Nork: joseba felix tobar-arbulu <josebafelix@outlook.es>
Bidaltze-data: 2024(e)ko martxoaren 31(a), igandea 09:33
Nori: Hanan Awwad
Gaia: ABERRI EGUNA and Mahmoud Darwish
Dear Hanan,
Good morning,
Today is our ABERRI EGUNA, our day of the Basque Fatherland (or Motherland!)
Here you have what I found yesterday.
For me ia a real jewel.
I’m sure you do know the author (Amal Eqeiq) and the Review:
(SAJJIL A N ¯AʿARAB¯I / WRITE DOWN , I A M AN A RAB (Israel/Palestine). 2014, Color,
73 min. In Arabic and Hebrew with English subtitles. Director and Producer:
Ibtis¯am Mar¯aʿanah Menuhin)
Just in case, here you have it.
Long live the Basque Country!
Long live Free Palestine!
All the best.
joseba
oooooo
SAJJIL A N ¯AʿARAB¯I / WRITE DOWN , I A M AN A RAB (Israel/Palestine). 2014, Color,
73 min. In Arabic and Hebrew with English subtitles. Director and Producer:
Ibtis¯am Mar¯aʿanah Menuhin.
Ibtis¯am Mar¯aʿanah Menuhin’s seventh documentary, Sajjil An¯aʿarab¯ı / Write
Down, I Am an Arab is a visual attempt to create an intimate portrayal of
Maḥm¯ud Darw¯ısh, a Palestinian refugee who became a national poet in exile.
The film is based on an assemblage of interviews with Darw¯ısh in Hebrew,
recordings from his poetry readings in Arabic, and personal testimonies
from close family members, ex-lovers, and friends about his private life
in the homeland and in exile. The testimonies of his Hebrew teacher,
Shoshana Lapidot and his ex-lover Tamar Ben ʿAmi stand out in particular
as a focal point of a Jewish-Israeli memory of Darw¯ısh. Highlighting these
testimonies as foundational entry points into Darw¯ısh’s life story privileges
the Israeli archive. It also reveals two subtexts that dominate the film from
beginning to end: First, the poet’s life story is intended primarily for an Israeli
audience. Second, this audience is about to discover that the Palestinian
national poet whose poetry was banned from Israeli schools, had, after all,
an unknown/untold “Israeli side” to his story.
The paradox of recognition and erasure that presents Darw¯ısh from this
perspective is evident in the first scene of the film. The camera zooms in on
Darw¯ısh’s shabby Israeli ID, which simultaneously recognizes his destroyed
village, Al-Birweh, as his birthplace, and erases his Palestinian identity
by registering his ethnicity as an Arab. Interestingly enough, the Israeli
Ministry of Interior didn’t look carefully into Darw¯ısh’s green eyes and
marked them as blue. This mechanism of colonial Ashkenization is ironically
reflected throughout the documentary, which follows the same order of
the ID: Hebrew first, Arabic second. Darw¯ısh’s first words in the film are
in Hebrew, recorded from old interviews with the Israeli press. They are
followed by an audio collection of his poetry reading in Arabic. Although
Darw¯ısh reflects later in the movie on his complicated relationship with
Hebrew, when he says: “Hebrew was the language that I spoke with the
foreigner who came to my land, with the policeman, the military governor,
the Hebrew teacher, and the beloved” (09:10), the documentary fails to
address this complexity. On the contrary, it normalizes Hebrew by featuring
only interviews with Darw¯ısh in Hebrew from different stages of his life
in the homeland and in exile. These fragments of interviews represent the
Israeli archive. His poetry in Arabic, on the other hand, is presented as a
separate archive. Without translation, it remains excluded from the Israeli
archive.
One of the most compelling aspects of Sajjil An¯aʿarab¯ı / Write Down, I Am
an Arab is its presentation of early visual documentations of Palestinians
from the period of the Military Rule, 1949–1966. These images reveal rare
and valuable footages of the Nakba and everyday life in Palestinian villages
captured by both ethnographic and surveillance cameras of the Israeli state
apparatus. This unusual access to these photos and the funding that this
documentary received because of the director’s Israeli citizenship privileges,
including support from three major Israeli cultural institutions—the New
Fund For Cinema and Television (NFCT), Yes Doco, and Pais Council for Arts
and Culture—raise critical questions about the structural limitations imposed
on Palestinian independent filmmaking. Palestinian filmmakers are generally
denied access to Israeli archives. This also applies to Palestinian filmmakers
in Israel who do not receive government funding or boycott the Israeli state
cultural apparatus. Moreover, similar Palestinian archives are precarious.
