Cassandra Lewis

This weekend I participated in a very inspiring playwriting workshop called, “Writing the Other.” The class was taught by Betty Shamieh at Magic Theatre. She is a world-renowned writer born to Palestinian parents in San Francisco. This three-day workshop was offered for free as part of her residence at Magic Theatre as an NEA/TCG playwriting fellow.

On the first day, she told us, “What we’re going to write about in the next three days are the things that people die for.”

Identity is at the core of each person’s outlook and at the root of beliefs by which people make every decision. Identity is personal and also tied to community or other groups that share a similar concept of self. Betty Shamieh guided us through many writing exercises where we explored our own concepts of identity and our perceptions of how others not in those groups perceive us - and from a complex and sympathetic angle.

I have always been intrigued with the arguments about what a writer has a right to portray. For instance, when Kate Braverman, a writer I very much admire, visited our MFA writing program at New College in 2005, some of my classmates expressed their feelings of outrage at Braverman’s portrayal of Frida Kahlo in her novel The Incantation of Frida K.. It was an imaginary or fictional portrayal, but the outrage was directed at the idea of a white woman writing from the perspective of someone who wasn’t. This remains a controversial issue within literary circles.

Who has the right to write from any perspective? And who makes this decision?

This weekend I gathered from Betty Shamieh’s thought-provoking course that it’s the writer who makes this decision. The point of the writing exercises was to free ourselves from these conventions, to lose the inhibitions that lock us into writing from the same old perspectives.

Today, our third and last day of class, Betty Shamieh said, “We can’t really control how the world perceives us, but we can choose how we identify with ourselves.”

If you haven’t had the honor of seeing her play, Territories at Magic Theatre, I strongly recommend you book tickets immediately. It is one of the best plays I have seen in San Francisco since I moved here four years ago. It’s nothing less than brilliant.

Territories is a historic thriller set during the Crusades. A French knight captures the sister (whose name was never recorded in any historical document) of sultan Saladdin. The experimental form was inspired by Cubist paintings and the story seamlessly explores the collision of two cultures and questions the place of women during war.