Cinematic Occupation

[Kamal Aljafari, still from \"Port of Memory.\" Courtesy of the artist.] [Kamal Aljafari, still from \"Port of Memory.\" Courtesy of the artist.]

Cinematic Occupation

By : Sadia Shirazi

Kamal Aljafari, Port of Memory. France/Germany/UAE/Palestine, 2009.

In the state of siege, time becomes place
Fossilized in its eternity
In the state of siege, place becomes time
Lagging behind its yesterday and its tomorrow

—Mahmoud Darwish, “State of Siege”

Kamal Aljafari’s film Port of Memory (2009) opens with a long tracking shot of a grand, decaying house at twilight. The camera lingers on the skin of this structure that bears traces of other times and previous inhabitations. The footage feels like a memorial for a building that may not live much longer: we see a floorboard of what was once a balcony, recesses where there were stairs, and the remnants of plaster crenellations above cinder-blocked windows. Aljafari uses these buildings and streets of Jaffa as a frame against and within which his character’s actions are set. The film pivots around the narrative of a shrinking city and its spectral inhabitants whose lives are inextricably tied to these spaces. The film brings to mind Freud’s writing on The Uncanny in which he quotes Jetsch doubting “whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.”[1] Port of Memory distances itself from conventional filmic narratives of Palestinian subjects by meditating on the state of Palestinians within Israel; it also departs from dominant spectacular representations by focusing on the minutiae of everyday life. The filmmaker’s relationship to the subjects in the film is never made explicit—the characters are Aljafari’s extended family—underscoring his resistance to the documentary format in dealing with his subject matter. Port of Memory thus blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction, offering a collage of staging and restaging, pre-existing archival footage and new footage.

While Henri Lefebvre writes that the city is a setting of struggle and the stake of that same struggle, Aljafari identifies cinematic space as a parallel site of conflict over power and memory and attempts to restitute Palestinian inhabitants’ rights to the city by reconstituting their identities through film.[2] Port of Memory focuses on the lives of Palestinian residents in Jaffa who are living with the imminent threat of eviction from their homes. Jaffa, once a bustling port city in pre-1948 Palestine, has been steadily absorbed and encroached upon by Tel Aviv to its north—to the point that it is now problematically considered a suburb of Tel Aviv. New construction surrounds the neighborhood of Ajami where the families live; the ambient sounds of construction and demollition of buildings permeate the film`s score. The frenetic activity of construction and encroachment is met with the still obstinance of Ajami’s residents. The repetition of daily gestures structures the film and guides its intervallic narrative, imbuing these with elegiac and defiant tones. Long takes of the filmmaker’s aunt ritually and systematically washing her hands, Aljafari’s family seated on a couch watching television, and a man in a café drawing a hot piece of coal within centimeters of his neck rhythmically punctuate Port of Memory. As the film progresses, the motions of these inhabitants take on an excruciatingly pained beauty, as the characters’ movements clearly hold crisis at bay. Aljafari locates the home as a site of conflict and inhabitance that becomes a form of resistance. In the state of suspension lived by the characters, an insistence on domesticity and the habits of daily life, set against the backdrop of the city, becomes itself a kind of performative resistance against the threat of dispossession.

The film both offers a psychological portrait of a community and engages with cinematic space as a parallel zone of conflict over claims to the city. The particularities of the characters’ identities and the contested nature of their city emerge slowly and elliptically from the film’s episodic structure. In the first scene of the film, Salim, who is Aljafari’s uncle, visits a lawyer to discuss an order of evacuation he has received from Amidar, a government-operated housing authority. It is the second time the family members have had to defend their ownership of the property, and in the ten years that have passed since the first case, the lawyer has misplaced the title of the house. This scene, in which the family’s attempt to challenge the legality of the government’s action is compromised by their own lawyer, establishes the precarity of habitation for Jaffa’s Palestinians.

