Hello, my name is Caroline Rooney I'm professor of African and Middle Eastern
Studies at the University of Kent. My lecture today consists of a short
introduction to an arts documentary I made in 2014 called 'White Flags.' Drawing
on extensive fieldwork and research in Lebanon, 'White Flags' as a project based
on film portraits of individual Lebanese citizens from different backgrounds
reflecting on their respective trust building initiatives in Beirut. This is
in the context of post-conflict Beirut of course.The film conceptually and
artistically explores the importance of white flags in a country where the
national flag has frequently had its significance appropriated and where the
variously colored flags of embattled political parties have served to
heighten tensions and divisions. First of all I should like to point out that I
made the film with my Lebanese research associate Rita Sacker and with Lebanese
cinematographer Johnny Husan because it was important for me to work with
those who are intimate with Lebanon in terms of its recent history and in terms
of topographical familiarity with Beirut. That said, I will speak here about some
of the preoccupations that I brought to the project at the outset as well as
some of the preoccupations that emerged for me in the making of the film. My own
research on Lebanon began with Osama bin Laden's claim that the reason for 9/11
was the 1982 siege of Beirut. It seemed to me that what bin Laden was ascerting
was that an oblivious America needed to be made aware of the trauma that the
citizens of Beirut had suffered and this was over the American-backed Israeli
assault on Beirut the PLO. This certainly explains the deliberate iconography of
9/11,
that of planes exploding buildings, this constituting a visual echo of the
Israeli jets that flew into Beirut in 1982 to bomb its high-rise buildings
along the Corniche and beyond. It was as if bin Laden wished to force the Americans to
experience what the Lebanese had suffered, this amounting to an attack on
the self-centeredness of America but if so, 9/11 as a mimetic act, or compulsion to
repeat, amounts to a very literal re-enactment and it may be added you
don't create empathy through making people experience the violence others have gone
through, you create empathy through appealing to the imagination.
However, it is the case that Americans who could not understand why 9/11
happened had little awareness of the legacies of trauma in the Middle East.
Very little attention is given in the Western media to those who live in
places devastated by war in the aftermath of conflict. The news is always
the conflict itself after which affected places get forgotten. The media moves on
to the next conflict flaring up. So, it may be said that the film constitutes itself
as a kind of counter-narrative to this along the lines of the following
question. While the 'war on terror' is going on between the west and the
extremists, what else is going on amongst us out of the war site. When I say
amongst us, I mean something along the lines of the approach of Ayman El-
Desouky in his recent book 'The Intellectual and the People in Egyptian
Literature and Culture'. That is, El-Desouky argues for
intellectuals and artists who placed themselves alongside the people
acting less as experts and more as concerned and involved citizens. It is the
ethic of solidarity that I was keen to explore. In keeping with this,
the film begins with a visionary passage from Mahmoud-Darwishl's poem 'Mural'
that strikes a chord for the whole documentary in terms of theme and mood. I'll
read out the extract we used. 'One day I shall become what I want. 'This is your
name', a woman said, and vanished in the corridor of her whiteness. This is your
name.
Memorize it well. Do not argue about any of its letters. Ignore the tribal flags.
Befriend your horizontal name. Experience it with the living and the dead.' In
an excerpt from Darwishl's poem, the line 'One day I shall become what I want'
suggests both the melancholic sense of an as unyet unrealized potential and
nonetheless a Utopian sense of hope. This seemed to be the right affect for the
film, melancholic yet hopeful, which matched with the music of the track chosen,
Ibrahim Maalouf's 'Beirut', his musical portrait of the city, one that is sadly
accepting and reflective but without being defeated. The film attempts to be a
visual counterpart to Maalouf's musical portrait, as I'll try to explain. In Darwishl's
poem to become what is desired depends on putting away the tribal flags
in favor of what he calls your horizontal name. So, the tribal flag may
be seen as set up against the horizontal and in the film,
flags are typically displayed in elevated positions as we can see here.
The logic of a flag is totemic, the raising up of a symbol of kinship, but
beyond this it is not only a symbol of belonging, but a territorial marker of
ownership.
The group ideal is thus informed by a logic of private property. On the one
hand the group ideal has a civilizational function of uniting its
members in a common purpose, but on the other hand it is potentially aggressive
in its privatization or monopolization of the communal and communally sacred
members of a group may share in its privileges of ownership, but are also
individually owned by the group as a regulative ideal. Tribal flags can
function like brands or capitalist logos furthermore in a sectarian context they
are invested with religious significance, while totems are more broadly valued in
terms of the sacred. In reading literature about the civil war in
Lebanon, a frequent observation I came across was that the symbols of religious
belonging were themselves treated as sacred. This is similar to Marx's
critique of commodity fetishism. For Marx the commodity is merely a thing
but it is treated as if it were magically alive.
Similarly, tribal flags have a fetishistic significance, or we could say
'shirkish' significance, the term 'shirk' being an islamic one for idolatry meaning
that it is the symbol that is worshipped more than what it symbolizes. In other
words, what is at stake in the territorialisation of tribal flags and
religious symbols is literal minded performativity, the symbol of something is taken
to be the thing itself.
