Avuncular American

Mustang - Free and Untamed in Turkey

Bars on your home's windows are usually to keep the baddies on the outside, but in Mustang they come to signify the prison that Grandma's house becomes for the five spirited girls who are facing the special dangers of adolescence in a conservative village.

Deniz Gamze Ergüven's film - honored at Cannes - begins and ends with Lale, the youngest of the girls but the one you want on your team if ever you have to survive impossible odds.  Young Günes Sensoy, playing Lale, sees trouble brewing, and lays plans.  Her first film, and what an acting revelation.

Her older sisters, one by one, risk succumbing to the constant pressure to be married off, arranged by Grandma, who mostly just wants to avoid embarrassment in front of judgmental neighbors, and by uncle Erol, a supposed prude with a violent streak.

Director Ergüven (French director Alice Winocour co-wrote the screenplay), whose diplomatic childhood spanned life in Paris and in Ankara, has deftly inserted scenes which illustrate the lot of many a marriageable girl in Turkey: virginity tests, arranged pairings concluded by the families, frustration assuaged by eating too many Turkish delights or swigging the dregs of raki at big sister's wedding reception.

But this is not a documentary, credible and realistic as it is.  From the outset, you care deeply about these girls and are with them as they try to enjoy innocent childhood pursuits or the normal joys and challenges of growing up.  A beautiful, moving film.

Deniz Gamze Ergüven is interviewed here on France Culture (44 minutes, in French).

Mideast Christians Beyond Christmas

Chances are that last week, as Christmas was being celebrated, your TV news included a segment on the Christians of the Middle East.  It's an annual staple, and provides jarring images like Santa confronting Israeli troops at a checkpoint near Bethlehem.

Throughout the Middle East, ancient Christian communities are being uprooted, if not extinguished.  Pope Francis, in a letter addressed to the Christians of the Middle East, wrote of their "leavening" effect:

You can help your Muslim fellow citizens to present with discernment a more authentic image of Islam, as so many of them desire, reiterating that Islam is a religion of peace, one which is compatible with respect for human rights and favours peaceful coexistence on the part of all.

William Dalrymple, the Scottish author of From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East, in a recent Guardian article, sees the exodus of Christians as the end of secular Arab nationalism.  He quotes the late Lebanese AUB professor Kamal Salibi who detected a "fin de race" fatalism among eastern Christians, a net loss for the Arab world: "It is Christian Arabs who keep the Arab world 'Arab' rather than 'Muslim'."

In his recent Foreign Policy report on Alexandria Egypt (my home for two years in the Eighties) "The Lighthouse Dims," James Traub sees the end of the cosmopolitan ideal:

North Africa used to be a civilizational crossroads in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews not only lived alongside one another but also shared one another's language and culture. This mingled society, formed from many intense particularities, is what we call cosmopolitanism. It was born in the Middle East, and it now seems to be disappearing there, including from the one place where the cosmopolitan ideal reached its supreme realization: Alexandria.

Recently I renewed ties with an old friend, a Palestinian Christian who was a fellow volunteer at a Boy Scout center in Ramallah in the early Seventies.  He and his family are now exiles from their home in Jerusalem, victims of what the Israelis call the "center of life" policy, which renders stateless Palestinians who have the temerity to go abroad on a work assignment.  His wife recounts their ordeal in this article.

Whether it's Israeli policies of harassment and land seizures (which of course affect all Palestinians, whether Muslim or Christian), or flight in the face of ISIS terrorism (William Dalrymple refers to the ISIS "Christian-free zone"), Mideast Christians face what could be, in the very lands where Christianity was born, the end of their long history in an entire region.

The instability which has afflicted the region in recent years - the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the Syrian revolution and the ensuing ISIS onslaught - has meant the flight of Christians from countries where they had been protected minorities, with sizable populations.  The Arab world's loss - Christian Arabs were the intellectual founders of many of the modern nation-states - will likely be permanent.  As Professor Salibi said, "Each time a Christian goes, no other Christian comes to fill his place..."  

