Haunted by Lost Home
Depicting the Last Moments Before Exile
Lara AlMalakeh
MA Thesis Comparative Cultural Analysis Dr. Kasia Mika
Table of Contents
Background ... 3
Introduction ... 6
Overview and Approach ... 9
Preliminary Grounding ... 12
Chapter I: Home as the Impossible Imperative ... 17
Home, the Congenial Place ... 17
Home, the Prison ... 22
Home, the Haunting ... 30
Chapter II: Challenged Identity and Reflexive Precarity ... 37
Displacement and the Futility of Citizenship... 38
Composite Identity and the Complexities of Denial and Rejection ... 44
Alienation, Othering and Reflexive Precarity ... 51
Conclusion ... 60
Lara AlMalakeh Dr Kasia Mika CCA Master Thesis 13 June 2018
Haunted by Lost Home
Depicting the Last Moments Before Exile Background
A revolution, turned civil war, turned blood bath, has been unfolding in Syria before the eyes of the world since 2011. With all international and regional media outlets banned by the Syrian regime from the early days, activists and people on the ground resorted to their phones and the internet to transmit their narrative to the world through images, as a primary medium. What was conveyed to the world was not only the narrative of a revolution, but gradually a chilling account of, mainly, state led annihilation, as dense, immediate and horrifying as never documented before. Reporters, news channels and individuals resorted to those images and videos as means of information, in the absence of any alternative media other than the state’s. However, such videos were not only informative. In light of the impossibility of physical existence on almost any geographical piece of Syrian land throughout the past seven years, these images also supplied the main raw material for the documentary film industry.
Documentaries present factual information through various, industry specific parameters, such as visual stability, image clarity and reliance on interviews. However, the emergence, circulation and ‘industrial’ use of the images that sprung out of, among others, the Syrian uprising and the Arab Spring, more generally, caused certain shifts in
those parameters of documentary filmmaking. Documentary industry was already undergoing heuristic changes, especially in the field of the factuality of the image, imposed by the proliferation of cell phone camera; a notion that Steyerl calls “the uncertainty principle of modern documentarism”. In parallel, Demos phrases this uncertainty as “the truth-value of the image [being] newly placed in doubt” (xvii). The media stemming from the Syrian conflict, with its shaky scenes, grainy images and subjective personal accounts, rendered that ‘uncertainty’ the criterion of the “new factuality” in Syrian uprising documentaries, operating within the paradigms of “emergency cinema” (Elias 19).
Emergency cinema is a term coined by the Syrian film collective AbouNaddara; a collective of anonymous Syrian filmmakers, who translate activism into short videos that depict sociopolitical nuances of the conflict. The collective explains emergency cinema as an adoption of the notions of disturbance and intervention: “disturbing the machine that maintains the rules of the emergency situation, especially the rules of the film and media industries, and inventing new rules of representation” (Bayoumi). This is especially true in the sphere of Syrian cinema, which is practically non-existent, so much so that Salti describes the prevailing attitude towards it as “to speak of Syrian cinema, as a national cinema, smacks of hubris.” (“Critical Nationals” 1). Since 1963, the cinema industry in Syria has been controlled by the National Film Organization (NFO), an arm of the Ministry of Culture. The NFO was, therefore, in complete and systematic adherence to the ideology and the subsequent censorship of the Syrian regime. Despite the repression, Syrian filmmakers such as Omar Amiralay, Nabil AlMaleh and Ossama Mohamed continued to make critical films that have never left the shelves of the NFO.
Such films were only screened in international film festivals where they did receive high acclaim; however, never in Syria (Van de Peer). As such, those filmmakers were rendered dissidents to the regime, and some had to live in exile as a result.
Taking charge of Syrian cinema sphere, at the onset of the revolution, was therefore an act of emancipation. Syrian filmmakers, who were previously halted by the endless restrictions and political prosecution of the despotic regime in Syria, embarked on their cinematic projects, where the very act of making film was, in fact, an act of resistance. Many of the films produced following the Syrian uprising aimed at depicting the struggle and documenting significant narratives (Elias and Omareen). Among some of the notable Syrian documentaries that received special recognition were Slivered Water: Syria Self Portrait (2014) by Paris based director Ossama Mohamed, which presented a cinematic collage of various visual street testimonies and registers posted online by Syrians living the nightmare; The War Show (2016) by Obaidah Zytoon, which presented a footage spontaneously filmed by hand-held cameras, and was rather a compilation of video journals of Zytoon’s; The Return to Homs (2013) by Talal Derki, which follows the unfortunate ‘evolution’ of a famous football star turned armed revolutionary leader in the city of Homs; and Haunted (2014) by German based playwright and filmmaker Liwaa Yazji, the focus of this thesis. The film, which Yazji shot while she was still living in the Levant, between Damascus and Beirut in 2014, presents calm, yet emotionally charged, interviews with Syrians who have lost, or are in the process of losing, their homes. In the following pages, I attempt to expose the subtleties of loss presented by the characters narrating their stories before the camera, and look into the interrelation between such loss and identity.
Introduction
In the time of Steyerl’s uncertainty as an ever growing feature in documentary filmmaking, scholars and professionals are asking contemporary questions on the effects of digital platforms in documentaries, the resulting shifts in evaluating the impact of documentaries and the role of the new legitimization of subjectivity in “giving voice to the previously excluded and confronted norms of objectivity haunting the documentary” (Mukherjee 115). The contemporary scene of ascribing new cinematic aesthetics to documentary as a genre inherently confined by factuality as an instrumental function, and the context of a globally watched war, inflicted a shift in the receipt, critique and empirical evaluation of the films mentioned earlier, blurring the lines between the aesthetical and the ethical. These films have received some analysis in few scholarly texts, articles and cultural debates. But thus far, approaches have been mainly cinematic, discussing the formal features such as angles, frames, scripts, narration and composition; analyzing the modes of representation and evaluating the authenticity and credibility of mobile filmed accounts. In the scene of Syrian documentary art, certain reflective questions remain open, such as the contextual reading of the accounts portrayed in film; a thematic approach that looks beyond the scenes to establish, or theorize, a broader view of conceptual elements and discerned notions put forward. An approach that delineates and materializes the intangible, the unspoken and the unseen directly through the screen. This is where this contextual analysis of Haunted is situated.
The dissertation’s approach suggests a much needed outline, a macro view, into sociopolitical aspects and moral questions that the Syrian conflict raises. This approach is especially needed in light of the current challenges to moderate and reasonable voices
around the Syrian matter, as complicated by Syrian migrations, mainly to Europe. The arguments in this dissertation attempt to (re)frame Syrians as part of a bigger human population by analyzing their experiences as human experiences of loss and forced displacement, and the subsequent shifts in their various relationships to, and conceptualization of, home and the Other. In so doing, the thesis adds a piece of the puzzle in drawing an outline of the Syrian crisis away from rubble and excavated corpses, into the living who are forced to venture on migratory journeys to the unknown.
