Memory within and without the photographic frame: Wadad Halwani’s The Last Picture… While Crossing

Prelude

Some halfway into Eliane Raheb’s documentary film, Sleepless Nights (2012), one of the two principal characters, Mariam Saiidi, sits on her sofa and embraces a large photograph of her son Maher Kassir. In June 1982, when still a teenager, he disappeared during one of the many militia battles in Beirut. Like much of the country at the time, Lebanon’s capital was convulsed in armed conflict, massacres, ethnic cleansing, civil violence, and foreign occupation. Kassir is among an estimated 17,000 casualties of disappearance, almost all of whom are still unaccounted.

The photograph Saiidi coddles is an enlarged, life-size print of the same photograph that she often presents in various public settings when advocating her cause and that of the disappeared in Lebanon—as activist ID badge during political protests, or else in exhibitions for the disappeared. With a blank background and shoulder-length framing that has the effect of compressing Maher to the surface of the image, the photograph must have been initially produced for a bureaucratic document.

In this particular scene of Raheb’s film, Saiidi has cut out her son’s figure from the enlarged photographic print, getting rid of the square frame and the blank background. As she puts her arm around Maher’s cutout image, it is as though she were hugging her son, all the while putting herself in the position of being cuddled by him. Her gesture, we can say, amounts to an effort to deny the compression of her son’s image to a depthless surface. In this instance, she is compelled to deny any reality outside the frame—deny, that is to say, the representative logic of the frame itself, deny Maher’s physical absence, deny his imaginary presence. However, at the same time, Saiidi cannot but help articulate a reference to photography as a representational medium: “This is how we used to be photographed,” she says to the off-screen director.

While filmed in the very intimate space of her lounge room, Saiidi is nevertheless aware that the documentary impulses of the film transport her intimacy into a public mode of representation and address. In other words, her very denial of the frame is itself framed (of which she is of course well aware) by the motion-picture camera, according to the momentum of the production (scripting, filming, editing, screening, viewing) of the film Sleepless Nights.

Simultaneously affirming and denying the photographic frame, the scene both captures and fashions an exchange between an emotional relationship and the pressing need to render this relationship amenable to political activism and public reception. Incorporated as an ambivalent site of fluctuation, the photographic frame transpires as a relational site of address and response, or else a disarticulated exchange of emotional comportment. This fluctuation depends on variable modalities of the exposure and representation of photographic images, within and without the photographic frame.

For the relatives of the disappeared in Lebanon, photographs have a role in how they transpose personal memories into public advocacy. Between the personal and public, photographs transpire as material and imaginative resources adapted to initiate memory as a “taking-place” (Agamben, 2013: 18). In other words, the photographs accrue consistency through their mediality—through their practical application as relational modalities of recollection and rememory.

In what follows, I concentrate on Wadad Halwani’s 2009 film The Last Picture…While Crossing, in respect to photographs of the disappeared in Lebanon. In discussing her film, I trace the contours and circumstances in and by which relatives of disappeared people have to both deny and affirm photographic frames. I am interested in how, as emotional entanglement, a photograph’s frame has to some extent be dissolved into the image it comports (or else around the image that comes to cohere), while in respect to political activism and advocacy the same photographic frame has to be affirmed. This shifting ambivalence is largely due to the inconclusive loss embodied by relatives of the disappeared, though, as I argue, carries the force of social and political circumstance. ¹ Within and without the photographic frame, memory of the disappeared shifts through manifold flows of personal value and public resonance, emotional comportment, and political sensibility, bearing both personal and impersonal, individual and iconic associations.

“We miss you, Odette. And the people of the photos, they miss you too”

(Wadad Halwani, 2009, in The Last Picture…While Crossing)

As personal possessions, portraits of disappeared individuals, graphic practices of bearing witness, sites of mourning, and exhibits for political activism, photographs have a special physical significance for the relatives of the disappeared, in Lebanon and elsewhere. Wadad Halwani has recounted attending an international conference in Geneva, where the participants surprised her by “wearing pictures of their disappeared on their chests.” Finding herself “strange and different without a picture,” she goes on to say that “it becomes like our identity … We are known through the picture” (quoted in Humaydan, 2006: 115). It is a telling incident and reflection on Halwani’s part, considering how a photograph depicting a disappeared person is physically worn on the body as a marker of personal identity and group association, incorporated as representational medium, activist affiliation, and emotional relationship. As a relational conduit, the significance and resonance of the photograph is embedded in particular milieus and events of memory. ²

