time gap between 2010 and now, and use the power of these documents of these testimonies of Ashtar Theaters’ brilliant work creating these [monologues].
Originally I was going to commission four different artists who I knew there were speaking out on the issue to create something—to make an audio version of one of the monologues—in their own style. But once I realized that the monologues are actually two to three minutes each, [I pivoted].
[SH]: In S18 E5, A POINT IN THE SEA + GAZA DREAMS, you have to remind listeners that everything they will hear is real, and was recorded there and that you didn’t embellish or change the material. Did it feel weird to have to say that? What compelled you to underline this fact, thinking back to your previous work?
[KP]: Number one, I've learned that because there's been fiction in the past [work of The Heart]. I've taken artistic license in recreating and creating reenactments of things that have happened. So I just wanted to make sure that nobody would ever think that what they were hearing is some kind of sting phone call fake, a really well-done reenactment. So that's the first thing.
The second reason why I felt the need to say that is because people often disbelieve Palestinians when they're talking about what they've experienced.
It would be easy to assume that I went on Al Jazeera and pulled a bunch of stuff and used it to sound design what what you're hearing. In the episode with the three young people who left their home in Gaza, if I wasn't the one who cut it together, I would easily make I would easily maybe make the assumption that the sounds were from some newsplace.
We're so desensitized to those sounds, and not really imagining ourselves inside of them. We're able to separate ourselves from them. It's hard to imagine ourselves in those—they're just terrifying images on the screen.
I wanted to remind people that this is not terrifying the sounds we've heard in movies. Imagine these people that you come to care for by the end of the episodes recording these things. I felt like the need to kind of shake people and be like: these sounds came from real things that were happening. That people young, young students, recorded with their phones. So that's why I felt like I had to explain.
[SH]: This series seems to signal a new era for The Heart. I have my own take on it, but I’d be curious how you would describe it…and if you also feel like it’s a new direction for The Heart?
[KP]: So I guess it's true that this series is a departure from the approach that I'm known to take, that I’ve usually taken in the past. I guess you're saying that it feels obvious to you…it felt very kind of paradigm shifty for me, as a maker, as an individual, and for the show, for the history of the show.
I guess to me, I see it as an entrance into an era where I'm choosing to no longer be afraid of what it means to actually have radical politics, or be disruptive to the power structure [of] politics. I wasn't afraid of that in the beginning, because I thought it just made sense. In the beginning of my career from 2008 until 2012, if I'm being really honest, I just thought that what other people called “radical politics” were just ways of thinking about things that just made sense to me.
In the early days of my activism, I felt very comfortable calling people out. But then I started to feel this bad feeling in the pit of my stomach when I suddenly realized that I spent most of my time being angry at people and looking down on them, seeing them as sheep and conformists, people who were weak and didn't have the courage to actually just stop by buying Coca-Cola. That was when I was 19. I was mad at people for buying Coca-Cola.
I was just kind of full of rage—and also self- importance—and [then] I felt like this is the antithesis of why I got into this. I got into activism because I care about humanity. So how do I reconcile that?
That was the moment that I kind of abandoned pointing the finger and I pivoted to things that felt more in line with a politics of love and compassion.
Doing the “No” series finally showed me that I wasn't willing to give up. I still believed that all people needed was education to start caring about the people who, either the way that they live, their livelihoods—what they're used to culturally—[are] actually harming other people. Like all they needed was education and how to show up in a more respectful way. And people would want to do it.
And then I think in 2020 when I realized, finally, when BLM happened, that's actually, no, it's not true. Most people are not willing to do a paradigm shift of the way that they think in order to to rewire their framework. People are not willing to give up their privilege. People are not willing to even admit that they're wrong. People aren't willing to say sorry.
[And now] because I am someone who has a public platform, and people follow me and some degree of influence and has a voice in my industry as well, I'm going to complicate things behind closed doors, on a one-on-one basis. But publicly, I'm taking a stand [about Gaza].
And that's what I believe in. And I'm choosing to not be afraid anymore of that.
[SH]: You said in one message that you are working much faster, and in a very different way on this series. Can you talk more about this?
[KP]: Basically I’m trying to do in six months what I usually do in three years. And speaking to current events, and making stuff that maybe won't be relevant in three years, instead of making something about the fundamental psychology, or the human-conditioned soul-element.
A good example is: what I usually would do if I was going to make something about this issue, about what's happening, it would be, you know, a five-episode series—that I spent two years on—working with Tarneem, Hamza and Ahmad, having them each tell a story of an intimate relationship that got ruined by the trauma that they have now because of the genocide. Or, I don't know, the three of them and their mom, the story of being separated. These kind of un quote/unquote universal things.
But…I'm basically taking rough cuts that we spent three months making, and then having to turn the rough cut, going from version two on a rough cut to version 22. But in a week instead of five months.
So it's been a trip. But it's been a fun trip, even though it's really heavy, and I cry every day.
The following are email questions and answers from Aliya Pabani, both contributor and story and audio consultant for the series. They have been edited for length and clarity.
[Samantha Hodder]: In terms of your input for the overall series, what were the key values you wanted to infuse into this work?
