This is effectively the third part of a trilogy. Would that be accurate to say?
The word effectively needs to be worked through here.
There were no plans to write a sequence of plays let alone a grand trilogy. The first two shows lent themselves to what appeared to be self-contained stories; “Fake ID” was about the struggle of my father, a Pakistani Muslim, in a part of the world which puts great stock in the question of identity. The play looked at his struggle with identity in that particular context.
The second show was about going to Pakistan for 5 days to find my father after he had been murdered. So, I had two shows, and again there were no plans to do this, which were about various aspects of my life that seemed like they were bookends.
The third play, “Partitions”, comes about as a response to what has been happening over the last 5 years; post Lockdown, Palestine feeds into it, just this idea that lines and partitions seem to inform so much of what is happening that is bad.
My own experience is in there in that I had two parents who were products of partitions, and products of British partition in particular. I think it just felt that it was time to look at partitions, personally, through my experience with my family but also on a wider political and historical scale; to weave the personal story into the bigger historical backdrop.
That sounds like it is substantially different from the previous works. A more dispassionate work?
I think so. It is not as immersive as the previous works. I am not as present, in the moment, within it, reliving a story. There are still moments of personal revelation, but there is a wider content and I go over the history of Ireland and the history of India, and the partitions there, and how this affected my mum’s family and my dad’s family.
It gives me an opportunity to bring in things like why Loyalists tend to be obsessed with Israel and I connect that to the relationship Nationalists have to Palestine. And I try to do this in a humorous and, I hope, revealing way.
Joe Nawaz – Partitions
Did you have to do a lot of research or did you feed in your already available knowledge?
I did have to do a fair bit of research, and I was amazed at where my research took me, from looking into the Sykes-Picot agreement between the British and the French post First World War, to the great betrayal of the Arabs.
I also had to look into the Save Ulster from Sodomy campaign which I had to google. That is something I wouldn’t recommend.
I really did have to tease out a fair few things and I did learn a lot along the way that I hadn’t already realised about Irish and Indian history and about the history of colonialism generally.
