Mia Sherry
The long journey home in Nadine Labaki’s thematic trilogy
Tackling trauma, identity and nationality through religion and tradition, Nadine Labaki’s thematic trilogy— Caramel (2007), Where Do We Go Now? (2011) and Capernaum (2018)— situates and contextualises these issues within the centrepiece of modern life: the home. ‘Home’ in Labaki’s films extends beyond the historical Western portrayal of a roof over four walls. While Labaki places the same importance on a strong sense of physical location, she also ties in issues of nationality, gender roles, diaspora and exile into the foundations of the home. This is largely, in Labaki’s case, reflective of how recent and new the foundations of Lebanon itself are, how fragile they remain, and of the much-discussed and contended role of women. As a result, when these concepts of nationality, the female experience, and encountering the modern home are expressed, Labaki’s work inevitably returns to or is situated in sites of home, homeland and exile.
Caramel (سكر بنات)
Labaki’s first feature film (which was entirely written and directed by her), Caramel, is the embodiment of the cinematic ‘home’. It does not take place within a house but rather in a beauty salon (‘Si Belle’), in which the love-lives, career setbacks and family dramas of five friends meet and intersect. Caramel offers the perfect mirror to contemporary Lebanese life. It also transcends societal rules and regulations: Layale (Nadine Labaki) mourns over her seemingly stuck-in-a-rut extramarital affair, Nisrine (Yasmine Al Massri), a Muslim who is about to be married, discusses pre-marital sex, Jamal (Giséle Aouad) watches her acting career begin to slip away with age, Rose’s (Sihame Haddad) love-life suffers as she takes care of her demanding older sister, and Rima (Joanna Moukarzel) is a (coded) closeted lesbian.
The physical space of ‘home’ here is the salon, a female space where the women and their lives can meet regardless of societal structures that would, externally, keep them apart. However, when they converge, not only do they offer structures of support that their blood families do not offer or understand, but a safe space of female transformation: literal physical transformation through depilation, but also emotional transformation as they engage with their interpersonal relationships, careers and sexualities.
Throughout the entire film, ‘Si Belle’ is a female-dominated and protected space until Youssef (Adel Karram), the policeman, is allowed in, and this is only as a form of payment for his help. As the Lebanese academic Luma Balaa has noted, “there is no space for him in this women’s space”, hence he has to shout to be heard over the din of hair dryers, radio and conversation. He winces in pain and is reduced to tears by Layale’s caramel waxing. The home in this context becomes “symbolic of feminine power” (Balaa, 2019).
Lina Khatib has contended that by situating sites of home in female-dominated spaces, the film recalibrates the woman’s body as the national body (Khatib, 2008). This notion is refined in Labaki’s Caramel, which is further removed from the male gaze and instead of objectifying the female body as a sex object, rather portrays it as a profound canvas on which the Lebanese female experience is reflected.
Where do we go now? (وهلأ لوين؟)
Where Do We Go Now? (WDWGN?), Labaki’s second feature film, acts as an embodiment of ‘homeland’. Set in an unnamed village where Christians and Muslims live in (somewhat tenuous) peace, the women of the village band together to distract the men from the war brewing outside the village and keep them from breaking the truce that exists within the village walls. WDWGN? was inspired by the outbreak of sectarian violence in May 2008, the same day in which Labaki found out she was pregnant with her first child, prompting her to ask the question: “What would I do to stop him [fighting]?” (Sinno, 2017).
While Caramel is deeply rooted in, and indeed, devoted to a strong sense of place, WDWGN? engages with concepts of nationality that extend beyond geographical territory. The fictional village exemplifies the German concept of Heimat (namely, that of a shared and collective home) by not focusing on one main character, but rather focusing on the women of the village as a whole (Hobswam, 1991). Where Caramel was dedicated “à mon Beyrouth”, WDWGN? is dedicated “à nos méres” – “to our mothers”. As political scientist Spike Peterson has noted, “women … become the battleground of [national] group struggles” (Peterson, 1999). It is women that protect and enable the unification of the village against the warring outside, and it is women who are hurt in the process. Although the only person to be killed is a man, Issam (Saseen Kawzally), it is his mother, sister and female friends who are seen crying and grieving, while the men remain stoic and seemingly unaffected by such a tragedy. In this way, the evocation of the ‘gendered nation’ is somewhat obvious, and not at all unique to Lebanese national cinema: the woman as the nation is mirrored in France (Marianne), England (Boadecia) and Ireland (Mother Ireland) (Kandiyoti, 1994). This phenomenon is encapsulated in Deniz Kantiyoti’s writing, with her assertion that “women bear the burden of being ‘mothers of the nation’”. This is embodied in Labaki’s film, as the women at once are freed of the “oppressed Arab woman” stereotype but are then redefined as mothering figures, concerning themselves constantly with the men and their peace. Thus, they “transmit the culture and are the … signifiers of national difference” (Kandiyoti, 1994). Lina Khatib has expanded on the female role in Arab cinema as being a signifier of national difference, positing that the female in Arab cinema becomes representative of the “ideological discourses” that are used in the creation and transformation of Arab spaces (Khatib, 2006).
