In an abrupt turn of events, 12 Syrian women slated to star in an adaption of a Euripides tragedy produced by journalist Charlotte Eagar, filmmaker William Stirling, and Syrian director Omar Abu Saada to be staged at Georgetown in late September have been denied visas by the U.S. Department of State. The Department cited the women’s status as refugees in Jordan and fears they will refuse to leave the U.S. as reason for barring their entry.
The adaptation, entitled Syria: The Trojan Women, reimagines Euripides’ 2,500 year-old work that explores the fate of several women fleeing the city of Troy after its surrender to the invading Greek army tasked with rescuing the kidnapped Helen. The parallels to the ongoing Syrian civil war are brutally apt: a homeland riven by conflict, mounting civilian casualties, with women especially caught in the middle.
The reasons to be disappointed in the State Department’s decision to deny the Syrian women visas span disciplines as diverse as security studies and feminism. Given an apparent U.S. policy void in response to the increasingly aggressive tactics of the terrorist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria—which as of Tuesday included the brutal murders of captive journalists Jim Foley and Steven Sotloff—and the Syrian conflict’s widespread disappearance from headlines, an artistic protest has a resonant potential to prompt meaningful dialogue that has been forfeited.
Through its Theater of the Oppressed-inspired preoccupation with the identities of its participants, the play, which has already been performed in Jordan and was scheduled to premier at Columbia University after Georgetown, makes a remote subject both immediate and corporeal. It is easy to forget the suffering of people halfway around the globe, but it is harder to do so when they’re standing right in front of you.
As NPR has noted, the move also threatens the women’s ability to share their stories with an audience that needs to hear them. Georgetown students and the D.C. community as a whole, whose internationalism is surpassed only by their attention to the news, should lament this missed opportunity to pay host and witness to a critical discourse on an ongoing humanitarian crisis with both political and existential dimensions.
As of this printing, the future of Syria: The Trojan Women, like the future of Syria itself, remains unclear. In a conflicted region in which women’s voices are often silenced as a matter of course—and in which their media presence is not nearly as prominent as that of ISIS—the State Department’s decision has shackled an essential, moving, and, above all, courageous act of liberation.