The dissertation, across its two chapters, investigates the underlying topographies of a desperate relationship with a home that is in the process of being lost, as complicated by war and imminent departure. The analysis looks closely into how those topographies, as they unfold, affect and reinscribe certain elements of identity. This is done in an attempt to answer how the problematized connection with lost home reflects on identity’s signifiers, and hence problematizes, permanently, the migrant’s conceptualization of home and the Other, before the migratory journey even begins. The analysis tackles the state of uncertainty that is a constituent of any migratory journey, by reflecting on the Syrian experience as a site for inquiry. A light will be shed on suspension as a transcendental experience inversely anchored in the materialistic of everyday life, as it forms within a temporal frame of ‘last moments’ before leaving home. The aim is to theorize the characteristics that shape, and inform, the phase that precedes the migratory journey; what I term ‘episode zero’ of the trip of migrancy.
In the first chapter, the analysis close reads intervals from Haunted along a diachronic axis that depicts the subtle changes in the characters’ various modes of attachment to home. The focus encapsulates the variables resulting from losing home in
the rush of escaping death. This is achieved by delving deeper, layer by layer, into the ‘evolvement’ of a rather troubled bonding with the living space as a result of disturbances inflicted by arms and siege. The chapter contextualizes the film’s portrayal of a gradual decay in relationship with space, turning it from the familiar place to the open prison, and then to the insistent ghost of the place. In the analysis of Haunted I argue how the disappearance of home as a familiar ground and congenial environment is bound to instigate a transformation in the individual’s approaches to home and the Other.
In the second chapter, I reflect the disturbances in the relationship with home on uninvited shifts in the terrains of identity and the relationship to home as an identitarian signifier. There, I investigate certain experiences, as narrated by the characters in the documentary, to interrogate the tension between suspension and belonging and the politics of citizenship as experienced in a rather unconventional manner. The analysis looks further, beyond the spoken, and into the divulged experiences of rejection and denial the characters reveal in their personal testimonies, and which unravel the troubled connotations of spatial fluidity and Othering; adversely shading, as such, the onset migratory journey.
Through the analysis of the transformed relationship to home in a time of conflict and severe stress, and in reflecting these transformed modes of attachment onto certain identitarian signifiers, the thesis resolves the state of rejection, denial and reflexive precarity that characterize episode zero of the journey of exile. Through analyzing the cinematic language and approaches in Haunted, the thesis also highlights a differentiated, more liberated representations of the Syrian people the film proposes.
Overview and Approach
The film’s title almost immediately engages Jacques Derrida’s take on the ghosts of the past, which he suggested in a political critique in Spectres of Marx. Derrida situates his notion of hauntology, through deconstruction’s bifurcations, in the conjuncture of various disciplines and multiple interpretations. Spivak, for her part, regards hauntology as an ancestral influence that is conjured as a token for hope in a certain future. While for Abraham and Torok’s, phantoms serve as a type of transgenerational communication (Davis 374). However, reading through the object, I don’t approach hauntology from such a post-structuralism perspective, but rather as a state of oscillation between what is present and what is not, what is dead and what is alive (373). Once lost, those homes, the memories of them and in them, the tangible belongings they harbor, haunt their inhabitants with guilt, missing and fear of the state of homelessness.
To tackle the depth of the notions of loss and home, I refer to postcolonialism’s multifaceted approaches to home and displacement, as they present a number of thematic parallels with my approach to disturbed relationship between home and identity. Insofar as the colonial experience is one of transformed spaces, where home is irrevocably dispossessed and community is changed (Le Blanc 240), the postcolonial modes of analysis offer frameworks that are suitably nuanced for my contextual close reading of Haunted. Of those frameworks, I deploy three thematic lines that serve as axes of analysis in this dissertation: identity, time and image. The analysis negotiates with postcolonial approaches to identity (Bhabha), in their depiction of the complexities and shifts in identity that are inflicted by a hegemonic power, whether this power is the colonizer, the dictatorship or, in this case, an armed conflict. The analysis also reflects on
postcolonial theorization of time (Guha), from the angles of ‘before’ and ‘after’, and how time suffers interruption and discontinuity in the discourse of migrancy. Finally, the analysis approaches the cinematic form of Haunted through the modalities of postcolonial cinema (van de Peer) that liberate the image, as well as the represented subject, as I expand on below.
As the moments of looming displacement are introduced visually, as well as narratively, the analysis looks closely at the intersection of the narrated story and the image proposal the film offers. Haunted is located in a somewhat novel area of cinematic documentary as mentioned earlier. As the film presents stories of loss, displacement and exile in a liberated and novel cinematic language, it operates within the paradigms of postcolonial cinema. Romeo theorizes postcolonial cinema as a lens, rather than a genre, that is not connected to a specific space or time, but one that is concerned with “presenting subjectivities, epistemologies produced and aesthetics created – and how all this is relevant in a cultural and political perspective” (238). As such, this cinema addresses the blurred binaries of time and space, which are recurring elements in Haunted, whether through the characters’ utterance, or by aesthetical choices of the director, which are discussed further in the following pages. Also, just as postcolonial cinema “revolves around notions of ‘time’ and ‘space’” and “reposition[s] the past in the present” (239), it evokes the concept of hauntology of the past as it shapes the present and projects heavily on the future. The dissertation close reads certain cinematic tropes in Haunted in light of van de Peer’s calls for a deeper understanding of the conversation the film offers between the filmmaker, the emancipated subject and the responsible
spectator (299). As such, analytical approaches of postcolonial film adequately address the cinematic vocabulary of Haunted.
As the analysis investigates the complexities of home/identity dichotomy that the characters of Haunted experience, it relies, in addition to postcolonial approaches, on Maalouf’s conceptualization of identity. Maalouf theorizes identity as a mosaic of the various elements and allegiances at play in one’s life. He also warns against the calls for giving supremacy to one of those elements over the rest, which normalized social approaches have been imposing so far. An example of such is asking an Algerian French what she ‘really’ is, an Algerian or a French, while she is, in fact, a combination of both. In his theorization of identity, where he counter-argues such normalization, he proposes two orthogonal axes of identification, along which identity affiliations are located. The vertical axis pertains to an ancestral, rather exclusionary heritage, whilst the horizontal one denotes a connection with the Other due to shared contemporaneity. The analysis problematizes the ‘symptoms’ of dislocation experienced by the characters in Haunted along those axes of identification. Within those same terrains of identitarian shifts, citizenship is questioned against Bhabha’s discourse on political identity, within the realms of power of the colonial and the struggle for agency of the colonized.
