Playing 'Jesus' in Pakistan

The following article appeared in the February 2008 edition of The Dubliner magazine.

I think I can safely say that I'm the only Irish comedian stupid enough to perform a religious, political satire in a Muslim country under a state of emergency. And it all started at the Trinity Ball.

Eighteen months ago, I attended a performance-art piece in TCD by a visiting Pakistani academic, Fawzia Afzal-Khan. Perhaps not surprisingly, Bold and Beautiful: Speaking Out As a Muslim/Pakistani/American/Wo/Man Post 9/11 wasn't terribly well-attended. But it should have been. Fawzia came on stage in a burqa. As she started to dance, the folds opened to reveal that underneath she was wearing nothing but a bikini. It made quite an impression.

Afterwards, a discussion ensued about the performance, politics and post-colonialism. At the time, I was studying the history of South Asia so I didn't sound like a complete idiot. Unbeknownst to Fawzia, she had arrived on the day of the Trinity Ball, and the college had thoughtfully given her a room beside one of the main performance tents. As sleep was out of the question, I agreed to be her guide through the morass of drunken students, liggers and upcoming rock bands who apparently comprise the biggest private party in Western Europe.

During the evening, she told me about her theatre company. I said that I was working on a one-man show about Jesus Christ being detained at US immigration, because He's a bearded, Middle Eastern guy who wants to die as a martyr. She loved the idea, and offered to help me bring it to the US. We stayed in touch.

Then, last summer, while touring in Boston, I got an email asking if I would be interested in bringing Jesus: The Guantanamo Years to Fawzia's native Lahore. It would mean representing Ireland at the World Performing Arts Festival in Pakistan with a show about a Palestinian Jew, imprisoned in Cuba, by Americans. How could I refuse?

A month before I was due to travel, Benazir Bhutto returned from exile, and narrowly escaped death when her convoy was bombed. Two weeks later, President Musharraf declared a state of emergency. Citing the threat posed by Islamic terrorists, his government lost no time in arresting judges, lawyers and journalists. You may have seen the backlash on the evening news. There's something strangely compelling about a group of middle-aged lawyers, soberly dressed in suits and ties, throwing bricks at riot police.

"It's probably no different to visiting Cork or Galway during the Troubles," I told my parents. "If you watch the international news, the whole thing looks like a war zone. But everyday life is probably carrying on as normal."

I'm not sure who I was trying to reassure.

As it turned out, travelling to Lahore was exactly like visiting Cork or Galway during the Troubles: poor infrastructure, economic stagnation, rumours of political corruption… and incredibly friendly, hospitable people. Perhaps most Irish of all, everybody I spoke to had their own personal analysis of how Pakistan should overcome the current crisis.

The festival itself was held in an impressive redbrick amphitheatre, exotically illuminated, with a dozen large performance tents in the surrounding fields. The entrance was guarded by uniformed men with carbines and machine guns who made everyone walk through a metal detector. (This seemed odd, if alarming. I couldn't imagine that a performing-arts festival showcasing Pakistani singers and Czech puppeteers was a priority target for Al Qaeda.)

The festival was organised by a nucleus of bright, resourceful young women who had no qualms about barking instructions at men twice their age. On arrival, I reported to the main office just as a minor staff dispute was heating up. The bulk of the exchanges were conducted in Urdu, but every time someone wanted to interrupt and assert their authority, they would speak in English. "Stop and listen to me. This is serious..." Then back into high-speed Urdu. I wondered if it was a legacy of colonialism, or perhaps something their teachers did at school. Either way, English was clearly the language of domination.

Walking around as a white English-speaker in Pakistan is a slightly unreal experience. It's almost like being a minor celebrity. Strangers want to shake your hand, young women want to pose with you in photographs, everyone wants to be in your presence. At first you assume they want money, but it's deeper than that. Both purer and more convoluted.

Given what interfering Westerners have done to the region over the past 250 years, the locals would be perfectly entitled to shout verbal abuse and spit at you in the street. But they don't. It's one of those paradoxes of human nature. Announce yourself as an American in France – a country which the USA helped to liberate twice in the past century – and you'll come in for a torrent of abuse. Turn up as a Brit in Pakistan – a territory your ancestors exploited for generations – and you're welcomed as an honoured guest.

I told one of the organisers how welcoming I found the people. "No," she said, "we're just like that to white people." When we went into the performers' mess tent, I offered to get her a glass of water from a table in the corner.

"No," she replied. "A servant will get it."

I couldn't believe what she was saying. There was no one else in the tent, and the water bottles and glasses were no more than ten metres away. But she shouted for a servant, and one appeared to bring us water.

I was caught in the politically-correct equivalent of the offside trap. On the one hand, I wanted to protest at the inequality of the situation. On the other, I didn't want to impose my Western values on the local culture. So I acquiesced. It struck me that the more stratified a society, the easier it is to impose a dictatorship: if everyone feels they have a status in society which has to be protected, they're less likely to upset the established order.

It slowly dawned on me that all the bright young women running the festival were part of the same extended family. All of the older men they were shouting at had been born into humbler surroundings. So class, or perhaps clan, trumps gender – hardly surprising in a Muslim country which produced Benazir Bhutto.

During the emergency, the media were censored. My paper of choice was The Dawn, which was started by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. Never having read a censored newspaper before, I didn't know what to expect. The first thing I noticed was the sheer number of acronyms – a crude barometer for the political sophistication of a paper's readership. (You don't see many tabloids with headlines like: 'EC removes restrictions on PIA operations,' 'Two ex-MPAs part ways with PML-Q, embrace PPP.') Virtually every second headline in The Dawn contained at least one acronym.

