RAMALLAH — Wearing traditional costumes and dancing the traditional dabke, a dozen male and female actors move across the stage dominated by an image of a white horse. For the last two months, Ramallah-based Wishah Popular Dance Troupe has been performing a musical inspired by one of the cornerstones of Palestinian literature: Ibrahim Nasrallah’s “Time of White Horses.”

In the novel, Nasrallah — winner of the 2018 Arab Fiction Award — weaves the saga of a Palestinian family by starting toward the end of the Ottoman rule in Palestine and continuing all the way to the Nakba, the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. With its tapestry of traditions, values, conflicts and alliances, the novel provides a strong narrative of the history and identity of the Palestinians. The relationship between Khaled, a young man from the village of Hadiya, and his white mare becomes a symbol of descending tyranny with one colonizer after the other attempting to take control of the lands and Khaled’s most treasured possession, his horse.

The musical, called “Khayl” — which means "horse" in Arabic — takes only one of the stories of the multigenerational novel. It revolves around Khaled, the main character who lives in the village of al-Hadiya in the district of Haifa, where hard living conditions are further coupled with high taxes demanded by the Sublime Porte. When the villagers refuse to pay their taxes, armed Ottoman gendarmeries arrive to confiscate their properties. The soldiers try to take Khaled’s horse as well, but the protagonist stands up to them with a rifle in hand, ready to escape the village on horseback and become a fighter.

The musical, performed in Ramallah last March and at Lourdes University in Ohio this April, consists of 21 musical scenes all performed with traditional dabke and lyrics based on the novel and sung by a chorus.