My Sweet Pepper Land

Hiner Saleem made My Sweet Pepper Land, set in his native Iraqi Kurdistan, a year or so before the world awakened to the barbarity of "the Islamic State" roaring into northern Iraq.  But you can't watch this superlative film without thinking of the IS threat to the Kurds and their imperfect but hopeful society in one of the world's most dangerous neighborhoods.

Pepper Land has been compared to a Western, and when the village bridge gets blown up by Turkish jet fighters in their guerrilla war with the Kurdish rebels who sometimes cross over into Iraq, horseback is the best mode of transport for Baran, the local police commander.

And he has to do battle, not with evil cattle barons, but with an evil traditional chieftan, who seems to have the whole town in his pocket.

If you think you've read the plot before, that's where the Western analogy ends.  Be prepared for serious treatment of the place of women in a traditional Muslim society (other than Baran's mother, who appears only briefly, the women are most definitely not headscarfed).  Govend, the local one-room school teacher, is set on bringing a bit of light to an otherwise benighted village, but she has an uphill battle as a single woman, already over the hill as an unmarried 28 year old.

And don't mess with those Kurdish women fighters, who operate in the hills between Turkey and Iraq (the film appears to be set in the years just after the fall of Saddam Hussein, when war-weary Iraqi Kurds fear Turkish wrath for sheltering PKK guerrillas).  Again, you can't help but thinking of the thin line dividing Iraq from the medieval decapitators, with Peshmerga Kurds (often including female fighters) the only force standing in their way.

Inevitably, Govend and Baran, the two outsiders who challenge local ways, are brought together.  The role of Govend the school teacher who dares to make her own way in the world is one that perfectly suits Iranian-born actress Golshifteh Farahani, who has so challenged her own country's conservative leadership that she doubts that she can ever return there (read this extensive profile in Spiegel Online International).

Hiner Saleem doesn't sugarcoat the situation in Kurdistan: there are numerous references to corruption and "bizness" by public servants, and Baran's frustration with post-Peshmerga life is encapsulated at the outset by a semi-comic botched execution of a criminal, where a smug Imam is the film's only reference to religion.

My Sweet Pepper Land is one of the best recent films out of the Middle East; it was featured ("Un Certain Regard") at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.

For Whom the Tocsin Tolls - World War I Centenary

At 4:00 PM this Friday afternoon, all across France, the church steeples echoed the sound of the tocsin, a reminder of the "Guns of August" of 1914.

Today, life pretty much continued as usual, and other than a few officials in ceremonies around the country, I doubt many people stopped what they were doing to reflect on that distant conflict and what it meant for the world.

My wife's late aunt, a girl of almost seven when war was declared in August 1914, recalled that people working in the fields dropped their tools - it was right in the middle of harvest season - so immediate was the effect.

Within weeks, thousands would be dead.  And the thousands became millions.

Here in Brittany, far from the WW I battlefields of northern France, the war nevertheless was felt, and with devasting results.  On the "Monument aux Morts" of my wife's native village, her uncle's name appears.  He had been gassed, and died in hospital in Caen in Normandy:

On the same monument, the names of eight village soldiers killed the same day on a faraway battlefield in Belgium, just three weeks after trading their rakes for rifles (photo below).  On August 22, 1914, before the glory faded on the bright blue and red French uniforms with the deadly, muddy dreariness of five subsequent winters, France came to the aid of Belgium in the earliest days of the war.  There's a Belgian blog with information on the battle of Maissin.

Imagine the impact on a rural farming community such as this Breton village - seven of its sons killed on the same day.  In Britain, early pre-conscription recruitment resulted in "Pals Battalions," consisting of relatives, friends and neighbors.  As Wikipedia puts it:

The policy of drawing recruits from amongst a local population ensured that, when the pals battalions suffered casualties, individual towns, villages, neighbourhoods, and communities back in Britain were to suffer disproportionate losses.

I hadn't realized what this would mean to a small Breton village until I took in the names and dates on the monument.

The great British military historian John Keegan referred to the "chateau generalship" exhibited during the war, depicted so well in Stanley Kubrick's timeless "Paths to Glory."  Today, we watch contemporary wars - never "declared," such a quaint concept - while munching on our evening meals.