I read articles challenging the international dominance of neo-liberal economics; analysing the importance of Pakistani civil society; and discussing the influence of Sufism on the works of William Shakespeare. One striking editorial declared that while the country's intelligentsia was preoccupied with the loss of civil liberties under the state of emergency, the real 'emergency' facing most Pakistanis was high inflation, exacerbating the rising cost of food.

Another piece, by an opponent of the government, declared:

"I was among the first to oppose this emergency and to demand 'give us back our country.' But what do we plan to do with it? There are the usual platitudes about improving education, helping the poor and stimulating the economy. But how do we actually plan to achieve that? This country faces serious difficulties – border disputes with Afghanistan and India, widespread corruption and an economy which cannot compete in the modern world. If we hope to take our country back, we need to have practical solutions to these problems."

In a country of 160 million, The Dawn has 170,000 readers. The journalists I read – like the people I spoke to – were all, by virtue of the fact that they spoke English, members of the educated elite. Unless I learned Urdu within 24 hours, and translated my entire show, this same elite would make up the bulk of my audience.

I was nervous about the show for three reasons. Firstly, in the Islamic tradition, Jesus is revered as a prophet. To depict him in a humorous context is technically blasphemous, and according to certain interpretations of Sharia Law, it's grounds for execution. My show was attacking Guantanamo, not Jesus. What could be less offensive to God than speaking up against torture? But all it takes is one fanatic. For the first time in my life, I didn't actively court publicity. As it turned out, Pakistan's journalists had slightly bigger stories to cover anyway.

The second reason to be anxious was the tense political climate. The Pakistani government was arresting people, without charge, and justifying its actions by highlighting the threat from terrorism. You don't need a PhD in international relations to realise that there's a parallel between the government's actions and what the Americans are doing in Guantanamo Bay.

I'd promised everyone back home that I wouldn't say anything which could get me into trouble. But the more I thought about it, the more ridiculous that seemed. The whole point of being a political comedian is to say things that could get you into trouble. What's the virtue of flying all the way to Pakistan, to complain about Guantanamo, if you don't take the opportunity to speak out about what's happening right in front of you?
Notwithstanding, I didn't want to be pointlessly provocative. And, like the journalist whose honesty I had so admired, I didn't have any clear understanding of how Pakistan could solve its many problems.

The third reason to be anxious was that the Pakistani audience might think I wasn't even remotely funny. Unlike puppetry, dance or instrumental music, comedy doesn't translate well. It's almost entirely linguistic – at least the way I do it. More than that, it relies on a network of cultural reference points, subtleties of inflection and linguistic gymnastics.

The more I thought about the comedy gulf between Ireland and America (both predominantly white, Anglophone nations) the more I started to think it was insane to have come to Pakistan. American audiences had only just been able to deal with my high-speed delivery and exotic Irish accent – and that was in Boston. With rising trepidation, I begged the English and Canadian performers to come to my first night. If nobody laughed, the whole thing would be a disaster.

To my immense relief, the Pakistani audience loved it. They hadn't seen much live comedy before, so the impact was all the greater. In all my fear about the blasphemy and political sensitivities, I had lost sight of the fact that the first 15 minutes of the show focuses on the misinterpretation of religion. 'Jesus' complains that his message of love and tolerance has been hijacked by joyless, judgemental fundamentalists. As the audience roared with laughter, I realised that everything I was saying about Christianity could be applied to Islam. Of course, as a Westerner, had I explicitly attacked Islam, or portrayed myself as 'Mohammed' instead of 'Jesus,' I might not have made it out alive. But satirising the flaws in Christianity allowed the Muslim audience to draw their own parallels.

In deference to religious sensibilities, I did drop one joke. In the original script, I had a line about Jesus feeling isolated – it's not easy being the only Jewish guy in a camp full of Muslims. At this point, an invisible choir of angels appear (and the technician plays the first few bars of Paul Simon's 'Call me Al' over the PA system). Jesus realises it's one of his Dad's embarrassingly bad puns: 'Call me Allah.' It's a crap joke. The only reason it's still there is to break the monotony of listening to me talk for 75 minutes. And to set up a better joke later on. But in Lahore, I dropped that bit entirely. Pakistanis hate Paul Simon.

On the second night, I decided to take the plunge and talk about the ongoing state of emergency. But I wanted to avoid sounding like a Californian tourist in 1970s Belfast, asking, "How come you guys can't all get along together?" So, towards the end of the show, I told the audience, "I know many of you are wondering whether there is a message here for Pakistan. I have to tell you, I've been reading the papers and studying the history of your country, and there is only one thing I know for sure. What Pakistan does not need is another white English-speaker from the West telling you how to run your country.

"Some people think there's a parallel between what's happening in Pakistan right now and what happens in Guantanamo – where innocent people are imprisoned, without trial, under anti-terrorism laws. But there is another way of looking at this. The Americans have locked up 15-year-old children and poor people who can't speak English. At least in Pakistan, you have the decency to lock up judges and lawyers who know how to defend themselves."

There was one line which I left out of the festival (but performed later at a private party). I didn't want to get my hosts in trouble. Their festival has been running for 15 years. It began as an international puppet festival, and has since expanded to include music, dance and theatre. Through all the difficulties Pakistan has faced in those 15 years, Musharraf has been one of the festival's most consistent supporters. Which isn't terribly surprising, given that he's an international puppet.

No, I didn't say that in public. I'm not that stupid.

An online audio version of Jesus: The Guantanamo Years is now available to download at www.MySpace.com/AbieLaughs

Launches on iTunes March 17, 2008.