Dear friends:

It’s curious to emerge from a month and a half of what I call “snail time” to do an interview about one summer in Palestine.

I call it snail time because I am still moving slowly after the accident last month And also, I’ve been Inspired by what I thought was only one snail on my terrace. Actually, there are two. And there are little snail-lettes as well. A snail family. They all live in one big pot that houses a plant with purple leaves that grows wildly and a sturdy brown-barked green-leaved succulent.

I read that snails like mushrooms.

So every now and then, I add a mushrooms to the soil. Because snails are nocturnal, I wait till it’s dark to visit them, peering over the pot with my cell phone light. It’s pretty thrilling to watch a snail eat a mushroom. For five minutes. Then it’s slow. And then I go. In the morning when I check again, the mushroom is a quarter eaten.

I am not a singular snail watcher. The singular snail watcher wrote a lovely book about snails that a friend recommended: The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating.

But about the interview: Many years ago, in 2014, I spent a summer in Palestine, in Ramallah and East Jerusalem with Ashtar Theatre and Iman Aoun. It was such an awakening.

I wrote a series of essays for Howl Round Theatre Commons. They chose one essay about Ashtar’s Youth theater festival for an anthology of writing from their first ten years of existence.

So in honor of that and to promote the anthology which has a curriculum and teaching materials, the folks at Howl Round are doing a series of interviews called “After the Essay.” What it’s been like since you wrote. Like that. We did an Instagram live interview. Me and Ramona Rose King, the Communications Manager at Howl Round.

A recording is here.

In the interview, I talked about seeing the everyday-ness of oppression in occupied Palestine. I talked about the power and resilience of theater and especially the young theater makers of Ramallah and Gaza. I said that a certain journey in theater was beginning in 2014 and I couldn’t have imagined that it was a journey that would lead to good manners and colonized subjects.

And about emergence: I haven’t quite left snail time behind. But I did also want to emerge to say a sincere heartfelt thank you to everyone who has written with their wishes, meditations, wisdom for healing. Thank you truly. The healing is happening. And I will write individual emails soon.

I highly recommend snail time. Burrow into dark earth under a wild looking purple plant. Eat a mushroom leisurely. Or whatever floats your shell.

slowly, from Sevilla

~ Shebana