Review by Fae Liesl Enchantee -- Divided World

[Eunice Geres]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Divided World" by Kenneth Pickering.]

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4 out of 4 stars

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Divided World: Plays of Occupation and Dispossession is a compilation of significant and thought-provocative plays depicting the life of the people who got trapped in the middle of the war because of powerful men with a twisted definition of peace instilled in their mind.

The collection consists of plays written by contemporary playwrights Hannah Khalil, Kate Al Hadid, and Hassan Abdulrazzak. The book started with a dialogue between Sykes and Picot, written by Kenneth Pickering, who also edited the whole collection. All the plays brought together in this collection serve to expose the reality of the life of people living in the middle eastern countries, the hardships of refugees, and the racism they are facing in the country they settled in.

I applaud the playwrights included in this book for writing such controversial themes that accurately depict the emotions and situations of the refugees and people still stuck in their country.

The editor, Kenneth Pickering, did a great job choosing the pieces to include in this collection. Every single play this book consists brought an understanding to my ignorant mind. It brought awareness in the part of the history that doesn’t get talked about in my country. It sheds light on the stories of refugees forced to leave their homeland behind to find some sort of security and peace away from the war. And every single play opened my mind to the current state of the middle eastern countries that war is happening right now, and yet nobody is doing anything to help those people stuck in a battle they didn’t want to be part of in the first place.

Every play included in this collection hurts me. It saddens me that somewhere in Syria, or any country with an ongoing war, there is a dreamer losing hope. It kills my heart, knowing that somewhere, a child is scared every day just because powerful countries back in the first world war decided to take charge of their own country.

While I anticipated profanities in these kinds of books, I didn’t expect multiple scenes of sexual harassment. These scenes just show how the playwrights aren’t afraid of showing the real events that happen in a war. They don’t care about how discomforting it would be for the audience. Their sole purpose is to make an impact on those who needed to understand that these horrible things do happen.

I would rate this book 4 out of 4 stars. I genuinely appreciate this novel, and it is something I would talk about with my friends who are also interested in these kinds of timely events. The stories are impactful and an eye-opener to those who reside in a secured country. In terms of technicalities, there’s nothing I didn’t like in this book. There's a minimal grammatical error, and the collection has logically arranged chapters. It started with a conversation about who gets what country, which is an excellent introduction to why there is a war. Then, the chapters progress to a short introduction to a particular playwright and the recognitions their plays received, and then their plays or monologue.

While this book would be fascinating by anyone interested in history and current affairs, I think this book would have a specific audience in the Muslim people who follows the Islamic religion. Some certain words or scenes show their tradition and religion, which people from other countries and other faiths wouldn’t comprehend.

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Divided World
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[Adanna Inya]

I read this body of work and I loved it. Beautiful review.