The Daily Star, Lebanon
Sept 17 2004
Appreciating Palestine after 50 years of exile
Yousri Nasrallah’s ‘Bab al-Shams’ popularizes Elias Khoury’s novel of
dispossession
By Jim Quilty
Daily Star staff
BEIRUT: It is 1994. Three figures – a repatriated Lebanese who lived
the civil war in Paris, his French girlfriend and their local fixer –
have asked Khalil, the central character of “Bab al-Shams,” to give
them a tour of the Sabra-Shatilla refugee camp. The couple will
produce a Jean Genet piece on the Sabra-Shatilla massacre and want to
capture the local flavor.
During the obligatory interview in the office of the camp’s PLO
official, Khalil translates the commandant’s oft-rehearsed speech
about the Palestinian’s dispossession and ultimate return into two
concise remarks: “The Palestinian people have suffered a great deal,”
and “The Palestinian people will suffer a great deal more.”
The scene nicely reiterates the wry humor of Lebanese writer Elias
Khoury’s 1998 novel “Bab al-Shams.” Though it uses memories and
impressions of Palestinian experience from the nakba to the Oslo
Accords, the novel does so without making a single narrative. Rather,
it creates a nonchronological composite of stories that at times
contradict and at times refine one another, transforming recollection
into fiction on the strength of the sheer multitude and variety of
voices.
Egyptian director Yousri Nasrallah has adapted Khoury’s novel into a
diptych, “Al-Rahil” (The Departure) and “Al-Awda” (The Return). With
a total budget of between $3 and $4 million, these works are
important both as political and aesthetic objects, and it is in these
terms that they must be assessed. The movies’ politics is very close
to that of the novel but the aesthetic is entirely different.
As “Al-Rahil” opens, Shams (Hala Omran), a young Palestinian
guerrilla leader, murders a neighbor of her lover Khalil (Bassel
Khayyat) and disappears. Later she’s gunned down by the murdered
man’s relatives. Shortly after the first murder, Khalil’s friend
Younes (Orwa Nyrabia), an old fighter from the days of the 1948
expulsion, has a stroke and is lying comatose in the camp hospital.
As Khalil is a doctor, and as PLO authorities will surely implicate
him in Shams’ crime, watching over Younes is a good way to hide.
For most of the first film, Khalil recounts his version of Younes’
story, specifically that of his long love affair with his wife Nahila
(Rim Turkhi) who, as we come to see, is a metaphor for Palestine.
After some preliminary scenes sketching Younes and Nahila’s teenage
wedding and the idyllic life of the pre-1948 Palestinian village, the
film moves onto its real interest – the dispossession.
Driven from their village, pursued by a ruthless Zionist army and
feebly defended by local gunmen and an Arab army never ordered to
engage the enemy, the population of Younes and Nahila’s village find
their way Lebanon. Younes is determined to carry on the fight from
Lebanon but Nahila remains in Palestine with Younes’ father and
mother. They carry on their relationship intermittently from
different sides of the border – thus establishing the film’s unifying
irony: The Palestinian never appreciated Palestine until he was
forced to leave it.
With Nahila safely dead and Younes in coma throughout, we never hear
a first-person account of this story. What we do get is Umm Hasan’s
counterpoint to Khalil’s story. Another nakba-generation refugee who
knew Younes and Nahila, she sometimes deflates his heroic-romantic
version of Younes’ story. Umm Hasan’s good-natured struggle with
Khalil over the truth of the story is nearly all that remains of the
novel’s multiple voices.
It is important to keep this in mind, since it provides some
intellectual ballast for the first film. Set largely in Palestine
before and just after the nakba, “Al-Rahil” has the unfortunate look
of a Ramadan musalsala – those televised historical melodramas that
are staple viewing after families break their fast. Though unbearably
sentimental and utterly alien to anything that’s come from Khoury’s
imagination, these long historical episodes can almost (almost) be
reasoned away if you remind yourself that Khalil’s representations –
of a history he didn’t experience of a country he’s never seen – are
dipped in the honey of nostalgia.
The center of gravity of “Al-Awda,” the second film, is more
contemporary, focusing on Khalil’s telling of his own story. It is a
far grittier, more critical tale than that of Younes and perhaps for
that reason more watchable.
An orphan, Khalil is drawn to Younes as a father figure. Like him,
Khalil becomes a fighter. Thanks to the Lebanese civil war, though,
Khalil spends more time fighting Lebanese than Israelis. As he notes
while recounting one particularly senseless killing: “The Lebanese
war made criminals of us all.”