Theory and relevant literature on home and identity, in the context of migration, often use the triad of ‘migrant, refugee, exile’. However, to remain sincere to the personal experiences of the characters, I restrict the vocabulary use to ‘migrant’ and ‘exile’. I use both terms interchangeably, to denote the persons on the verge of, or those who have just suffered, a loss of the place called home. Those who are living through the bitter, gradual realization of their ‘transformation’ into people forced to start an unknown journey:
a migrant; a person who did not have the luxury of choice on whether to stay or leave; an exile, someone “prevented from returning home” (Said, “Reflections on Exile” 143).
In this dissertation, I theorize episode zero of the migratory journey: the last moments before embarking on the forced voyage. To that very end, I refrain from using the term ‘refugee’. This is necessary to dislodge the analysis from the specific connotations that accompany the term, especially in the context of the Syrian conflict. It is because this thesis does not aim to analyze the journey of refugees, as a political, humanitarian and social phenomenon, which, despite being an urgent matter in our time, does not align with the thesis’s approach to the state of suspension of the Syrian exile on the onset of dislocation. In addition, other visible notions in Haunted, such as trauma, memory and nostalgia may be referred to as illuminating signifiers in few intervals in the analysis, but without extended analysis. This is done in the interest of academic focus, where the analytical approach works on dissecting the two tightly bound notions of home and identity. The analysis, thus, unravels what lies beneath the surface, one layer at a time, through the ‘testimonies’ of the characters, presented within a specific cinematic language in the documentary Haunted. In mediating the experiences of the characters, the director offers aesthetic choices that dislocate these testimonies from their local context, attempting to render the experiences of the subjects universal. This is why a preliminary grounding of the analysis is necessary.
Preliminary Grounding
Apart from its contemporary play on various mediums of the image (mobile camera, cinematic shots and video calling scenes), as is discussed further in the analysis, and its attempt to give agency to the disempowered subjects in an armed conflict, Haunted aims
to shed a light on the human condition of homely suspension, thus situating its narrative in the world. In an interesting aesthetical choice, the director omits any references to names, locations or dates, apart from a couple of intervals where dates were uttered to situate the documentary within a broad timeframe. The only names inferred through the conversations are those of the couple Rufaida and Abboud. This omission reflects ontologically on the situatedness of the characters in the film: the exiles are nameless. The name, that is one of the very first elements of identity in one’s life, becomes an unimportant detail in reference to the migrant, who is immediately indexed within the normalized frames of reference to ethnicity, nationality, religion and gender, among others. Also by neglecting to mention the location, the director unbinds the documentary from specific references to the Syrian conflict. As the interviewees share their innermost thoughts, the viewer is given the opportunity to connect with the utterance, bond with the visual representation and work on forming a subjective understanding of connections; thus placing the documentary on the larger map of corporeal displacement and war inflicted loss and migration.
Interestingly, though, the director does not endeavor to obscure or conceal any such references either, but allows them to appear organically in the conversations. Some are direct, such as references to locations in Damascus, other cities and towns in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, others are more implicit, such as the professions of the interviewees. This offers a play on the tension between the absolute dislocation discussed earlier, and the tantalizing invitation to anchor these experiences somewhere. However, rather than enforcing any such locality in the documentary, the director leaves the viewer to discern reference points as they appear, organically and implicitly. The floating
ambiguity, neither revealed, nor concealed, offers a multilayered, subjective cinematic experience, reducing, at times, the space between the viewer and the screen; a notion that will be addressed further in the following pages.
On an extratextual level, the omission of the location aligns with the precarity of the subjects, and the state of suspension of home they are witnessing. It actually seems almost arbitrary to mention a location, as those exiles carry home with them as a nostalgic, romantic and impossible notion. As much as this lack of reference points demonstrate a novel cinematic approach in documentary films, it introduces certain challenges to the analysis. These challenges are overcome by creating references to the characters for clarity.
The documentary presents the stories of few main subjects who appear in the majority of the scenes, and few others whose narrative is supplementary and less focused. The main characters in the documentary are the middle-aged couple Rufaida and Abboud, who get suddenly imprisoned in their home on the frontline of the armed conflict. The only access the director had to them was through video calls, which she filmed through the computer screen. The viewer follows their journey which represents the main ‘storyline’ in the documentary, running over the, almost, two hours of the film’s duration. Through their journey, the viewer witnesses the escalation of their fear, which they constantly deny, yet express implicitly and vividly. The film presents their disturbed relationship with their home, as their initial, rather sarcastic, approach to the matter of escaping the siege turns into their desperate attempts to flee. Rufaida and Abboud’s comprehension of loss develops slowly, but steadily, giving their story certain primacy in
the analysis. Giving Rufaida and Abboud’s story center stage in the documentary assigns their narrative prevalence, thus anchoring the film around their transformative experience.
The other main character is the Palestinian Man1 whose family is originally from Palestine, living in Syria as refugees following the 1948 Nakba, and who has witnessed more forced nomadism than anyone should ever experience. Through the narration of his parents’ denial of the severe loss they suffered, yet again, a light is shed on the issue of rootlessness, irreversible suspension and denial of reality. The third main character is the Smiling Man, owing to the big smile constantly on his face, who seems to be a writer or an artist, and for whom loss is his inability to salvage his books and notebooks. Through the narration of his feelings about the now, the ‘future him’ and the ‘past him’, time stops and is sucked into a black hole. Although his suspension is yet to come, he anticipates, with great anxiety, the resulting fracture in his perception of the self.
Lastly, and in a very polemic story, the documentary presents the Golan Man, a writer whose family is based in the Golan Heights, the South Western part of Syria which has been occupied by Israel since the 1970s. The Golan Man is forced to make a conscious decision on either staying in his rented apartment in Damascus, which he had called home for the past 12 years, or go back to his family in the occupied Golan Heights, within the Israeli territory, and lose any ability he would possibly have to return to Syria, as he will become – by force – an Israeli citizen. His story reveals great tension in the notion of political identity: apart from the war scene he is fleeing, he has to face the irresolvable polemics of citizenship and political ‘belonging’.
*****
To reiterate what I have introduced in the preceding pages, this dissertation departs from contextualizing the documentary Haunted, addressing the polemics of a future that is haunted by the loss of a major identitarian signifier which is the home, both house and country. The analysis navigates from the suspension, through the fissures of identity to investigate the reflections of loss on certain elements of personal identification, while characters are trying to comprehend the loss of a part of the self which they left behind in the burning home, and all while being haunted, adversely, by a past that can never be again. I attempt to locate those notions of loss and identity, as they push and pull perceptions and suspension of the exile towards, or against, ancestral heritage and re-formation of home. By tackling the migratory journey, which temporally takes place before the physical corporeal movement, the thesis attempts to theorize the characteristics of episode zero of the migratory suspension.
The following chapter introduces the stories of the characters, along a time-bound change in their perception and modes of attachment to home. The analysis depicts key intervals in Haunted to close read, contextually and visually, how the relationship with home is forced into certain shifts inscribed by the ongoing conflict.