The film pairs the incremental expropriation of Palestinian property in Jaffa with the foreclosure of Palestinian residents from the city’s cinematic history.[3] When I interviewed him, Aljafari referred to this as the “cinematic occupation of Jaffa.” In another interview, he explains: “the film is very much about place, being excluded from it, about being there and not being there at the same time. I know these buildings will vanish from reality, so at least I have them in my film. And [through] cinema…with framing and by shooting something for a long time, you can claim it.”[4] Citing Hayden White, Edward Said suggests that “narrative in general, from the folk tale to the novel, from annals to the fully realized ‘history,’ has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority.” Similarly, through this film, Aljafari claims “permission to narrate,” following Said’s argument: “Facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain, and circulate them.”[5] Port of Memory produces a subversive counter-narrative that challenges dominant histories and reinscribes the narratives of foreclosed subjects in built space as well as in Jaffa’s cinematic archive.

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[Kamal Aljafari, still from Port of Memory, 2009. 16mm film, color, sound; 63 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.]

Jaffa has a peculiarly rich presence in contemporary film history, where the city was effectively emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants and used as a live set for numerous American and Israeli films from the 1960s through the 1980s. Aljafari appropriates footage from two such films—The Delta Force (1986), in which Jaffa represents war-torn Beirut, and Kazablan (1974), in which Jaffa represents itself—and shows Mizrahi Jews struggling against Ashkenazi government representatives over house demolitions, which foreclose the city’s Palestinian narratives. The filmmaker responds to the exclusion of Palestinians from cinematic representation—indeed, in The Delta Force, even the opportunity to play Arab “terrorists” was only granted to Mizrahi Jews—by offering to reinscribe them with his film. A layered psychic narrative emerges from this juxtaposition of the everyday life of Palestinian residents with scenes from these Hollywood action and Israeli dramatic films, with the filmmaker carefully replicating the camera’s placement to capture the same scenes, albeit in a different time and populated by very different actors.

The last sequence of images in Port of Memory is interspersed with footage from The Delta Force, in which we see a tank hurtling down a pedestrian street, hugged tightly by the old stone walls of residences. This is followed by a long take of Salim walking down the same street, worn from the passage of time but readily recognizable. The city’s streets are transfigured from a site of violent conflict in the first film, to a prosaic pedestrian landscape in the second, without any movement of the cinematic frame. The explosions and collisions in The Delta Force happened in real time and space, with ammunition ricocheting off walls and absorbed by streets and buildings. Roland Barthes wrote “the Photograph represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter.” Jaffa’s cinematic image, to paraphrase Barthes, was not just an intimation of death, but one whose production literally contributed to the city becoming a specter.[6]

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[Kamal Aljafari, still from Port of Memory, 2009. 16mm film, color, sound; 63 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.]

The second film sequence appropriated by Aljafari is from the Israeli film Kazablan. The scene opens with Salim gazing longingly at the sea, from which he is separated by a mesh wire fence. The camera then pans to a shot of the sea and another man’s voice is heard singing, “There is a place beyond the sea, where the sand is white and home is worn, where the sun shines, over the market, the street and the port….” The water is now accessible and the actor sings as he walks along the shoreline and then through the narrow pedestrian streets of Jaffa. In a spectral montage sequence, Aljafari transports Salim into the spaces of this parallel film universe—Salim walks in front of Kazablan’s main actor, looking back at him playfully as he ducks into a doorway. In the next scene, Salim alone traverses the eerily unpopulated spaces of the vacant port, which no longer exist but which he remembers from his youth. These scenes produce spaces of a past-future, in which the past replaces the present absence through a future presence and where reality is supplanted temporarily by projective desire.[7] It is unclear whether the scenes are part of a dream sequence or a waking memory roused by gazing at the ever more distant sea. The film ends with a sequence of images that echo the film’s structure: night falls, the morning is greeted by construction along the coastline, Aljafari’s aunt commences washing her hands, his uncle gazes again at the sea from his rooftop at dusk, and the screen fades to black.