[ALIYA PABANI]: When Kaitlin asked me to contribute a piece for the series, I said that I wanted to capture the disjuncture between the banality of everyday life and the simultaneously occurring, seemingly endless atrocities in Gaza. It makes life feel somehow surreal, like everything becomes a performance. I’d thought about what it would be like if a monologue came on over the grocery store speakers, or in a stadium. I wanted to make that feeling material somehow.
To implicate us, but I also wanted it to feel embodied in a way that could stir something up in the listener. I conceive of my artistic practice as being in dialogue with my organizing. They’re different facets of the same struggle, but I don’t believe an individual’s artistic expression can substitute for the power of the collective, moving together against a common enemy. That work is often more direct, by necessity.
For me, this piece was about trying to turn a connection, or relation, that’s normally occluded into something material. Something that connects the mundanities of our lives to unimaginable suffering, and then grappling with the weight of it.
[SH]: There’s a lot of juxtaposition going on in your episode: the banal act of going to the bank, up against the subtle activism of reading a monologue, to a bank employee…poetry here becomes the activism…all in a very generic corporate headquarters, which you have captured with delicious binaural microphones. This could have gone off the rails in a number of different ways, but you held on. Tell me how you balanced on this tightrope.
[AP]: Honestly, I’m not sure. I actually came out of the interaction thinking that it wasn’t what I wanted and that I’d have to figure out how to make another appointment without being flagged. It wasn’t until I played the raw tape for Kaitlin and Yasaman that I realized I had something. Any performance I’ve done—by which I mean any meaningfully pre-planned or choreographed interaction beyond the improv of daily life—is about creating the conditions for a kind of experiment and then trying to swim my way out.
There’s a loose structure: an appointment with a financial advisor, a manila folder containing my financial statements and a monologue, a binaural mic and two extraneous recording devices, a sharp but nondescript outfit, the assurance that whatever happens, it will likely be over in an hour or less.
Once those elements are in place, I just try to be as present as possible while it’s unfolding. Oddly, I don’t really remember much once it’s done.
[SH]: At the end of your bank moment, the episode shifts into “journalistic” mode, albeit a very poetic, Heart-like version of this. What were the threads that you wanted to braid in this one to make sure there was a through-line?
[AP]: I left this part up to Kaitlin. So much has happened, is still happening, that it’s hard to have perspective on what’s important, especially given that she knows her audience better than I do.
We all agreed that there should be minimal exposition at the top. Another priority was to leave people with the understanding that collective action gets results. It was important to me that people don’t get mired in confusion and despair.
The following are questions and answers from Tarneem Jaber, who began as a contributor to the series, when she wrote Letter to Gaza. Later she joined the production team as a paid member.
[Samantha Hodder]: What was your inspiration for your work on this series?
[Tarneem Jabber]: My inspiration for my Letter To Gaza actually, the only thing was in my mind, I was just thinking of that day when we left our home and that day, when we get the news, when my brothers [saw] the blood around and they gave us that news—they bombed our whole our home. So this letter was [about] this day, [and that was] the inspiration [for] this letter.
The other thing is just leaving my family behind and and traveling to survive, even though they couldn’t. I wasn't talking about only myself…I was just talking about everyone, Gazan people, [and all the] different kinds of suffering…maybe losing a friend or a family or a home or or a job or anything. So it's it was general, but effective.
So I remembered that when I sat [to write]. I was thinking of that day, when we left the home and got that news [about the our house] and the day that when we left our family behind in the north, and [left].
These are the most affective moments in this war…even if like a lot of things bad things happen in the war, two events are the worst.
[SH]: Can you speak to what the experience was on this project, to go from working with The Heart as a collaborator, to someone who actually had a hand in the final piece of the project?
[TJ]: If someone [were to] ask me what is the best thing that happened this year during the whole terrible thing, I will tell you meeting Kaitlin. This [was] the most amazing thing, because in the beginning, when we met her, the first meeting was [to do] work for one episode.
And after that, our relationship was with the entire team, and with Kaitlin, wasn't only as someone who worked for this episode. We [became] friends, and [got] closer with each other. She's becoming my soul sister. In the end, we [got] a chance to do the final episode. Like we have a hand on this…the monologue for Ahmad, and [I wrote] The Letter for Gaza, this was really amazing experience. [Ahmad also did the sound design for this episode].
[It’s] something that I'm really honored [to] do. It was such an amazing experience [to] get a chance to give my voice to reach the word. And I feel that like she helped us so much, [to share] more about us and about everything we live.
Hey, will you be in Toronto next week?
Want to join me at The Promise of Audio? It’s a half-day workshop and networking event.
I will be moderating the panel: How To Keep Them Coming Back: Creating a Serialized Narrative
And I’ll be there with an esteemed panel of producers: Arshy Mann, Producer of Commons at Canadaland, Sam Mullins, producer of Chameleon: Wild Boys, and Katrina Onstad, now at The Globe and Mail, and lead producer on Love, Janessa.
WHEN: Thursday, October 17th, 2024, 2:00pm - 6:00pm
WHERE: Canadaland, 401 Richmond St West, in Toronto.
Registration is open & spots are limited so RSVP to secure your spot at The Promise of Audio!
Wow Samantha. Amazing Q&A. 💚