Chapter I
Home as the Impossible Imperative
In this chapter, I analyze home as a notion complicated by loss, within the context of war, as presented in Haunted. The analysis follows the progression of the key characters as they verbally, through their informal conversations with the director, discuss their imminent displacement. This displacement acts as an imperious that accelerates a rather problematic evolvement of their situatedness with regards to home. The analysis anchors the notion of home within three diachronic terrains: home, the congenial place; home, the prison and home, the haunting. The argument aims to unearth the various modes of attachment the characters form with home as a notion, and arrive at an understanding of the ways in which loss and contestation of home instigate a negative transformation in this relationship. The analysis draws on scholarly approaches to the various dimensions of the notion of home from different discourses: deconstructionist, postcolonial, poststructuralist and ethnic studies, to interrogate the layered networks of connection the subjects have formed with the spaces they inhabit. The chapter highlights an area located on the nexus of subjects’ chronological development and a relationship to home complicated by siege and loss.
Home, the Congenial Place
“Is it true you cleaned the house fully?2” the director asks Rufaida, through their recorded video call, surprised since the moment of escape was scheduled that night. “I cleaned it because I love it”, was Rufaida’s answer [0:08:17], trying to explain her irrational action of cleaning the house before a departure with indefinite return. Away from being simplistic,
Rufaida describes her strong connection with home, using the simple word of love. Rufaida acts driven by love, translated in caring for the place she calls home, despite her knowledge of the futility of such an act in light of the upcoming departure. What’s more, is the high probability of this house being partially or completely destroyed; a fact that Rufaida tries to ignore. The act of cleaning, hence, plays a symbolic role in denoting the bonding that is formed with the space beyond its physical qualities and the material needs of its inhabitants. What Rufaida refers to as love is the ties that she has established with the place she, and her family, have inhabited for a long time.
The implicit expressions of love of home continue, as at minute [0:20:45] Abboud takes the camera on a tour in his, soon to be, abandoned house. He shoots a wall, where the barely legible names of him and the rest of the family members are engraved. The film doesn’t offer further context: do those inscriptions belong to the family’s early days in the house, when they first painted the walls? The viewer does not know. However, the shaky scene of the names on the walls, as visually disturbed by the pixilation of Abboud’s continuous movement in his attempt to capture the wall through the narrow angle of his mobile camera, brings to the fore the memory of home videos of children’s writings on the walls, as they experiment their first steps and their first grip of crayons. A child-art that many parents preserve, cherish and resort to to retrieve memories of the childhood of their offspring. In the following scene, Abboud moves the viewer to his daughter’s room, showing a picture of hers when she was young, glued to the side of the mirror. He pics it up so as to pack it and give it to her when – and if – he manages to escape the siege and see her. Their home is the amiable haven, which stands witness of a life made and lived. It is the witness of the generational progression of this family. The home is, thus, a
metonym of an ancestral space that has been historically bound with and through its inhabitants; a place where the subjects are rooted.
In the house of the Golan Man, the camera exposes an untidy, and a rather old dwelling space, in which the Golan Man moves freely, and sometimes even anxiously, as his conversation with the director delves deeper into the inner enclaves of his feelings of loss and imminent departure. The Golan Man pensively utters: “all my dreams and thoughts are here” [0:04:49]. During the course of the conversation, it is understood that he is a tenant; so he does not own the apartment in which he lives. However, he has been residing in the same house since his arrival in Damascus 12 years earlier. Despite the temporariness of his tenancy of the place, and the fact that he lives in a city that is not his homeland – a matter that is discussed in great detail in Chapter II - the longevity and stability of his relationship with this apartment accounted for a bonding with the place that made it home. The apartment is the home that, according to Sarup, is a place: “associated with pleasant memories, intimate situations, a place of warmth and protective security” (94). For the Golan Man, it is a place associated with certain positive experiences, occupational success and a life steadily built, which inevitably inscribe gravity to his relationship to home.
Another dimension in the modes of attachment to home is reflected in the complexity of the meaning of home for the Palestinian Man’s family, where home to them is an anchor that reverses their state of endless suspension as Palestinians with no land. Their relationship to home goes beyond emotional and material investment. For people who are living a life-long state of official suspension, being without a land and holding the official status of ‘refugee’, having a place to call home is an anchor to which they can
attach and attempt to relieve, even if in pretense, their inherited state of deferral as Palestinian exiles. Having a place to call home, a place “to return to no matter how far and long I travel in the world” (The Palestinian Man [1:08:00]), is an attempt to fulfill the imagined space of the ‘original’ home. Owning a place to call home is the opposite of the temporariness of the state of displacement that characterizes the exiled. It’s the seeming end of living rootless, vulnerable and in a state of social fluidity. For as Sarup quotes Hampton on the state of precarity of young exiles: “the person with no roots whatsoever is vividly aware of them, like some phantom ache in an amputated limb.” (96). While Said quotes Weil to express the importance of being rooted: “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul” (“Reflections on Exile” 146). The connection with home here goes beyond the physicality of the need for shelter, the social normative of not being homeless and the sentimentality of memories shared within the confinement of a space. Home, in this context, becomes a synonym of belonging and a replacement of homeland; a notion that is explored further in Chapter II.
In the documentary rarely do the interviewees explicitly utter an emotional statement about their attachment to their place of residence, but the deep connection with home is evident. For Rufaida and Abboud, home is the familial warmth. For the Golan Man, his house is where his future was nestled. For the parents of the Palestinian Man, their home is the fulfillment of a lost homeland. Half an hour into the documentary, the director attempts to assign a suggestive valorization to the otherwise empirically impossible assessment of the transcendental worthiness of home. In attending to such anguishing questions, the director lyrically stages the voice of the Palestinian Man over the scenes, and even the voice of Abboud, as they both attempt to answer. The
Palestinian Man assigns a temporophysical value to his family house, explaining that his parents were able to purchase the house after 25 years of work. Simultaneously, Abboud utters “20 years” in between the pauses of The Palestinian Man [0:24:00]. Did he live in his house for 20 years? Or did it take him 20 years to own it? Either way the viewer is made to evaluate the innate attachment to the home as an investment of the multiplicity of time, capital and emotions.