Port of Memory illustrates how one city, through cinematic representations, functions as multiple sites of desire. The city and its narratives are mutually constructed terrains of conflict. Through a dual invocation of cinema, Aljafari is intent on reclaiming the city of Jaffa for its Palestinian residents. On the one hand, cinema offers the only access to these spaces that no longer exist, while at the same time, cinema is presented as a fiction, as something that does not exist. The land and the stories about the land are not easily aligned, and Aljafari’s footage further complicates this mix.[8] Aljafari refrains from establishing a counter-normative system or a triumphalist ideology in his work and cultivates what Said referred to as a “scrupulous…subjectivity.”[9] The film moves between subjective and objective registers in its hybrid form of fiction-documentary, taking up Jean-Luc Goddard’s challenge in his film Notre Musique (2004), which proposes that all that is left to the Palestinians is documentary, while the Israelis possess fiction. Port of Memory, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak remarked of subaltern historiography, “articulates the difficult task of rewriting its own conditions of impossibility as the conditions of its possibility.”[10] Aljafari’s work can be said to create a space of reconstituted identity for the Palestinian subject in Israel who finds herself doubly erased—on the one hand by the imminent threat of dispossession, and on the other, by her erasure from cinematic archival records. Port of Memory thus represents a counter-narrative that attempts to hold back the teleological rush of history.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Jetsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (1906), trans. Roy Sellars, Angelaki, vol. 2, no.1 (1995). Quoted by Freud in “The Uncanny,” 347.

[2] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992), 386.

[3] “Foreclosure” here refers to the use of the psychoanalytic term in postcolonial theory, which highlights the term’s ethical underpinnings: "I shall docket the encrypting of the name of the `native informant` as the name of Man…I think of the `native informant` as a name for that mark of expulsion from the name of Man—a mark crossing out the impossibility of the ethical relation.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 5–6.

[4] Kamal Aljafari, interview conducted by Nasrin Hamada, Montreal Serai, 2010. (accessed March 1, 2011).

[5] Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 141–47.

[6] The cinematic image is considered akin to the photographic image. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 14.

[7] I would like to thank Laura Mulvey, here, and the conversation we had that helped me develop my line of thought.

[8] I would like to thank Sarah Lookofsky here, as her feedback contributed greatly to this argument.

[9] Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 141–147.

[10] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and The Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988), 271–313.

[An earlier version of this essay was first published in Foreclosed. Between Crisis and Possibility (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 107-121.]

New Texts Out Now: Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education

Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Betty S. Anderson (BSA): I always joke that I conceived the project in the pool of the Carlton Hotel in Beirut. In June 2000, I visited Beirut for the first time so I could attend an Arab American University Graduate (AAUG) conference. One day, I walked with some friends all along the Corniche and up through the American University of Beirut (AUB) campus and then back to the hotel. Since it was late June and ridiculously hot, the only option at that point was to jump in the pool as quickly as possible. Two minutes in the pool and the thought occurred to me that my next research project was going to have to be about Beirut in some way. I had fallen in love with the city in just that one day. A half second later, I thought, I should write a history of AUB.

Besides the fact that I wanted to get back to Beirut as soon as possible, I wanted to know why AUB had been so influential in politicizing its students. At the time, I was doing additional research for my book on Jordan (Nationalist Voices in Jordan: The Street and the State) and a number of the political activists I studied had attended AUB. Their memoirs were filled with explanations and stories about how important those four years were for the development of their political identities. However, I had no idea as I floated in the pool that day that I’d have to do extensive research on Protestant missionaries and education long before I could even get to those Arab nationalists. At the time, I really knew relatively little about the school’s history.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address?

BSA: When I finally got back to Beirut in 2004, it was research on the educational systems offered at the Syrian Protestant College and AUB that eventually ended up directing my thesis. I was struck initially by the goals the American founders and their successors set for the school. They talked more about the transformative process they wanted the students to undertake than the course options they were offering. For example, Daniel Bliss (1866-1902) preached about producing Protestants who understood not only the liturgy but the lifestyle required of one converting to this faith; Bayard Dodge (1923-1948) exhorted students to follow the model of the modern American man as they sought to develop new characters for themselves. The former presided over a missionary educational system, the latter the new liberal education system then being formulated back in America. The first half of the book discusses this shift as the American University of Beirut was renamed in 1920.

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[Main gate of AUB campus. Photo by Betty S. Anderson.]

Liberal education, as American educators developed it in the second half of the nineteenth century, asks its students to be active participants in their educational experience. Before this point, professors taught their students a fixed body of knowledge; students were required to memorize and recite the data to prove that they had learned it. In liberal education, the system asks that professors teach students how to think and analyze so they can produce data on their own.

