Dear Laila

“Dear Laila, you’re five years old and you’ve started asking me where I grew up and why we can’t go there. This is my attempt at an answer.”

The idea for this production was sparked by Basel’s five-year-old daughter, who began asking about the place where her father had grown up. Unable to show her in person, he set out to recreate it, building a model of his home in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus.

 Dear Laila shares the Palestinian experience of displacement and resistance through the story of a single family, exploring how war and exile are lived through everyday, domestic, and public spaces. This intimate, interactive installation, experienced by a single viewer at a time, uses storytelling and tactile elements to revive a place that has been destroyed and no longer exists.

Basel Zaraa is a Palestinian artist based in the UK who works with text, graffiti, and music, collaborating with international artists such as Akala, the Palestinian hip-hop group Katibeh Khamseh, and Tania El Khoury. His work engages the senses to convey experiences of exile and war, serving as a means to process the trauma experienced by his community. His current immersive, multi-sensory installation What Will We Do Without Exile? creates a vivid world inside a refugee tent and invites audiences to imagine life beyond occupation and war. The intimate, single-viewer installation Dear Laila, touring since 2022, uses storytelling to explore these themes and won the Audience Award at the 2023 Zurich Theatre Festival. Zaraa’s previous works include As Far As My Fingertips Take Me, created in collaboration with Tania El Khoury and awarded Outstanding Production at the 2019 Bessie Awards. His works have been presented on over fifty stages and festivals across five continents.

“This intimate artwork challenges the notion of camps of displaced people as a kind of purgatory and shows that they are physical places where people are born, die, live and love – where they also renovate and breed pigeons. A place of refuge can be the subject of nostalgia – and, as was traumatically the case in Yarmouk when civil war broke out in Syria: a place from which a family can be driven away again.”
— J. Kelly Nestruck, The Globe and Mail, Canada

Duration: 20 min

By Basel Zaraa
Commissioned by Good Chance Theatre, with support from Arts Council England
Translator and script editor: Emily Churchill Zaraa
Sound engineer: Pete Churchill
Production assistant: Ward Zaraa