Those unraveled modes of attachment are explicated with a different depth along the progression of space. As the Palestinian Man speaks of the loss of his family home, he theorizes home, not as the tangible place, but as the specific life inhabiting that space within a specific timeframe. Home is, thus, the specific combination of space, inhabitants and the timeframe. Once abandoned, the memories of that broken combination turn it into a “lost paradise”, as he says. He adds: “in the end, regardless of why someone becomes a refugee: a person leaves his house, and the place he left is going to change. It will never be the same place anymore” [0:46:00]. Home here becomes the relationship between the space, the people and the events that happened there, denoting the tangible space as the least important of the elements that make up a place. In parallel, Gupta and Ferguson suggest, in the context of political economies and natural territories, that a place is made from within an imagined space, suggesting that unpacking the way a place is imagined is a necessary element in exploring the process of place making as it meets the materiality of space (11). They problematize the notion further, suggesting that “space and place can never be “given”” (17), and calling for shifts in considering “the way spaces and places are imagined, contested and enforced” (18). Spaces are, thus, not static, but rather a hybrid dynamic of elements and powers that operate in, and around, those
spaces. Home is a combination of certain specificities that exist in a certain frame of time. Home is never a given, but it is what is imagined, what is lived and what is anticipated; a place that contains, nurtures and reflects, not just the specificities of today, but also the imagined tomorrow of its inhabitant. This hybridity and fluidity of the notion of home is what allows for the variety of the modes of attachment witnessed and analyzed in Haunted. From love to familiarity and from building a life to metonymical homeland; it is noted how these modes of attachment vary in accordance with the special experiences of the inhabitants of the homes. Each one of the modes is instrumental in the process of making meaning that each character goes through in forming their special relationship with home.
Home, the Prison
In as early as minute [0:03:00], Rufaida sets the scene and provides the necessary context of their story. She speaks of how her neighborhood has become sandwiched between the regime forces stationed in the capital and the approaching rebels from the suburbs, transforming the area into a literal frontline. For both fighting parties the civilians still inhabiting that place are of tactical importance. They are the regime’s guarantee that the rebels’ approach is hindered, and they are the rebels’ cover for their guerrilla offensive against the regime forces. Ruafaida, Abboud and their neighbors suddenly became entrapped in a bloody frontline, with battles closing in. Within the following two minutes, the viewer witnesses the disappointment of Abboud and Rufaida’s first failed escape attempt. Abboud speaks about the moments that they thought they will be shot dead just for attempting to leave the area which has fallen under complete siege. Abboud, taken by despair, announces that he is reconsidering the idea of escaping. A moment of many
throughout the documentary where Abboud oscillates in contradictions and denial, as analyzed further in Chapter II. It is hence a moment that marks the beginning of a transformative stance which Rufaida and Abboud will undergo, and which the viewer witnesses along the documentary.
Contrary to all other shots in the documentary, the frames through which the viewer sees Rufaida and Abboud are out of the control of the director. The interview was filmed off a computer screen, on many relatively chronological video calling sessions, through which the story unfolds. The frames, angles, camera movement and lighting effects were completely under the control of the characters: how and where they place their computer; how and where they sit; or whether they chose to face the camera or not. This seeming control contrasts the state of besiegement the couple were living. Throughout the documentary they are seen getting in and out of the frame as they please; sometimes to answer the insisting ring of the phone, other times to just take a peek at the outside and inform the director of their findings. They don’t ask for permission to move, to step out of the frame, or into the frame. At one point, frustrated by another failed escape attempt, Abboud refuses to be filmed but contributes in diegesis to the ongoing conversation between Rufaida and the director. Rufaida then tilts the computer in his direction, against his will, and the frame changes completely. Abboud, still not facing the camera, becomes the main character in the shot and, naturally, the conversation. The viewer’s gaze in the case of Rufaida and Abboud is one controlled by the characters themselves, manipulating the movement and direction, deciding what can and cannot be seen. Such control by the “previously disempowered subjects” (Romeo 241) is a move that introduces a novel re-balancing in agency between the viewer and the subject. By controlling the paradigms of
the viewer’s gaze, the subject reclaims a certain amount of agency, usually lost to the viewer’s encroaching gaze. The cinematic functions in this specific story of the documentary seem to be reduced to a mere vehicle between the subject and the viewer. Rufaida and Abboud are thus freed from the intrusion of the lens and the viewers’ gaze which impose over their homely privacy.
The director offers an image regime in which the characters suggest, and, at times, control the modes of their representation, as seen above. The interviewees are the central producers of the narrative. Such aesthetic statements situate Haunted in the emancipatory sphere of postcolonial cinema where subjects, locations and representations are liberated (Weaver-Hightower and Hulme 2-3). The representations in Haunted flourish within aesthetical paradigms that deliberately avoid explicit violence and reflect the calm, home related discourse of the film. For the most part, shots are clear and un-disturbed, and sound is mostly diegetic, complimented by notes of melancholic music, written especially for the film. Despite the overall calm, the scenes of Rufaida and Abboud disturb that audiovisual clarity. Rufaida and Abboud, who carry the main developing storyline along the axis of time (through their transformational experience in besiegement and escape attempts) are introduced within shaky, disturbed and pale image. Their motion is fragmented, and the audio is delayed, as customary in a video call over a poor internet connection. Their sound is asynchronous, where their lip synchronization does not follow the voice due to the patchy connection.
This seeming conflation of audiovisual calm and disturbance in Haunted is a play on the margins of documentary in its established heuristics and disturbed portrayals of contemporary political films of the Syrian uprising (Elias and Omareen). Categorical
contradictions are present and are celebrated. The documentary is interview based. However this canonical standard of documentary, which establishes credibility, is tainted with the disturbances and spontaneity of video calling. Rufaida and Abboud do not seem to be interviewed. Their footage rather suggests a casual conversation with a friend, the director, tinging their testimony with doubt as it contradicts the normalized standards of interview based documentary. The director introduces both registers: the normalized professionally filmed interview, and the radicalized web-based, casual interview. The two are placed in a juxtaposed alternation of a cinematic heterogeneity that enriches the form and introduces innovative aesthetics in the film landscape. The emancipatory aesthetics through which Rufaida and Abboud take control of their exposure, corroborate the liberated representation of the Syrian body that the director is aiming at. The director deploys this emancipatory heterogeneity quite vividly in the last five minutes of the documentary. The director presents an interesting shuffle of registers between unedited mobile image, as an extreme example of the modalities of “new cinema”, and scripted cinematic shots, as an element of fiction, resulting in a “documentary-fiction” that “interweave the factual and the imaginary registers of the image for critical and creative effect” (Demos xvi).
During what is later known to be Rufaida and Abboud’s successful escape, the film presents what Elias describes as the reconfiguration of “epistemological frameworks of documentary truth” by cell phone cameras (18), and what Demos refers to as “moving images” which denote the growing assemblage of film and digital video as mediums (Demos xvi). The viewer faces a shaky, horizontally-tilted, mobile-shot footage of Rufaida and Abboud locking the door to their house, with their few pieces of luggage piled by the
floor. The viewing experience is interrupted as the viewer has no possibility to adjust the image, and is left with no other choice but to tilt his/her head sideways to decipher the scene. The viewer experiences the modalities of mobile filming and viewing, but on the silver screen. This ultimate image disturbance, is pacified by the adjacent calm, serene and shady images of a scripted cinematography, both accompanying the melodramatic climax, towards the end of the film, as Rufaida and Abboud embark on their final escape attempt.