So this means that the group ideal becomes more important than the group
itself, the symbol is treated as more real than reality. In order to resist
this literal mindedness and to return to the group has a reality and not a
performative symbol a poetic of the real is needed.
'White Flags' therefore tries to create a picture of Beirut in a poetic way that
might redirect us to the real, as a question of what, group peacescapes might
be. What is a peacescape? Drawing on Freud's 'Civilization and its Discontents', a human
peacescape as opposed to a natural one, could be surmised to be a city or a
town that is clean, orderly, utilitarian and yet adorned with beauty. The Beirut
that is seen in 'White Flags' is not a picturesque Beirut. The Corniche is
pretty much absent along with the glitzy districts of the city, rather it is the
Beirut that most Lebanese experience on a daily basis that is presented, a rather
haphazard and scruffy city of hastily erected buildings, disrepair and traffic
jams due to the lack of public transport. Although it is in this viewing a scruffy
city in the main, as many cities are, it is nonetheless decorated with capitalist
logos and advertising with tribal markers including flags and with
graffiti. For me this urban writing entails different kinds of signs
So here's an advertisement I photographed in Beirut. What interests me about this photograph
is that, when I saw it I saw that the lamppost had chopped off the original letters of
the slogans so it became 'ashionable area' instead of 'fashionable area' and 'harming
neighborhood' instead of 'charming neighborhood'. So coming back to the way
in which this urban writing entails different kinds of signs,
there are signs that are advertisements in the sense that they seek to draw
attention to themselves,
self-centered signs. And then there are the signs that seek to advertise or make
known something beyond themselves as signs. I call this latter kind of sign an
ostensive sign, a sign that points to something other than itself. What I wish
to suggest is that the white flag as opposed to the tribal flag is an
ostensive sign. The tribal flag wants you to concentrate on it as the ideal but
the white flag presents you with a blank space and this blank signifier or page
opens up the freedom of the imagination for everyone. In that it is the case
of what is for everyone,
any inscription or image here would point to or seek out fellow images and
inscriptions in the manner of graffiti. And here's some Beirut graffiti that
there's really a lot of it all over the city.
The film is constructed rhizomatically or horizontally that is to
say with respect to this group imagination. The horizontal name that Darwishl
refers to. The particular rhizome at stake could be called 'Rebuilding Civil
Society'.
While each individual interviewee is like a distinct blade of grass on this rhizome,
distinct yet connected with the others. I did not approach the White Flag with a
preconceived notion of its meaning, and what was interesting for me was to see
how each interviewee brought their own meanings to the White Flag, as I'll
indicate. It was on perceiving this the editing structure of a film emerged as
opposed to the script. I will now say something about each interviewee. Firstly,
we have here a Amah Maccaram on the left. Amah Maccaram is a humanitarian aid
worker and for her
The White Flag points to national memory.
If bin Laden's 9/11 message was 'remember Beirut', he chose the wrong
language for it. Amah created a peacescape by assembling politicians of different
political parties in Beirut's Martyrs Square under a banner calling for
national remembrance of all the suffering not just only of this group or that group.
Her banner or white flag was eventually torn down but at least she made a peacescape.
For Chorki Azeeri, the next interviewee, The White Flag points to
mourning, the universality of such, and in his work as a psychoanalyst he helps
his patients from different backgrounds through the processes of mourning. Both
private patients and patients at a Hospital Mount Lebanon. For Janine Joque,in a
news reporter and columnist with l'Orient le Jour, The White Flag points to justice,
especially socio-economic justice, and this is her vocation as a journalist. For Arouf Rify,
an artist and urban planner The White Flag concerns the darwishi
figure. So here is some of his work where he paints these darwishi figures. I should
explain that in Lebanon the darwish is not just a Dervish but more broadly a
carnivalesque figure embodying popular spirit and can sometimes be a
revolutionary figure. The figure of the darwish is a white flag in challenging
identity politics in favor of a common humanity. Finally, for Orealy Azuki, a
theatre director and performer, the white flag points to the arena of public
conviviality and he uses theatre and performance spaces to achieve this piece
scape of festive togetherness across sectarian divides as we see at the end
of the film where he organizes a street party
all these visions of the white flag can be placed horizontally beside each other
in an open ended series to which you can add your own white flags and you're
welcome to do so.
Finally the white flag also seems to turn the boundary marker into a
threshold you can cross. Apart from filming the streets of different
neighborhoods in Beirut, we filmed the interviewees in their homes and workplaces,
but for all of them
the boundary between home and workplace was a porous one. Also the boundary
between the home but as a workplace and the street turned out to be a porous one
particularly as can be seen in the festival Aurelian organized as this big
street party so, coming back to where I started, the white flag should undo the
logic of private property both indicating where those on the streets
can be taken into the home and cared for and where the civilization of the home
can be taken out onto the street.
Thank you very much for listening.