If the First World War seems so distant, its effects are very much with us now.  Think of the empires dissolved, the countries born of WW I.  And the seeds of nationalism sown.  You can play counterfactual history to no end with World War One: if it hadn't happened, would the Soviet Union and the Cold War happened?  Would Israel have come about without the 1917 Balfour Declaration?  Without the humiliating defeat of Germany and the Central Powers, would Hitler have risen to power and unleashed the Holocaust?

There are helpful websites to keep track of the complex history of The Great War: PBS and BBC's World War One are among the best.  But like today's tocsin, it's a somber, long four years that we're commemorating.  Next time you're outside for a few minutes in a dismal November rain, spare a thought for the soldiers - Tommies, Doughboys, or poilus - in their muddy trenches.

It all started 100 years ago today.

Valentino's Ghost: Hollywood & TV Imagine Arabs

This post first appeared in TALIM Director's Blog.

You have to be dedicated, or perhaps suffering jet lag, to get up to watch Michael Singh's excellent documentary at 08:00 on a Sunday morning.  The time was a function of the setting: this was the annual conference of MESA, the Middle East Studies Association, and Valentino's Ghost was making a debut showing.

It's all good fun, at least at the outset.  Rudolf Valentino dashing off to conquer some blond.  Rudy was good for several sequels, that stallion-mounted Sheik of Hollywood imagination.

Singh proceeds from silent film to talkies, so we then have lots of Beau Geste French Foreign Legion desert shots, this time of Bad Arabs being mown down by heroic white Legionnaires, usually in defense of those same damsels that Valentino made swoon a decade or so before.  But it's all oldies, and good fun.

Then we have the more complex portrayal of Arabs in David Lean's classic Lawrence of Arabia.  Hard to fault this almost perfect film, though the focus of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks is mostly on T.E. Lawrence, the great white hope of the hopelessly "little people, silly people" as the British officer calls the disputatious Arabs.

It was still possible in the 1962 film to portray Arabs as noble (think Omar Sharif).  A decade later, after the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre, and the images in film and on video are almost entirely negative.  And it's this image which still informs - if one can use such a term - most coverage, both fictional and news, of the Arab world.  From Bullfrog Films, the distributor:

Valentino's Ghost takes viewers on a chronological journey through more than a century of images of Muslims, Arabs and Islam in the U.S. media, from the early 20th-century fantasies of romantic sheiks to today's damaging stereotypes as evil fanatics. Through interviews with Robert Fisk, Niall Ferguson, and John Mearsheimer amongst others, the film shows the way in which the changing image of Arabs and Muslims has mirrored America's political agenda in the Middle East.

But chronology would be boring, and so Singh gives us themes.  "The Arab as Indian" (as in Cowboys & Indians), the Arab as devious cheater, etc.  All the stuff of what any other ethnic or religious group would have long ago succeeded in banning from Hollywood.

Michael Singh has apparently made his film with PBS in mind.  Such an important subject does deserve an audience beyond specialist Middle East studies showings.  He feels that it is urgent:

Even our educated American colleagues appreciate orientation on the subject, partly because our subject has never been shown on television: PBS has broadcast films examining media images of Blacks, Jews and Asians, but not Arabs or Muslims. We contend that this lack of knowledge has contributed to widespread ignorance, stereotyping, fear and hatred of those of Middle Eastern heritage or the Muslim faith, including American citizens, and has also bolstered public support for a long line of fictions about the Middle East.

Last year, in India Abroad, Singh voiced doubts that PBS would go through with his film:

One PBS executive has told me personally that he will do everything he can to prevent the film's broadcast.  He has not even seen the film, but realizes that the politics as discussed in the film, especially about our relationship with Israel, is like nitroglycerin.  I think PBS is afraid of angering audiences who, unlike network audiences, directly donate money that is critical for PBS's survival.

If that is the case, then maybe you too will have to wait until some classroom near you shows it... at 8:00 in the morning.  Not-ready-for-prime-time, the US-Israel relationship and the skewing it does to American views of Arabs?

End of Mubarak, End of Maalesh

The old joke about Egyptian society ruled by the IBM ethic - Inshallah, Boukra, Maalesh (God willing, mañana, It doesn't matter) - needs a bit of revision after the resignation under popular pressure of Hosni Mubarak.