“It speaks to the larger ideal of Heimat – home as being collective, rather than divisive; meaning that the village itself became more important to the women than their devout religious beliefs”
The Arab space in Labaki’s WDWGN? is both defined and unified by tradition: the villages meet at the confluence where the mosque and the church face each other. The film itself opens with the women of the village, clad in mourning clothes, walking and singing in unison as they go to the graveyard before splitting up to Muslim and Christian plots respectively. Though this division would usually cause tension, it instead becomes a consolidating force as the women recognise the importance of keeping peace. It culminates with the men waking up on the day of Issam’s funeral (who has been killed in another warring village), to find their wives have converted: the Muslim wives are now carrying rosary beads and waking their husbands up with holy water, and the Christian wives now wear hijabs and sing the call to prayer. As Takla (Claude Baz Moussawbaa) tells her son, his “enemy is now inside your home”. Though the religious conversion is played somewhat for laughs, it speaks to the larger ideal of Heimat – home as being collective, rather than divisive, meaning that the village itself becomes more important to the women than their devout religious beliefs. However, Labaki remains a pragmatist: as the newly-unified men carry Issam’s casket to the grave, they suddenly stop, unsure of where to bury him. Turning around, facing the camera, they ask “Where do we go now?”.
Capernaum (كفرناحوم)
The cycle is complete with Labaki’s most recent film, Capernaum (2018), which examines exile. Zain (Zain Al Rafeea), a twelve-year-old boy, sues his parents for bringing him into this world and not being able to care for him. It is then revealed that Zain ran away from home after his younger sister, Sahar (Cedra Izam), was sold into marriage at the age of eleven to a much older man. Having run away, Zain is taken in by an immigrant single mother, Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw). Zain takes over the caring duties for her infant son, Yonas (Boluwatife Treasure Bankole), while Rahil is at work, desperately trying to earn money to get papers for both herself and Yonas. Exile is experienced in Capernaum by many people: by Sahar, who is expelled from her family home once she is “of age” to marry; by Rahil, who is an exile from her birth country and in Beirut due to her inability to legally access papers; and by Zain, who is the only one of the characters to self-impose his own exile. Where the two women are made powerless by the authorities above them and are forced into exile, Zain, being a male, still retains some autonomy by not having the same social barriers imposed on him. For example, Zain does not have to marry for money or take care of any children, and can freely navigate between multiple homes, as opposed to the women, who are quite literally locked in theirs.
However, despite the fact that Zain, Sahar and Rahil’s exiles are individually and differentially expressed, they are all united in one singular form of exile: they do not have the legal or bureaucratic means to legitimately “exist” in the state. When citing her initial inspiration for the film, Labaki noted “… the notion of the absurdity of having to have a paper to prove your existence, the absurdity of borders … refugees. I look at this … and I go, ‘But this is like hell. We are living in hell.’” (Labaki in Hutchinson, 2019).
Filmed in Beirut slums, the title is derived from the French word for chaos, and the biblical city ‘Capernaum’, which itself was a city exiled: “And you, Capernaum, will you be lifted to the heavens? No, you will go down to Hades.” (Matthew 11:23). This sets the precedent for the rest of the film, which indeed does have a kind of biblical, fairytale-esque narrative: the fact that a not-yet teenage boy could successfully sue his parents just for his birth, that he could run away from home without suffering any major injury or harm, and that the characters he meets along the way all add some element of fantasy to offset the gruelling dramatic realism with which it is portrayed. Furthermore, Labaki utilises the common criteria for gothic fairytales, most notably excess (the excess of suffering, of sibling and found-family love, the excess of sound and colour) and Freud’s seminal theory of the ‘uncanny’; or the ‘unheimlich’, where the ‘Heimat’ (home/homeland) becomes unfamiliar or ‘unhomely’ (Hubner, 2018).
In Figure 2, when Sahar is still with the family, the stairwell leading to Zain’s apartment is clearly lit as he walks up by himself. In Figure 3, the next day when Sahar is being dragged out by her mother, the same stairwell is dark and murky, reminiscent of the descent into hell mentioned in the biblical verse from which the film takes its name. This stairwell is representative of Freud’s theory of the unhomely, wherein something that was ‘home’ suddenly becomes unfamiliar and ‘haunted’, and where “everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away has come into the open” (Freud, 2003). Once the uncanny has been realised, it can never revert back to the homely – the Heimat is now and forever ‘haunted’ by what was or has occurred. Zain’s encounter with the unhomely is so jarring and uncomfortable that he can not only never return (hence his self-imposed exile), but this feeling of dislocation is also carried with him throughout the rest of the film as he attempts to create other sites of home at the carnival, Rahil’s house, and eventually the streets of Beirut. All of these events are both impermanent and permeable by outside forces, but his journey as a whole represents the wider “cinematic myth of home” (Bronfen, 2004). This myth can never fully be realised purely due to the fact that ‘home’ is by nature so liminal and undefinable that it can never be safely and securely represented on screen without being ‘haunted’ by what is and is not represented.
Home, homeland and exile all converge with contemporary Lebanese culture and politics in the filmography of Nadine Labaki, each mapping its own complex imaginary geography of modern-day Beirut and Lebanon. Both home and homeland are largely female-dominated, both upheld and protected by the women that in many ways created those sites, and allow for a space of cultural confluence that would not otherwise occur outside this boundary. Exile is not as gender-coded, though its conditions are clearly differentiated on the basis of sex, yet its experience remains largely the same. The cinematic dream of home is mapped through Labaki’s thematic trilogy, where spaces of home or lack thereof are seen through the female gaze and told through female voices, which become united not despite their differences, but rather in spite of them.
Bibliography
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