When Israel forces the PLO out of Beirut, Khalil remains behind to
work as a doctor and then meets Shams. He’s never able to finish his
story because the Palestinian secret police arrest and interrogate
him about the murder Shams commits at the beginning of “Al-Rahil.”
Here the interrogating officer provides a counterpoint to Khalil’s
version of things. Armed with an intelligence file, he undermines
certain “facts” we have about Khalil – he isn’t a doctor but a nurse;
his girlfriend Shams was sleeping with other men; his adopted mother
Umm Hasan, who comes to rescue him, is not his mother and cannot
pretend to really know him.
Critics no longer complain about film adaptations being inferior to
the novels they’re based on. They observe, quite rightly, that film
and fiction are different genres with different conventions. The
counterargument has it that the problem isn’t one of moving fiction
to film as such – few complain about film versions of Steven King and
Tom Clancy novels. Rather it is one of dumbing-down intelligent
fiction to make it more appealing to a wider audience.
In 1996 Anthony Minghella adapted Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 novel “The
English Patient.” Like Khoury’s novel, Ondaatje’s rotates around a
pair of love stories – one recollected by a dying burn patient, the
other experienced by the nurse who is caring for him. These stories
are interesting because they are presented as a dense knot of
distinct narratives and by the context – a rich poetic treatment of
history, memory and the geography of exploration and grief. Many were
bewildered, then, that there was little but love story in Minghella’s
film, which Ondaatje himself had a hand in writing.
The same dynamic is at work in the adaptation of “Bab al-Shams.”
Again, the director and writer have collaborated in transforming a
poetic, nonlinear composite into a chronological narrative of two
pairs of lovers set against a troubled history.
The two novels (and their filmic progeny) are different from
Ondaatje’s in one respect – the content. Though both authors invested
years in researching their subjects before sitting down to write, the
dispossession of the Palestinians is politically fraught in a way
that Ondaatje’s subject is not.
There are other ways to go about it, of course. The Armenian genocide
in the 20th century is as much as the stuff of communal trauma,
history and memory as Palestine’s nakba. Yet virtually the only film
treatment of the episode is “Ararat” (2002). Written and directed by
Armenian-Canadian director Atom Egoyan, “Ararat” is not made
according to populist convention – working with trauma and communal
memory while being critical of the political uses of memory.
Viewing Nasrallah’s historical sequences of the refugees of the nakba
– hundreds of extras swaying across desolate landscapes in period
costume, pursued by other extras packing toy rifles and bundled into
approximations of period Israeli uniforms – it is difficult not to
recall Egoyan’s toy shots of the Armenian displacement. The effect is
altogether different, though. Nasrallah evokes melodrama in the
finest tradition of the Ramadan musalsala. Egoyan creates and
contemplates the scene from a distance, which makes it possible to
look upon the scene without grief.
Many Armenians hailed “Ararat” when it was released because a film
telling their story had finally been released. Later conversations
suggested they simply didn’t “read” the film in the same way as
others, many non-Armenians, who admired its courageous, intelligently
critical position.
The film adaptation of “Bab al-Shams” might have struck the cranium
with the same satisfying thud as “Ararat.” It is unlikely,
furthermore, that it could have been done by an independent Arab
director with more talent and better contacts than Yousri Nasrallah.
Unsatisfying as it often is, it’s more informative to look at “Bab
al-Shams” for what it is than what it isn’t.
It “is” the sometimes-uneasy marriage of two sensibilities – a
post-modern poetic of disjuncture born in the contradictions of
Lebanon’s civil war and the unabashedly populist sentimentalism of
Egyptian cinema. The issue may do less to capture the nuances of the
human and historical narrative. It does return some of Khoury’s
stories to those who remembered them. Indeed, if statistics about the
size of this region’s readership are to be believed, Khoury’s stories
are likely to reach a far wider audience on film than in print.
In this respect the films are a sort of reaffirmation of Palestinian
experience.
What gives some pause is the question of what aesthetic message
accompanies this reaffirmation. This streamlined representation of
the Palestinians’ stories strips the nostalgia and the sentiment of
nationalism from the vulgarity of political agenda. What, you wonder,
is it attached to? At the end of Nasrallah’s “Bab-al-Shams,” Khalil
flees Shatilla, leaps into a river that carries him back to
Palestine. Khoury’s “Bab-al-Shams” has Khalil leave Younes’ grave for
some unknown destination.
The original scenario sounds more desperate, but surely it is
preferable to flee on your own two feet than to be swept along by the
current, political or otherwise.
“Al-Rahil,” the first film in Yousri Nasrallah’s “Bab al-Shams”
diptych is now screening at Beirut’s Sodeco Cinema. The second film,
“Al-Awda,” will open later in the year.