Following the horizontal door scene, the camera moves away from Rufaida and Abboud to present various footages of destroyed houses with holes in the walls and rubble everywhere. Before the viewer arrives at the happy ending, and in the only such scene of its kind in the documentary, a footage of an explosion in what seems to be a residential neighborhood is presented immediately followed by one of an airplane. The scene is accompanied by the voice of a man on a phone call with his mother. Only his part of the conversation is heard, and he seems to be listening to her complains about the daily trivials that are making her life in exile unbearable. Enriching these scenes are intervals of the dark images of a female figure packing books from the floor and a male figure packing toiletries from a dusty shelf. The sequence takes a rather puzzling conflation of voice and a varied constellation of images, meanwhile the fate of Rufaida and Abboud is still not clear. Through this short, fast paced tenure of filmic mosaic, the spectator is taken to another world, not experienced before in this documentary, where the unsettling and unprecedented movement situates him/her on the run with Rufaida and Abboud. Viewing experience is contested, and tension engulfs the viewer in a new
cinematic language just as the film approaches its end. Just then, the tension is relieved as Rufaida, and then Abboud, narrate their journey.
However, before their freedom that takes place at the end of the film, and going back to their cinematic freedom, such visual liberation that Abboud and Rufaida enjoy is dramatically contested, as the viewer uncovers the calamities of their first failed attempt to escape in the first 10 minutes of the film. They become immediately confined in the phenomenology of a prisoner: prisoners of their congenial place; prisoners without a guard. Their home transforms into an open prison, the walls of which are promises of certain death inflicted by snipers circling the area. Spaces ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are reappropriated invoking Bhabha’s take on ‘homeliness’. Bhabha distinguishes homeliness as that extended moment throughout the process of relocation of one’s home and the world; the recalibration of the coordinates of a private space against the public one. He locates homeliness within the nexus of inside, outside and time, suggesting that “the intimate recesses of domestic space become sites of history’s most intricate invasions. In that displacement the border between home and world becomes confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting” (“The World and The Home” 141). Similarly, the viewer witnesses Rufaida and Abboud’s attempts to reassign the space in accordance with the temporal specificities of their surroundings. Walls are shattered and meanings are continuously being conflated, contested and rewritten: the inside, the self and safety, against the outside, the other and death. A moment of extreme tension and imminent loss is inscribing shifts in Rufaida and Abboud’s social, physical and emotional presence,
complicating the build of networks of relationality; suspending existing ones and rewriting frail trails instead.
The open imprisonment of Rufaida and Abboud is a result of a relatively recent armed conflict, however such feeling of imprisonment is not new; not to the Syrian collective. What an imminent war was inscribing on the lives of the subjects caught in its whims, living under a totalitarian regime has inflicted on them before. With no attempt to venture into political analysis, it is of heuristic value to highlight the genealogies of the distorted forms of relationship to space that living in the imprisonment of a totalitarian regime inflicts. In her account of her experience of living in Syria, visual artist Sulafa Hijazi best encapsulates such a collective feeling in a concise analogy: “Inside Syria, people live as prisoners inside a huge cell. Once we try to escape from there, we discover that we are still inside” (16). The hegemony of dictatorship in Syria since the late 1960s has enforced emergency laws and crippled, gradually to a full halt, individual freedoms. State Security Departments, which infiltrated the smallest of districts, had ultimate autonomous and decentralized powers to issue and enforce arrest orders without justification or accountability (Ghadry). As democracy was crippled and mouths were shut, either by force or by fear, politicians, intellectuals and artists alike were forced into assimilation with the main political stream. The only other options were imprisonment, torture and death or exile. This state of suppression of political engagement and expression, combined with oppression by the hegemonic power and shortage of options entailed a living on the margins for the majority. The constraints on civil and political freedoms and modes of expression inscribed a dystopian state of open imprisonment: imprisonment into the status quo, within the confines of the nation state. This spatial psychological and social
detainment was coupled with its usual companion of submission, as it manifests in Foucauldian lack of sovereignty. The borders between the inside and the outside collapse as Rufaida and Abboud move towards a realization of the futility of freedom revealing a state of sociopolitical suspension of living in the “wake”. The state of living in the wake here derives its relevance from the dispossession and confiscation of free will, from the “exclusion from social, political and cultural belonging” (Sharpe 14). Although Sharpe theorizes, with critical eloquence, Blackness as a state of non-existence, the analogies of such a suspension as living in the wake draw parallels to the case of the Syrian collective living in the ‘non-living state’ under despotic dictatorships. It is so through the negation of rights, of participatory citizenship, political inclusions, subjugation to violence and marginalization as a collective. Sharpe contends that: “[t]o be in the wake is […] to live in the no-space that the law is not bound to respect, to live in no citizenship” (16).
I borrow living in the wake, as it is the track in the water inflicted by the movement of a body and the location of disturbance (3), to specifically denote the aforementioned case of suspended living in the shadows of the totalitarian power, rather than Sharpe’s metonymical approach which signifies slavery trade through vessels across the oceans. The wake here is a synonym of the effect of the despotic power that enforces sociopolitical specificities which create an isolated place of ongoing disturbance and fluctuation, thus transforming and reshaping the living conditions of the society. By so doing, the hegemonic regime transforms place into a strange space: it renders a known place alien. Such an alienation of home has been argued by LeBlanc as a dilemma of identity within the paradigms of postcolonial theory (240). In his approach, LeBlanc places emphasis on the dialectics of transformation within the sphere of home, and consequentially, identity
and construction of the Other. Home here is treated as a multidimensional space: physical, psychological and intellectual; it is the site of struggle for preservation, alienation or adaptation. A contested space and a site of inscribing the ‘original’ in the post-colonial era by an “inevitably transformed human being” (241). The transformation of space by the hegemonic power, the violence and the erasure of the sovereignty of the governed draw staggering similarities to living under dictatorships, to living in the wake, to the life of Syrians for decades in what can be regarded as an open prison.
From the abject living of the Syrian collective under a dictatorship back to the specificities of Rufaida and Abboud’s sudden besiegement in their neighborhood, home as a notion is compromised. As the ‘congenial place’ undergoes a transformation into a trap, the relationship to home becomes complicated by the literal imprisonment. This relationship to home is stymied, rather shifted, coiling Rufaida and Abboud in a love/ hate oscillation with regards to home; a notion that lends itself to the understanding of the uncertainty the characters experience that pushes them to look into the past. Home, the Haunting
In the narration of their failed attempt to escape the siege, Rufaida talks to the director about the nervous night she witnessed following the escape attempt that was aborted with gun shots, where the couple barely escaped death. Rufaida, despite being nonreligious, spent the night reading verses from the Quran. Reciting verses from Quran is a practice enshrined within the mandate of Muslim prayer. In addition to its sacredness, reading Quran is a very old socio-religious practice that assigns divine healing powers to the holy book. Traditionally, mothers and grandmothers would recite verses endlessly next to an ailing body or to calm a disturbed soul. Being entrapped, without alternatives
or support besides her husband, who is living the same nightmare, Rufaida instinctively resorts to this ancestral remedy. The significance of that act exceeds such normative explanations, since Rufaida states that she is not a religious person. Rufaida was not reading Quran as means of prayer, asking God for an exit of her imprisonment. She stated that she resorted to God because she was feeling weak. The cadence of recital shrouded Rufaida in a fragile soothing veil that would silence the sounds of the blasts and the looming death outside. This act of reciting the holy verses serves as a metonym of pagan rituals of ancestral evocation. In her ‘prayers’, Rufaida was retrieving the familiar, rather comforting, presence of the mothers and grandmothers in their soothing Quranic lullabies.
