The intellectual resistance of Yusuf Al-Ani

Abstract

Yusuf al-Ani’s intellectual character, Nouar, says in The Key, ‘Not all the doors are closed yet, not all the roads are blocked. We can start again’. So it was with al-Ani’s innovative people’s theatre – it never shied away from starting anew, introducing new themes and styles. This article focuses on the intellectual and artistic resistance embodied in al-Ani’s life and work, which, as is argued here, prominently exhibit the most important elements of Edward Said’s concept of the intellectual. Al-Ani’s people’s theatre as a revolutionary force for necessary change and anticolonial resistance is examined in some detail. Important Saidian and postcolonial themes, such as speaking truth to power, secular criticism, representing the oppressed and a refusal to surrender in the face of death and desolation, are examined in al-Ani’s work. Al-Ani’s break with tradition is not only thematic, as is argued, but also aesthetic and imaginative, exhibiting an irreconcilability that can perhaps be best described as Saidian ‘late style’. The essential role of al-Ani’s people’s theatre in igniting resistance and change is highlighted by examining two of his longer plays: The Key (1968) and The Ruin (1970).