About the Authors:

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Naomi Wallace is a playwright and screenwriter from Kentucky who lives in North Yorkshire, U.K. Her plays, which won a MacArthur “genius” prize and Obie award, have been produced in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States include In the Heart of America, Slaughter City, One Flea Spare, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, Things of Dry Hours, The Liquid Plain and The Breach.

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Ismail Khalidi, born in Beirut to Palestinian parents and raised in Chicago, is a playwright and director who has written, directed, performed, curated and taught internationally. Khalidi's plays include Tennis in Nablus (Alliance Theatre, 2010), Truth Serum Blues (Pangea World Theater, 2005), Foot (Teatro Amal, 2016-17), Sabra Falling (Pangea World Theater, 2017), Returning to Haifa (Finborough Theatre, 2018) and Dead Are My People (Noor Theatre, 2019). Khalidi's plays have been published in numerous anthologies.

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About the Play:

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    Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace’s Visions from the Centre of the Earth focuses on the stories of five Palestinians in the midst of an ongoing genocide. It insists upon its catastrophic effects, as well as the enduring resistance of Palestinians in the face of it. Throughout the play we witness how motifs of body fragmentation and the animal as a symbol, are employed in order to reclaim the personhood of the Palestinian people. Tactics of maiming and animalization are often used by the Israeli occupation to enforce an agenda of dehumanizing the Palestinians. The play’s co-authors, through their deliberate incorporation and re-representation of these particular symbolic elements, work towards deconstructing such propaganda, exposing its absurdity and cruelty. These narrative choices also invite questions about what personhood and humanity have really come to mean in the 21st century, at a time where human rights are under constant violation. 

    The play proposes a conception of humanity that is immersed with ecologies, where the rigid boundaries between the human and the animal are conflated, reconfiguring personhood beyond the boundaries of the individual and into a more porous and interconnected version of the self. This distinction is presented by Wallace and Khalidi in recording how the sovereign Israel treats animals and ecologies, compared to the Palestinian characters’ relationship with them. The character of Yamen is not afraid of being assimilated with the non-human other, there appears to be a trans-corporeal relationship between the human and the animal. Additionally, it is established that humans and non-human animals alike share the possibility of death, while we also encounter their shared capacity for politically significant transgressive action against the oppressor. Bilal’s recording of the history of beekeeping in Palestine showcases that indigenous epistemologies of the land provide perspectives contrasting the colonial narratives of nature, while also further solidifying the connection between nature and politics. The text is acutely aware that we occupy a political reality where the inherency of human rights seems to bear hardly any value, the institutions that are supposed to safeguard them blatantly allowing an active genocide. As a result, the need to deconstruct all narratives that naturalize domination arises, along with a desire on the side of colonized subjectivities to identify with something beyond human. Deconstruction becomes both a political and emotional necessity. In their connection with animals and nature, it is the Palestinians that retain their “human” qualities of both sympathy and resistance, as social and political subjectivities. 

    The Israeli apartheid regime has historically resorted to practices of deliberate maiming against Palestinians, cruelly treating them as a “population available for injury”. This praxis is understood in liberal terms as less violent than killings. Thus, injuries are not included in the “dry statistics of tragedy” from the perspective of the West. This is a kind of methodical warfare that targets the capacity to nourish life itself, and by extension, the very possibility of resistance. In 2026, after three years of active genocide in the Gaza strip, we are aware that, even for its own selfish reasons, Israel is no longer interested in minimizing casualties. However, the history behind the practice of intentional debilitation contextualizes the particular use of trying to reclaim motifs of body fragmentation in the play. 

    Opposing Western ideals that want the “civilised” body to remain closed, stable and clearly delimitated, the characters traverse the preconceived boundaries of the bodily form. Via the act of sewing different parts together, the play creates images of fragmented and reassembled bodies, where the stability of form has been transgressed, and the audience is invited to contemplate their otherness. The “paroxysmal” potential of the body is present, as the sewing of new animal members to humans offers them the possibility for new bodily operations. We also witness a deconstruction of the Western conception of the body as closed and individualized, allowing for a representation of an open collective one. By virtue of these narrative choices Wallace and Khalidi reject a notion of Western “civilization” that is capable of setting limits on bodies, but allows the continuation of a genocide. 

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Bibliography:

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Arya, Rina Abject Visions: Powers of Horror in Art and Visual Culture. Manchester

University Press, May 2016. 

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Carlson, Sarah. “Porous Bodies: Trans-corporeality and Passages of Becoming.”

Vol. 2. The EAAS Women’s Network Journal, 2019.

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Evangelou, Angelos “Dogs and the Politics of Illegal Border Crossings: Suad

Amiry’s Sharon and my Mother-in-law and Marios Piperides’s Smuggling       Hendrix.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol.60, Penn State University Press, 2023.

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Puar, Jasbir, K. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Duke University

Press, 2017.

 

Text by Georgia Theodosia Marini, Undergraduate Student in the English Language and Literature Department, UOA.