God willing, democracy will come to take root.  Note the word democracy, not elections, though credible electoral processes are certainly welcome. Inshallah.

Tomorrow - boukra or mañana - in a more democratic Egypt may bring stability and prosperity, but the danger for now is a letdown after the euphoria.

But maalesh, that fatalistic default position where today's woes are regrettable but will certainly be there tomorrow, has suffered a serious blow.  Despairing Egyptians, faced with the stultifyingly corrupt practices of a civil service that could turn the simplest of administrative procedures into a lifelong quest, used to jump off the roof of the infamous Mogamaa Building off Tahrir Square.

Maybe that was urban legend, but the truth is that they summoned up the courage not only to block access to the all-powerful Mogamaa, but also to block a President-for-life, and his hereditary plans for a "republic" in name only.

Mubarak and his sons, no doubt, counted on the famous Egyptian quality of contentment or qanaa, a tranquility of the spirit that put up with three decades of impunity.  But every good quality, when abused, has its limits.  Maalesh - no more.

Scheherazade Tell Me a Story

It’s men – not the veil – that are the women’s main concern in life.  Or, if this weren't a film from a predominantly Muslim country, their main cross to bear.

The women are the guests on Hebba's TV talk show, and they run the gamut of Egyptian society, from meek murderesses to mighty media stars.  The men in their lives, whether ministers or minions, are uniformly trouble for the women.  That’s Scheherazade Tell Me A Story in a nutshell.

But this 2009 film by Yousry Nasrallah is more than that.  Like The Yacoubian Building a few years ago, Scheherazade (the French title is, not inaccurately, Les Femmes du Caire) is a sprawling, over-long soap on the wide screen.  The usual Egyptian cinematic traits – melodrama verging on the hysterical – are present.  But the talents of screenwriter Wahid Hamid, who painted the string of portraits that made The Yacoubian Buiding so gripping, save this from being just another "Egyptian movie."

As does, of course, the director's fine political sense, recently revealed in a Jeune Afrique interview

For women, the problem isn't really the fondamentalists, it's with the predominant mindset that men's interests count for more than those of women.  From the 1930s throught the Eighties, Egyptian cinema was centered on its actresses.  Now that has changed, in large part due to Saudi financing.  That's why I have always done coproductions with France.

When I showed up at the Tangier Cinémathèque, the ticket person first tried to steer me away to a free documentary showing that evening.  “There aren’t any subtitles,” she said of Scheherazade, as if that were an impediment to my enjoyment of the film.  I did give the documentary a try – a series of interviews with minor rockers using mobile phone cameras – but it really wasn’t for me.  No subtitles? Well, I'd lived in Egypt a couple of years, and my rusty Arabic is still tinged with not a little masri...  Still time to catch the beginning of Scheherazade - off I go.  I wasn’t disappointed.

The film is full of attractive young Egyptians: there’s the yuppy leading couple, Hebba and her hubby, both on career tracks that appear to be onward and upward.  But then the seed of fear – or is it jealousy? – makes hubby pressure his TV host wife to move away from political talking heads to the “safer” ground of a women’s talk show.

Well, if that’s what you want...  Hebba gives it her best shot, and what ensues is a series of vignettes of women brought down by men, or rather women refusing to be debased by men.  The ways are many: neighborhood heartthrob woos, in rapid succession, three sisters in a poor working class neighborhood.  Three-timer ends up badly when the eldest sister realizes what he’s been doing.

On the other side of town, successful dentist is taken off her feet by a patient, who becomes a minister after they wed.  But then Prince Charming becomes Count Dracula (or at least a Robber Baron) – inexplicably, in relatively short order.  Turns out that he’s more interested in the dentist’s earnings than in earning her love.

The vignettes are maybe two too many – the film’s 134 minutes do make you want to check your watch – but there could have been many more.  One, only hinted at but surely a daily ritual repeated across the world, shows a beauty in an expensive perfume boutique donning a veil to make the trek home on public transport to her shaabi neighborhood.

