August 10, 2013
By Francis Sadac
A play like Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Invasion!, currently receiving a blistering Chicago premiere at Silk Road Rising, which focuses on how people use words to differentiate, segregate, define and re-define Arabs as the other is vital and critical. It is a provocative play that will make some people squirm in their seats, as they should!, but it is essential viewing.
Khemiri, son of a Tunisian father and a Swedish mother and raised multi-racial in heterogeneously white Scandinavia, has very potent, cuts-close-to-the-bone things to say. Khemiri writes some pretty damn powerful scenes. It is powerful, breathtaking stuff. Khemiri blazingly drives home the point that it is our words, words we have control of, that we use to define and disenfranchise. [Invasion!] hooks us in, leading us to stare, riveted, at the ferocious, unsettling world Khemiri’s words have created.