The second half of the book examines how the students reacted to this shifting pedagogical focus. The American leaders of the school repeatedly stated their goals for the students, and most books and articles on AUB focus on only those voices. However, that stance leaves out an important element of the AUB story, because only the students can truly determine whether the programs are effective. AUB is famous for the many student protests that have taken place on campus, starting with the Darwin Affair of 1882, leading to the Muslim Controversy of 1909, and then on to the large protests of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. As I discovered when I delved into the archives, students used dozens of newspapers to explain why they were protesting. The catalyst was always a particular event, on campus or off, but the students always framed their arguments around the freedom they felt the liberal education system promised. They fought against any administrative attempts to curtail their actions and frequently accused the administration of not following the guidelines set by American liberal education. This issue became increasingly contentious as students worked to define an Arab nationalism that called on them to be politically active while on campus. The administration continually opposed this position, and many of the student-administrative conflicts centered on the differing definitions of freedom put forward on campus. I put “Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education” in the subtitle of the book because by the twentieth century, these were the two dominant elements defining the relationship between the students and the administration.

J: How does this work connect to and/or depart from your previous research and writing?

BSA: Most of my work has centered on education in one form or another. In my book on Jordan, I wrote of the politicizing role high schools in Jordan and Palestine, as well as schools like AUB, played in mobilizing a national opposition movement in the 1950s. I have published a number of articles analyzing the narratives the Jordanian and Lebanese states present to their students in history and Islamic textbooks. Moving on to a comprehensive study of one particularly influential school was a natural progression. The difference was that I now had to study American education in the same way I had previously examined the influence of education in the Middle East.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

BSA: I hope AUB alumni want to read the book and, equally, that they find something of their story in it. I did not want to cite just the Americans who founded and ran the school; I purposely wanted to write about the students themselves. Typical university histories leave out the words and actions of the students in favor of hagiographies about the founders and their famous successors. I also hope that scholars and students interested in studies of education and nationalism will be interested. This is a book that addresses both Middle Eastern and American studies.

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[Assembly Hall and College Hall, AUB Campus. Photos by Betty S. Anderson.]

J: What other projects are you working on now?

BSA:
I have a contract with Stanford University Press to publish a book called State and Society in the Modern Middle East. Like with anyone who undertakes to write a textbook, I am frustrated with those that are currently available. Textbooks of the modern Middle East typically focus just on state formation, the actions of the chief politicians, and the political interplay between states. My text focuses instead on the relationship between state and society as it developed over the last two hundred years. The states in the region centralized in the nineteenth century, faced colonialism in the early twentieth century, and then independence after World War II; these stages created new roles for state leaders. Civil society, in the broadest definition of the term, emerged from the eighteenth century forward as people sought new ways to organize within and against the states now intruding on their lives. They took advantage of the new institutions the states built to establish for themselves new class, national, and gender definitions, while frequently opposing the states that had introduced these very institutions. My text examines how schools, government offices, newspapers, political parties, and women’s groups constantly negotiated new relationships with their respective states.

Excerpt from The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education

From Chapter One:

"The great value of education does not consist in the accepting this and that to be true but it consists in proving this and that to be true," declared Daniel Bliss, founder of Syrian Protestant College (SPC; 1866–1920) and its president from 1866 to 1902, in his farewell address. President Howard Bliss (president, 1902–1920) said in his baccalaureate sermon in 1911, "In a word, the purpose of the College is not to produce singly or chiefly men who are doctors, men who are pharmacists, men who are merchants, men who are preachers, teachers, lawyers, editors, statesmen; but it is the purpose of the College to produce doctors who are men, pharmacists who are men, merchants who are men, preachers, teachers, lawyers, editors, statesmen who are men." Bayard Dodge (1923–1948) stated at his inauguration as president of the newly renamed American University of Beirut (AUB; 1920– ), "We do not attempt to force a student to absorb a definite quantity of knowledge, but we strive to teach him how to study. We do not pretend to give a complete course of instruction in four or five years, but rather to encourage the habit of study, as a foundation for an education as long as life itself." The successors to these men picked up the same themes when they elaborated on the school`s goals over the years; most recently, in May 2009, President Peter Dorman discussed his vision of AUB’s role. "AUB thrives today in much different form than our missionary founders would have envisioned, but nonetheless—after all this time—it remains dedicated to the same ideal of producing enlightened and visionary leaders."