Which brings us to the veil.  As Mona El-Naggar, Egyptian journalist, remarked in the August 10 New York Times, young women and girls in her country now wear the veil at a rate of some 89%.  Peer pressure – which might also be said to be man pressure (fathers, brothers, boyfriends and spouses all expect this outward manifestation of piety/chastity/obedience) – is a powerful force.  Despite the "measure of respectability," offered by the veil, El-Naggar states that it "no longer protects or prevents harassment on the street."

But remember, as Yousry Nasrallah told us, it's not only the fundamentalists - it's the men, and their all-encompassing desire to dominate.  Scheherazade comes down on the side of the resisters: they may be battered, but they keep their dignity.

Israel: Swift Sword, Into Foot

In the heady days after the Six Day War, when the IDF vanquished numerically superior forces on three fronts, retired US Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall wrote Swift Sword: The Historical Record of Israel's Victory, June 1967.  Now, the title might have to be Spin Swiftly: Israel Inflicts Own Goal In Showdown With Aid Flotilla.

All the spin in the world isn't helping this time.  The Israeli MFA deployed its multilingual team of spokespeople, native speakers of English, French, Arabic, and the infinite diversity of languages brought back from the diaspora by the Aliyah.  To little avail.  When the IDF commandos wind up alienating 81 year old diplomats like retired US Ambassador Edward Peck, they probably have lost already.  What are they going to do, sink the next ship with Nobel Peace Prize winners aboard?

Israel may have the best spinners, but if the message is in contradiction to your very foundation - "Let my people go" - then audiences will quickly figure it out.  Yes, it would be nice if the Palestinians could deploy their own diaspora, who probably have as wide a linguistic background as the Israelis.  For now, they choose people whose imperfect command of English and of PR 101 leaves them at a distinct disadvantage.  The other problem: Israeli spokespersons represent a country, and Palestine does not yet have that status.

Which brings us to the heart of the problem.  As Israeli writer Amos Oz says today ("Israeli Force, Adrift On the Sea") in the New York Times

the only way for Israel to edge out Hamas would be to quickly reach an agreement with the Palestinians on the establishment of an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as defined by the 1967 borders, with its capital in East Jerusalem.

Amen.  Minus that, flotillas will continue to float - and rockets will resume flying.

(Image: Mother Jones)

Iraq: Sovereign, Secular, Saddamless?

The trigger - a loaded word in this context - was the release in Brussels of The Hurt Locker, an excellent film in my book, and worthy of its Oscars.

What did it set off?  Well, my first mention of Iraq in this blog in about 6 months.  We should think about Iraq more often - the US does have close to 100,000 troops still there.

Democrats Abroad Belgium (DAB) organized a screening and discussion at the Cinéma Styx, an institution like no other here.  Tucked away in a residential district, it offers space for about 35 people - just right for a discussion.

I came prepared, having read a couple of interviews with Mark Boal, the journalist whose two-week embedding with an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in 2004 was the basis of an article that he then turned into a screenplay.  It was the embedding that put me on guard, but Boal was very conscious of the "controlled and antiseptic" coverage of the war on American TV.

Here, I think his stint with the EOD guys yielded the right perspective.  As George Packer - the New Yorker writer who also spent time in Iraq - says, “The Hurt Locker isn’t an Iraq movie—it’s a war movie."  Specifically, a war movie about three guys in a bomb disposal unit.  Period.

That said, our DAB audience found a few inklings of political sensibility.  A comment from one of the soldiers about turning possibly innocent civilian suspects into insurgents.   A disoriented moment back in a Stateside supermarket on R&R and other hints of the PTSD that afflicts thousands of troops (and civilians) who never get used to the everywhere-all-the-time war zone.

Some of the Democrats' comments about authenticity echoed those of veterans, especially the depiction - for dramatic purposes - of EOD experts breaking out of their assigned duties to chase suspected insurgents down dangerous Baghdad alleys, without even those famous night vision goggles, let alone infantry backup.

And the film's depiction of the Iraqis?  George Packer again:

There are no Iraqi characters to speak of, but the walk-ons and extras behave, with one or two exceptions, exactly as their real counterparts would—that is, they treat the Americans with wary hostility, ingratiation, or bafflement.