Spivak, in her reading of Derrida’s hauntology, sees that resorting to an ancestral past is “the only way to go in a moment of crisis” (71). She suggests an analogy in the Ghost-Dance Religion of the nineteenth century where the “ghostly agency of haunting” can force the future to inscribe the now as a “before” (70). A notion where ancestral spirits are conjured and asked, in a haunting ritual, to trick the feared dark future and rewrite the now as a past of serenity and peace. Therefore, between the resurrected past and the tricked future, the traitorous, dim and halted now disappears, though temporarily, leaving behind a frail sense of relief. However, the present remains even more deferred with the lack of certainty, as neither the ancestral ghosts inflict a change, nor a gravitational realization of the future manages to materialize into reality. Such impossibility, coupled with helplessness, are reflected in Spivak’s analysis, where she resolves that “the ghost dance can never “work” as the guarantee of a future present. Yet it is the only way to go at moments of crisis; to surrender to undecidability” (71). It should be noted, though, that Spivak’s reading through the rituals of the Ghost Dance suggests that the ghosts of the
past are consciously and deliberately summoned and resurrected; but this is not the case here. Rufaida’s lullabies were not conscious acts of evocation. Within the lack of options, they were the surrender to the certainty of the past with the comfort and peace of its ghosts; hence fully embracing it and falling in the loop of impossible haunting.
This conflation of the past, present and future blurs the timeline and tinges it with doubt. This blurriness of time is clearly articulated in the narration of the Smiling Man, as he contextualizes his feelings towards leaving his home. The Smiling Man comes across as a calm, smiling and softly spoken person. The footage of his interview was filmed in his house, in a very quiet and calm surrounding with dimmed lighting, as the window shutters were closed. There are no sounds of shelling, as the ones heard through the video calls with Rufaida and Abboud. There are no broken homes, no dislocated furniture and no fidgeting and loud television noise as experienced in the scenes of the Golan Man. Not much can be seen in the house of the Smiling Man due to the dim lighting, but also because the camera shoots him in close ups, leaving very little to be seen in the background; placing him in a direct and immediate dialogue with the viewer. The choice of close up shooting not only extenuates the calmness and warmth the Smiling Man transmits, but also depicts the calamity of the loss he expects. The camera, with the close ups, leaves the character and the viewer without much distance. The subject, trying to conceal his fear and anxiety with a smile, cannot escape the exposure. The viewer, whose visual experience is condensed into the facial expressions of the character, has no choice but to be immersed in his experience as he reveals his innermost anxieties.
As the Smiling Man starts his story, he talks about his books and notebooks and how he has packed them with diligence and stored the boxes in the room that is furthest
from the street so as to increase the chances of their survival. Through his calm, yet painful, narration, the viewer follows his meticulous plans to preserve his artworks and notebooks in his home, which, to him, is less the physical space and more the incubator of his creativity. He describes how he carefully packed his books and notebooks and camouflaged the boxes with fake labels. He wanted to mislead anybody who would break into his house and think of these boxes as containing valuables worth stealing [0:18:00]. His narration reveals deeper disturbances. It becomes clear that it is more important for him to know that he has done everything in his power to prevent the loss. He is in a contingency plan to fend off the fracture he foresees he will suffer when he eventually flees his house for his life and loses his home.
In a near schizophrenic state, the Smiling Man talks about his ‘now self’ which will become the past of his ‘future self’, a self that he doesn’t believe he will be able to recognize after having lost its signifying anchor with the lost home that is impossible to retrieve. From his position in the now he can envision a fragmented future, haunted by the memories of his lost notebooks and the thoughts they contain, which will question him on why he left them behind in a relentless haunting. He is certain that such valuables lost in the, then, past will haunt him so he needs to do everything he can to stop the loss. An impossibility, as he rightly assesses, but he would still frantically pack, and re-pack, to present a proof to his future self and the haunting memories that he, at that specific moment of time, did everything in his power to prevent the loss and preserve the now. The loss inflicted, splitting of the self journey he is living translates into an adverse and distorted relationship with time. He keeps mentioning the ‘last half-hour’ before he is
absolutely forced to leave. The departure, the exile, for him in condensed in a certain timeframe: the last 30 minutes he will have with his life as he knew it so far.
Time for him is fragmented into unconnected periods. Time suffers a discontinuation and falls in a void, the black hole of the horrible specificities of that moment. Time stops at moment zero. Such discontinuity has been addressed by Guha in the context of migrancy, as he theorizes migration within a frame of “communitarian” temporality that becomes an exclusion, or a discontinuity. Cut from the past, and still not able to build bridges into the future, the exile’s departure from home is a fragmentation of ever lasting impact. Belonging is an acted temporality, one that is quite pervasive and interconnected with the past and future, that it becomes “an existential question of being in time” (5). The Smiling Man, however, suggests that it is a moment on ‘non-being’ in time. Upon departure from home, time, along with the process that made a place home, are cut off and eternally suspended in the void.
But it’s not just Rufaida and the Smiling Man who are consumed with the haunting of the soothing past. The haunting by that lost past remains evident in many intervals throughout the documentary. Abboud speaks of a Turkish coffee pot that has been passed on to him from his father and which had been used daily for the past forty years. Abboud forgets to pack it twice; the second time was in their final departure, and the pot was lost forever. Of all the belongings that were left behind, Abboud mentions the item which reminds him of his ancestors, the memory of which keeps returning.
In another take, an anonymous old man is interviewed. His face is marked with deep fissures, suggesting a tough life. Through his only appearance and brief narration, it is understood that he has worked all his life as a minimum wage laborer, and he built
the house, which was lost in the conflict, brick by brick with his own hands. The man now lives in ancient ruins, undistinguished in the film, after having lost all. Of all his dire material losses, he only mentions the picture of a son he once had and who died long ago. He regrets not being able to remember his face anymore, since he lost the only reminder of him: his picture. He describes it as loosing something extremely precious [0:42:00]. Through the picture the man was able to hold the ghost of an ancestral descendant and retrieve it at any given moment. However, the loss of the picture problematized this connection and became a metonym of the uprootedness the man suffers, as he now lives in a non-place. Lost home is condensed in an ancestral representation that is lost and now haunts the present.