In addition to being geographically scattered around the world, they lack
adequate institutional support, and as the salvation of PLO film archive from
Lebanon demonstrates, the Palestinian archive has a long history of being
vulnerable to looting and destruction.
Despite the director’s explicit cinematic attempts to present Darw¯ısh’s life
through a joint and “balanced” Palestinian–Israeli narrative, made explicit
in her public statements in several interviews, the documentary largely
fails to achieve this balance because of its focus on Darw¯ısh’s relationship
with Tamar Ben ʿAmi, his Jewish lover and the inspiration for his famous
1967 poem “Rita and the Rifle.” In its preoccupation with this supposedly
unknown side of Darw¯ısh, the film ends up elevating Ben ˈAmi to one of
the most important people in Darw¯ısh’s life. The exclusive media value of
her appearance in the documentary—Ben ʿAmi does not appear in other
documentaries about Darw¯ısh—also sensationalizes Darw¯ısh’s personal life.
Juxtaposition of footage of Ben ʿAmi as a woman in her sixties sitting in her
apartment in Berlin with her well-kept archive of poetic love letters that
Darw¯ısh wrote in Hebrew from an Israeli prison in the 1960s reminiscing
about her sixteen-year old young self in Haifa, and Rita of the poem presents
a confusing and unconvincing blurring of biography and poetic practice.
Ben ʿAmi may well have been the inspiration for Rita, but Darw¯ısh’s poem
is not only, or even primarily about her. This tension in the politics of
memory and the difference between Rita and the poem on the one hand, and
Ben ʿAmi and her memories and life experiences on the other, underlines
the visual structure of the film. However, the assemblage of footage from
Haifa, Berlin, and Paris and the director’s attempt to recreate Ben ʿAmi’s
romantic nostalgia by following her efforts to reconnect with Darw¯ısh
decades after their separation reveal the relatively marginal significance
of this early love affair to Darw¯ısh’s life in exile. To Ben ʿAmi’s bitter
disappointment, he agrees to see her only once for a brief meeting in
Paris.
While Ben ʿAmi’s nostalgia is featured as the main source for revealing
intimate details about Darw¯ısh’s life before exile, the documentary also
includes fragments of interviews with other significant people in his life: his
biological brother, Ahmad, his adopted brother and comrade, the Palestinian
poet, Sam¯ıh Al-Q¯asim, and his ex-wife Ran¯a Qabb¯an¯ı. None of them mention
Darw¯ısh’s love affair with Ben ʿAmi. Their memories focus on respectively
recalling the internal struggles of Darw¯ısh the brother, the friend, and
the husband. Ahmad reflects on his brother’s persecution by the military
governor and the difficulties he endured in Israeli prison, which eventually
forced him into exile. Al-Q¯asim laments the spiritual separation that Darw¯ısh
experienced as a result of this exile. He also dismisses the idea that
Darw¯ısh’s exile furthered the development of the modern Arabic poem. In
her living room in Paris, Qabb¯an¯ı shares family albums, her translation of
Darw¯ısh’s poetry, amid vivid descriptions of their passionate, yet short-lived
marriage(s). Through these accounts, the viewer gains a deeper insight into
the complex character of Darw¯ısh and the effects of exile on his identity as a
man, a poet, and a Palestinian.
The last scene in the documentary features a recording of Darw¯ısh’s exit
from the stage after his last poetry reading in Ramallah before his death
in 2008. He fades out from the frame leaving behind a cheering Palestinian
audience who saw in his poetry its collective voice. This dramatic scene seals
Darw¯ısh’s life, but only as another fragment from the archive, disconnected
from the testimonies of his brother, Al-Q¯asim, and Qabb¯an¯ı.
Unlike other documentaries about Darw¯ısh, such as Simone Bitton’s
Mahmoud Darwich: Et La Terre, Comme La Langue/ As the Land Is the Language
(1997) and N¯as.r¯ı H. ajj¯aj’s Kam¯a Q¯ala Al-Sh¯aʿir /As the Poet Said (2010),
Mar¯aʿanah Menuhin’s Sajjil An¯aʿarab¯ı presents Darw¯ısh through a hegemonic
colonial discourse about hybridity, conflicted Palestinian-Israeli identity, and
fragments of memory that camouflage the complex life of the poet and the
influence of his poetry in the Arab world and beyond.
DOI:10.1017/rms.2017.
Amal Eqeiq
Williams College