I think that gets it about right, and I think Robert Scheer's calling The Hurt Locker "chauvinistic" is a bit off the mark, despite its US-centric focus.  It's clear that the main character is addicted to war ('war is a drug," the Chris Hedges quote, opens the film).  The final scene gets you thinking - is the US addicted too, to military adventures in the Middle East?

Which brings me back to Iraq, which The Hurt Locker, though set in 2004, rightly reminds us of.  Can it be sovereign with those tens of thousands of US troops there, even after withdrawal from the major cities?  Can it ever again be secular (recent elections provide no conclusive answer), or has the US intervention made a Shia theocracy inevitable?  And even though Saddam Hussein and his family pose no threat, history would indicate that strong men are never ruled out.

So, where does that leave us with The Hurt Locker?  It's a good film, accurate (up to a point) in its portrayal of a highly specialized unit at a given time in 2004.  But the Iraq war didn't end in 2004, and American EOD people continue to ply their trade in Iraq.  It's a good war film, but it's not the definitive Iraq war film, despite the Oscars.  Not yet.

Just like Vietnam and Apocalypse Now and Platoon, we'll have to wait until the war is really over.

Israel To Palestinians: Take A Hike

Put aside Jerusalem and its contested status for a moment.  Divert your eyes from AIPAC conferences and White House meetings.   Consider, like Robert Wright in the New York Times, that knee jerk "pro-Israel" support can actually be anti-Israel.

And take a hike with Raja Shehadeh, prize-winning author of Palestinian Walks: Notes On a Vanishing Landscape (Profile Books, 2007).

The danger with the current focus on East Jerusalem and Israel's obstinate construction of housing on this "annexed" territory is that it clouds our view of what is happening elsewhere in the occupied territories.  Shehadeh, a human rights lawyer who hikes in his spare time, has provided us with a beautifully written walk through time.  Some of his early walks are simply no longer possible today; paths walled off, territory declared off limits to Palestinians, or hills simply razed to make way for settlements.  Listen as he narrates excerpts from his book:

I hiked some of the same paths that Shehadeh was still able to follow in the early Seventies.  Around Ramallah, I hiked with Palestinian friends and fellow international volunteers, there for a Boy Scout/Quaker project.  Stopping at a grapevine shaded roadside cafe overlooking the olive groves, where a fried egg never tasted better.  Who would ever have thought that such simple freedoms could end?

With my pack rat tendency to keep every map I've ever bought (and I've picked up many), I still have an Israeli ordnance survey map from 1971.  It's a beautifully colored topographical map, whose accompanying "list of settlements" does not refer to Israel's then rare outposts on the West Bank, but is an index to any "settled" place, from Ashdod to Tel Aviv.  Shehadeh's trails are there too.

A return trip in the mid-Eighties, and I pick up a Survey of Israel map of Jerusalem, printed in  1982.  There's a long arm of Jerusalem reaching up toward Ramallah, enveloping "Jerusalem Airport."  The construction of high rise apartment blocks on the high ground around the city belies Israeli intentions.  But it's still rather tame, compared to what happens next.

The Geopolitical Atlas of Israel (Autrement, 2008) shows it in detail: an irregular carbuncle jutting east from what was already annexed East Jerusalem, with the "Separation Wall" enclosing what are clearly Israeli settlements that cut up and loom over Arab neighborhoods.  Elsewhere the Atlas shows what Shehadeh and other Palestinians are up against: a West Bank patchwork of "Areas," nature reserves, and military zones that relegate Palestinians to what's left over, with contiguity a quaint notion for the history books.

For Shehadeh, the omnipresent blockage of his beloved trails is a metaphor for the everyday frustration that faces Palestinians in their own back yards.   For him, "Oslo" is indeed a four-letter word, where negotiators who never hiked the hills were ready to trade them away for the chance to rule over Ramallah and a few other towns.

Raja Shehadeh dedicates his book to his nephew and niece, "with the hope that they will be able to walk in the hills of Palestine."  I certainly hope they will.  But not if Israel's response to everyone, from President Obama to Gordon Brown to Palestinians, is a dismissive "take a hike."