The haunting memories destabilize acceptance of the changed now, and therefore fuel an antagonism between the old-self and the new-self, cracking open the self as a site of time bound conflict where identitarian shifts flourish. Time, as the axis for the transformation witnessed by the characters, is changed by the struggle, and is no longer a “progressive, ordered whole” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 40); as The Smiling Man diligently theorized. For through the haunting spaces, an arbitrary retrieval of the past conflates the rational and the imaginary. A conflation that Said addressed in his review of the ‘dysfunctional’ works of the Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, whom, in her art, produces non-functional household items, such as a barb-wired dining tables or rubber-made beds as a metonym of lost home. Said suggests that such artworks represent “mundane instruments of a defiant memory facing itself and its pursuing or opposing others implacably, […] yet unwilling to let go of the past that they carry along with them like some silent catastrophe that goes on and on without fuss of rhetorical bluster” (“The
Art of Displacement” 15). It is that defiant memory, accompanied by the insisting haunting of the elements of a past life that stifle the exile from moving on. In a moment of extreme stress and imminent loss, memory becomes an active player where the past in constantly conjured and ancestors are resurrected. The now is too macabre to be tolerated, so submission to uncertainty and hauntedness manifests as the only solution. In these moments, time also suffers discontinuity and the moment of loss hangs in the void.
Along this axis of time, the analysis investigated the characters’ relationships to their homes through various modes of attachment. From a substitute of homeland to an incubator of creativity, these various meanings all act within certain frames of time: the past, the now and the anxious anticipation of an uncertain future. Resolving that home is constructed on the nexus of the physical spaces, the inhabitants and a timeframe. Home is forever changed if, and when, one of these elements shifts. As the timeframe becomes a past, home becomes an impossibility in that sense.
Through Rufaida and Abboud’s shifts in their relationship with home, the temporal dislocation the Smiling Man suffers and the multilayered, multidimensional, relation to the physical space the family of the Palestinian Man holds, the analysis has anchored home as the warmth and safety and as the reimagined homeland, but also as the confinement of freedom and as the location of the haunting ghosts of the past. The close reading has unearthed diachronic disturbances, “the illnesses of losing a place3” as the moment of dislocation becomes imminent. These unearthed notions, and more, are further explored in the following chapter when this disturbed relationship with home is analyzed against certain notions of identity, suggesting the characteristics of episode zero.
3 The Palestinian Man [0:46:00]
Chapter II
Challenged Identity and Reflexive Precarity
After exploring the complexities of the changing modes of attachment to home imposed by the eminent and forced loss, the second chapter aims to dissect fissures in the concept of identity, made severe by loss of home as an identitarian signifier. The analysis negotiates with postcolonialism in both the context of identitarian structuring by the powerless subject, and the cinematic modalities. Through the direct identitarian conflict anticipated by the Golan Man, displacement spirals into an open interrogation of political agency and citizenship. This rather unique experience invites Maalouf’s theorization of composite identity which calls for a widened perspective in approaching such a ‘dangerous’ concept as identity. Along the axes of identification that he suggests, I locate the disturbances unraveled in the first chapter as reflected on a sum of uninvited identitarian shifts witnessed by exiles. I, then, look closer into identitarian fractures demonstrated in denial, made deeper by the experience of the violence of loss.
The aim is to theorize the characteristics of episode zero of migratory journey, suggesting a state of resistance, that is contaminated by hauntedness, and that amplifies a state of reflexive precarity that hinders the migratory journey before it starts. The state of reflexive precarity suggested here is reflexive insofar as it is an unconscious translation by the subjects of the identitarian tension they experience. It is a state of precarity in its sociopolitical connotation, theorized by Butler, of uncertainty, fragility, suspension and lack of agency and power (148).
Displacement and the Futility of Citizenship
Just as the film approaches its end, the camera wanders in the house of the Golan Man as he packs his belongings. The film shows an empty wall with multiple pins; a wall that was presented earlier in the documentary with various paper clips from newspapers and magazines hanging on it. The wall is now empty as the Golan Man is slowly erasing his trace from this rented apartment. Just as the camera moves to the adjacent wall, on which hangs an old world map, Abboud’s voice enters the scene, suggesting a linguistic analogy, as the camera scans the map, randomly zooming in and out: ““Fled to” and “was displaced to” […] are just like “died” and “fell”. I mean, “the wall fell”, where’s the active subject? Something made the wall fall, the wall can’t do that on its own. A person “flees” or “is displaced”… this doesn’t happen on its own, no one does it of their own will4” [1:14:00]. Abboud, in this observation, suggests the complete lack of choice in the acts of fleeing a conflict, or being forcibly displaced; the lack of alternatives renders the act of fleeing a forced decision. This absence of agency is visible at a deeper level in the story of the Golan Man; one that is loaded with complexities and clashing political affiliations.
As the Golan Man narrates the details of his journey ‘back home’, the viewer witnesses his unique experience that is shaped by personal conflict. Apart from deserting the old apartment, which he proudly called home for over 12 years, his return to his ancestral home, family and homeland means that he will have to cross a physical, cultural, political and ideological border into the Golan Heights; the Syrian territory that is one of the few spaces left in the world that is under direct occupation (Strickland). While Israel, since its seizure of land in the 1970s, has attempted to enforce cultural assimilation and
4 As taken literally from the subtitles
political integration on the Syrian population of the Golan Heights, the majority still regard Syria as their homeland, rather the ‘motherland’. Both Syria and Israel consider the residents and land owners in Golan Heights to be their citizens, however one cannot be citizen of both simultaneously. For its part, the Syrian government, as a proof of inclusion, offers free admission and full scholarships to Syrian high school graduates from Golan Heights to study in Syrian universities.
Since the failed attempt to retrieve the Golan Heights in 1973, a ceasefire has been negotiated, and the border since has been controlled by the United Nations peacekeeping forces. Hence, the movement of Golanians in and out of Syria is limited to studying and marriages; in the latter case, such a journey takes the form of a one-way only crossing. The movement across the border is facilitated by the International Committee of the Red Cross, where students are allowed into Syria at the beginning of the school year, and back to the Golan Heights during the summer break. However, upon graduating, students face a rather troublesome dichotomy: staying in ‘motherland’ Syria and losing any possibility of seeing their families ‘back home’, or returning to Golan and losing any possibility of ever seeing Syria again.
The Golan Man, after having built a life in Syria for over a decade, and accepted the idea of permanent exile in the motherland, now faces the involuntary choice of escaping the conflict in Syria, never to return again. In this rather painful impasse, he is placed on the brink of a “shredding of the soul” experience, as he indignantly describes it [0:05:30], where the geographical space denotes a political conflict that instigates an identitarian crisis. What the Golan Man faces is a state of recursive exile that compromises the self ability of identification. A recursion where exile is echoed through
