BY SHEILA REGAN
Thursday, August 27, 2015
When she looks back at her memories of Somalia’s Civil War, performance artist Ifrah Mansour remembers playing in broken tanks with her siblings. As a child that was simply the place she lived. She remembers having fun and all the joys that childhood brings, despite the unst able world she lived in.
Loosely based on her own experiences, How to have fun in a Civil War, is a solo piece reflecting on how a child experiences war. Her story speaks to those of her generation; people who were children during that unsettled time, and remember it differently than their parents.
“Our history is being told as one sad sob story,” she says. “It’s told from the elders’ perspective of the war and their version of the history.”
Those elders are the ones who remember a peaceful Somalia before the war, and the pain of seeing that world torn apart. For Mansour and others her age, all she remembers growing up as the war was taking place.
“I remember my mom would call us inside to play,” she says, recalling the bombs that were dropping near them. “I can’t even imagine her feelings and emotions then.” Mansour’s memories are much more innocent; she was having fun.
In the play, which will be performed at the Minnesota State Fair, Mansour narrates her experience in the style of Diary of a Wimpy Kid or Home Alone.
“The narrator is a kid, and they tell what is happening from the perspective of their miniature small world. It capitalizes on the child’s innocence and the child’s ability to create their own world,” Mansour says.
Born in Saudia Arabia in the late 1980s, Mansour moved to Somalia prior to the war and lived there for four years before moving to Kenya and then the United States.
Last December, Mansour was waiting for a friend while doing a writing exercise from a prompt that she had found online. When her friend arrived, Mansour showed her what she had written, and her friend said that it was something she should develop into a larger piece.
She showed the work to Maren Ward from the Bedlam Theater, who responded that she should rehearse it, and Mansour eventually took the work to a conference Grand Forks. From there, she’s worked with a number of other collaborator to put it all together and has performed the piece at Bedlam and a number of other places around the Twin Cities.
The piece is about 10 minutes, but Mansour eventually wants to extend it to a full length work. At the Minnesota State Fair, she’ll be showing the short version, followed by information panels providing more information about Somalia. Mansour will also be handing out bookmarks that give more history and information about Somalia. She wanted to add the “Somalia on a Stick” information because the show itself is told without many details. That was an artistic choice, as she wanted it to be universal so that people from, say, Palestine or Uganda might recognize their own experience. The "Somalia on a Stick" will give additional context for Fair-goers who don’t know much about East Africa.
So far, Mansour has gotten a lot of positive feedback when she’s performed the work. After one show, a man from East Africa (not Somalia), who went through a Civil War with his children, said he always assumed his children’s experiences were exactly like his. Her piece helped show how different generations might share the same tragic experiences but have vastly different perspectives on them.
Mansour began doing theater work four years ago. She was about to finish her teaching degree when she landed a job at Mixed Blood. “I was supposed to promote [theater] to the community and ended up promoting it to myself,” she says.
So she’s been creating theater around town ever since at places like Bedlam, Patrick’s Cabaret, and Intermedia Arts. In addition to creating work, Mansour is also very invested in turning the Somali community onto theater.
“It’s just a little foreign,” she says, but it’s getting better. “I used to get hate mail, and now I get love mail.” Just recently, she performed for a large East African audience, and was delighted when many people came up to her after the show to say how much they appreciated it.
How to Have Fun in a Civil War performs on the hour from 3 to 6 p.m. August 30 through September 1. Educational Building Courtyard at the Minnesota State Fair