In The Last Picture…While Crossing, Halwani dwells on the significance and embodied resonance of photographs for relatives of the disappeared in Lebanon. As a commemorative commentary, the film traces varying modalities of affective, emotional, social, and political comportment. Her 15-minute film is about Odette Adeeb Salem, a close friend and fellow activist. Salem died on 16 May 2009, hit by a car as she crossed a road. This was close to the SOLIDE (Support of Lebanese in Detention and Exile) protest tent she had just about moved into soon after it went up on April 11 in 2005, in front of the United Nations building at the Khalil Gibran Garden in Beirut. ³ Initially established as a shelter for a sit-in organized to “demand to know about the fate of the missing Lebanese in Syrian detention,” ⁴ the tent still stands today and remains an active site of public address and political protest. Up until her death, Salem spent much of her time at the tent, taking care of its livelihood—sitt al-khaymeh, as Halwani says, playing on the proverbial sitt al-beit, or sitt beit (madam who well knows how to manage her home).

While dedicated to the life and activities of Salem, Halwani’s film is also autobiographical, as she speaks about the abduction and disappearance of her husband, Adnan Halwani, in 1982. Indeed, between Salem and Halwani, the film transpires as a relational auto/biographical prism. ⁵ Throughout The Last Picture…While Crossing Halwani provides a voice-over narrative, in a quite direct and unaffected tone. She recounts Salem’s circumstance, as well as her own relationship to Salem and her plight. Toward the end of the film, Halwani says, “We miss you, Odette. And the people of the photos, they miss you too.” She does not refer to people in the photographs, but people of the photographs, as though photographic image and physical presence are inseparable.

Salem’s children, Richard and Christine, were kidnapped in September 1985. Her daughter was 19 and had just finished high school, while her son, 22 years of age, was attending university. Since this fateful time, Salem had preserved her children’s bedrooms exactly as they were on the day of their disappearance, even keeping a packet of cigarettes that belonged to her son in his room. Day by day, she carried an expectation that her children would return. In her voice-over narration for her film, Halwani recounts visiting Salem in her home, while including video footage of Salem restlessly moving around her apartment:

Maybe you came to the tent to escape your house, which had become very cold. In fact, I felt the cold when I first visited you in your apartment, even though we were in the middle of summer. You went to the kitchen to make coffee, and I sat in the lounge room on the edge of the sofa, shivering. I felt as though I was in a haunted house.

At this point, Salem’s resigned voice interjects, as the video footage depicts her children’s rooms, focusing on some of their personal possessions, such as her son’s shaving razor: “I live with their things, their clothes, with pictures of them,” Salem says. Halwani’s voice-over returns: “You came to the tent, perhaps escaping a house that had become empty and false.” The camera dwells on the rooms and clothes of the children and then on photographs of them.

Salem refers to the photographs of her children as pictures she lives with—a gist that resounds with Halwani’s sense of the photos at the SOLIDE tent actively missing Salem after her death. Besides their value as mediums relaying images of her children, the photographs have become subjects that she physically dwells with in the space of her home—a dwelling overflowing the referential frame of the photographs. Both emotionally and politically, this overflowing cannot be contained by one frame or another, but resonates as a phenomenal extension, exercised as both haptic embodiment and political activism.

The phenomenological implications of this resonance have been theorized by Bachelard (1994) and Heidegger (2010)—the former’s musings attuned more to the interior confines of the house (dreams and haunts “from the cellar to the garret,” including drawers and cabinets); the latter’s, to the built environment. In this fashion, both philosophers were in their respective work interested in a haptic, spatial dimension by which the physicality of dwelling resounded as corporeal embodiment.

By contrast, there is a compelling temporal register embodied by Salem’s relationship to the photographs of her children. Salem had to both embody and disembody the temporality of her relationship to her children’s photographs. On the one hand, she embodied a temporality affectively bound up with her capacity to endure her traumatic, inconclusive loss. On the other hand, she had also to disembody this affective prism in those instances when she had to refer to her children, as in a public representation of her predicament. In such terms, this conflictual temporal register in which photographs shift across the manifold vectors I have been referring to resonates as an inconclusive temporal relationship between present and past; an inconclusiveness always thrown into the future, if a modicum of hope is to be maintained.

Indeed, the stuttering narrative momentum of Halwani’s film itself embodies these varying temporal rhythms. With all its constitutive anachronic fractures of prolepsis and analepsis (flash-forwards and flashbacks), the camera often disrupts the flow of narrative-time when it focuses on still images of photographs, especially on collages or during slide shows. It is as though Halwani compulsively designed the film to deny the passing of time, using photographic stills to deny its cinematic format as a stream of moving pictures.