In dozens of publications, SPC and AUB students have also asserted a vision of the transformative role the school should have on their lives. The longest surviving Arab society on campus, al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa, published a magazine of the same name during most academic years between 1923 and 1954 and as of 1936 stated as its editorial policy the belief that "the magazine`s writing is synonymous with the Arab student struggle in the university." From that point forward, the editors frequently listed the society`s Arab nationalist goals. In the fall 1950 edition, for example, al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa`s Committee on Broadcasting and Publications issued a statement identifying the achievement of Arab unity as the most important goal because "it is impossible to separate the history, literature and scientific inheritance of the Arabs" since "the Arab essence is unity." Toward this end, al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa pledged to accelerate the "growth of the true nationalist spirit" among the students affiliated with the organization. In describing education as an activist pursuit, the statement declares, "To achieve political ideas which are aimed at our nationalism it is necessary for we as students to seek information by many different means." In this call, the AUB Arab students must take on the task of studying the Arab heritage as thoroughly and frankly as possible so that when they graduate they can move into society with solutions to the many problems plaguing the Arab world.

Since the school`s founding in 1866, its campus has stood at a vital intersection between a rapidly changing American missionary and educational project to the Middle East and a dynamic quest for Arab national identity and empowerment. As the presidential quotes indicate, the Syrian Protestant College and the American University of Beirut imported American educational systems championing character building as their foremost goal. Proponents of these programs hewed to the belief that American educational systems were the perfect tools for encouraging students to reform themselves and improve their societies; the programs do not merely supply professional skills but educate the whole person. As the quotes from al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa attest, Arab society pressured the students to change as well. The Arab nahda, or awakening, of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries called on students to take pride in their Arab past and to work to recreate themselves as modern leaders of their society; the Arab nationalist movement of the twentieth century asked that students take a lead in fighting for Arab independence from foreign control. The students streaming through the Main Gate year after year used both of these American and Arab elements to help make the school not only an American institution but also one of the Arab world and of Beirut, as the very name, the American University of Beirut, indicates. This process saw long periods of accommodation between the American-led administration and the Arab students, but just as many eras when conflict raged over the nature of authority each should wield on campus; the changing relationship between the administration and the students serves as the cornerstone of this book, for it is here where much of the educational history of SPC and AUB has been written.

From Chapter Five:

The 1952 April Fool’s Day issue of Outlook (called Lookout on that day) satirized the proliferation of student protests that had dominated campus life for the previous few years. In the paper’s lead article, the author declared, “A School of Revolutionary Government, designed to equip AUB students with a wide knowledge of modern techniques of conspiracy and revolution, is to be opened during the fall semester, a communique from the President’s Office announced late Friday.” Continuing the same theme, the article reports, “All courses will include a minimum of three lab hours to be spent in street battles with gendarmes and similar applications of theories learned in classrooms.” President Stephen Penrose (1948-1954), the article stated, gave a Friday morning chapel talk on the new school motto: “That they may have strife and have it more abundantly.” In a further announcement, the paper described the day’s protest.

There will be a demonstration this afternoon at three in front of the Medical Gate to object against everything[.] All those interested please report there promptly five [minutes] before time. The demonstration promises to be very exciting—tear gas will be used, and the slogans are simply delightful. If all goes well, police interference is expected. If not to join, come and watch.

This, of course, had not been the first era of student protest; the difference by the 1950s was the widespread and sustained nature of the conflict between the administration and the students. When Lookout published its satirical articles in 1952, students had been organizing demonstrations in support of Palestinians and Moroccans, and against any and all things imperialist, since 1947; these events only petered out in 1955 as the administration banned the two main groups organizing them, the Student Council and the Arab society, al-cUrwa al-Wuthqa. Students engaged in these exercises explicitly as Arabs, proud of their past, and striving toward cultural, political and economic unity in the future. In their actions, students sought to integrate their educational experiences at AUB with the real-life events taking place outside the Main Gate, for only then did they feel they could be trained to function as the vanguard initiating the necessary changes in their society.

[Excerpted from Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education. © 2011 by The University of Texas Press. Excerpted by permission of the author. For more information, or to order the book, click here.]