Amena Shehab's and Joanna Blundell's Collaboration Across the World

Amena Shehab and Joanna Blundell

by Amena Shehab and Joanna Blundell

No Woman’s Land comes from the friendship between two women who met while living in the Middle East while working for Al Jazeera, the Arab world’s major media network. 

We met while living on the same compound and became close friends fast! Anyone who knows Amena knows this is how it goes! After six months of Arabic lessons, and lots of Google translate, we went to Syria together with Amena’s one-year-old daughter in tow. We visited the ancient Roman cities of Busra and Palmyra, a Christian nunnery and many, many of Amena’s friends and relatives. We became each other’s guides to our respective cultures.

One year later almost exactly, the Syrian war broke out in 2011. We sat together watching what the global media called the first televised revolution. This play was conceived there; two women, one from the East working as a theater producer, now living a war through her family back home in Syria; one from the West, working as a TV news producer covering a war that felt close to home, for the first time.

Years later, with Amena living in Canada, and Joanna back in the UK, we started writing, both looking for creative outlets as we faced big transitions in our lives. 

We worked via Google Drive and Facetime, long before the global pandemic made this the norm! To add to the challenge, it is at least a seven-hour time difference! Joanna visited Amena in Canada twice in the following years and they tried to work in a friend’s cabin in BC in spring and also in Amena’s basement in January snows. The basement was more productive!

We collaborate on all aspects of the play, working to our strengths and supporting each other. We both feel that we could not write this play with any other person, it was co-created from shared experience.

We also have a deep motivation to break archetypal portraits of women in war.

Amena was born in a refugee camp in Syria to Palestinian refugees, then became a refugee herself, a mother who came to Canada with three children. 

We want to show how war can break up families and societies, but also how it can reveal radical strength, drive and the ability to adapt. 

We are also exploring the tension inherent in differing world views and experiences. Both of us, while living away from our home countries, have experienced both the ‘cognitive dissonance’ of being among a foreign culture, when seemingly reasonable people say things that seem impossible to understand.

We’re also interested in the idea of privilege - the lottery of being born in a certain place and time. It can be hard to accept each other when experience can be so far apart. But even at the height of the war and refugee crisis, we found common ground in our shared passions.

We have both studied the ancient plays and been fascinated by their eternal stories, Amena at the High Institute of Arts in Damascus, and Joanna as part of her Classics degree at Durham University in England. Joanna also has studied Arabic and knows the rhythm and culture of the language.

We lived together in the East and apart in the West and through it all, our friendship has thrived. We are convinced we will keep writing and talking and traveling together for the rest of our lives.