Nawwar Bulbul’s Love Boat as a Testament to History and Memory

This paper examines Nawwar Bulbul’s Love Boat (2016) which follows members of a Syrian theatre troupe who fled Syria during the Syrian Civil War. Through the troupe’s personal narratives, the play reveals an awful past and unknown present, as interpreted through Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity. By parodying European texts and juxtaposing them with lived testimonies of Syrian and Palestinian refugees, Bulbul transforms the stage into a testament to history and memory, where individual trauma intersects with collective dispossession. The paper tries to find an answer to the following research questions: How does Nawwar Bulbul’s Love Boat embody Bauman’s concepts in Liquid Modernity (2000) and Strangers at our Door (2016) in its depiction of refugees’ precarious lives? How does Love Boat use a plethora of techniques to represent memory and history of displacement? How does the performance serve as a testament to history and memory, linking the Syrian refugee crisis to the earlier dispossession of the Palestinians?