To refer to what Marianne Hirsch has called “postmemory,” we could say that whatever “capacity” a photograph exercises occurs in respect to its mediality—its relationship to the circumstances of its collection, circulation, and exhibition. ⁶ In her consideration of the value, significance, and resonance of photographs for the children of Jewish Holocaust survivors, Hirsch compellingly writes about an absence from the “space of identity” a spatial configuration inflected by an ambivalent temporality. She discusses not merely the loss of a specific place called home, but the loss of stable temporal coordinates by which to represent and refer to this loss. The photographic significance/resonance of postmemory both indicates and repairs this loss, in respect to a “photograph’s capacity to signal absence and loss and, at the same time, to make present, rebuild, reconnect, bring back to life” (Hirsch, 2012: 242). A photograph thus constitutes both referential impulses and varying modalities of inhabiting temporalities. In other words, photographic encounters take place according to a tension between indexical and performative registers of association.

A resonating ethos

Wadad Halwani suggests a sense of an embodiment of temporality when in another documentary film—Neither Dead or Alive (2013) ⁷ —she speaks about the abduction of her husband. As she recounts the incident,

They came to our home, two civilians, and took Adnan on the pretext of questioning him about a car accident, saying that it would only take five minutes, after which he would return home. This was on September 24, 1982. We are now almost at the same day in 2013, and those five minutes haven’t finished.

Like other relatives of disappeared people in Lebanon, Halwani embodies and articulates not so much an erratic sense of temporality, but rather an acute sense of time as both passing and standing still, a shell-shocked duration of 5 minutes standing out against an accompanying passing of 30 years. This ambivalent, traumatized sense of temporality, I want to emphasize, is not restricted to an existential plight, but flows into circumstances resonating as sites of social exchange and collective action. The very framing of a photograph takes place as an engagement of circumstance and occasion, circulating in and initiating practices of what we can call, following Toni Morrison (1997), rememory—whereby memory of an event takes place as an event of memory.

The taking-place of memory as modicums of rememory involves an ethical demand that viewers develop capacities to be responsive and contribute to the potential of their public cultures to adequately receive and politically nurture the plights of the disappeared and their relatives. Accordingly, Halwani fashions her film as a modality of address and response, exposing a public audience, both actual and potential, to Salem’s circumstance and her arduous efforts in engaging her circumstances. The Last Picture…While Crossing is about Halwani’s relationship to Salem, about their respective experiences of loved ones being disappeared, about their experiences of learning to live with a sense of the physical absence of a loved one. The film, to be sure, is also about, and further contributes to, their activism.

The ethical resonance courses through and around the referential registers of the film. While obviously conceived as a site of remembrance and, further, a work of mourning, the style and momentum of the film carries reverberations of a milieu de mémoire, in the sense of emerging from a restless taking-place of memory activism. As far as Halwani is concerned, Salem’s life and death will not only be mourned, but bequeathed as a proactive site of address and response to the potential of public cultures in, across, and in relation to Lebanon.

The ethical pitch of Halwani’s film lies more in the physicality of its expression, and not merely in the content of its expression. This physicality takes place through the aural tenor of an exchange of voice between Halwani, Salem, and a viewer’s variable, circumstantial capacity to listen and respond—a resonating tenor that overflows the photographic frame. The pulse beats of this ethical tenor reverberate through the predominating second person mode of address by which the film situates Salem as an addressee. This second person address is announced at the very beginning of the film. The camera focuses on a collage of photographs, the top half of which is dominated by a larger photograph of Salem, waving a greeting to the point of view of the camera, to the viewer who is inevitably framed by the camera to meet and return her solemn gaze. In her unaffected voice-over, Halwani speaks directly to Salem, despite her having passed away a few months earlier, and at the same time interpolates the viewer:

Good morning Odette. Maybe a lot of those who are now listening will be startled, concerning how I am greeting you while three months have now passed since your death. Can anyone greet someone who is dead?

It is a stunning opening to the film, when we consider the ambivalent temporality embodied by its utterance. The now of “those who are now listening” is, on the one hand, infinitely deferred, always supplemented by further occasions of reception; while on the other hand the now marks a definite date three months since Salem’s death.

After the opening shot of the poster collage, there is a cut to Salem’s funeral, to a number of people walking across a small field carrying a wooden coffin. Halwani, addressing again Salem in her voice-over, tells the latter that her “heart, mind and soul” are still at the tent and continues: “You still wave to me with your hand everyday as I go to work, and say: “I’m still here, and my children are coming back.” The English subtitles seem to have missed the fact that Halwani speaks this last sentence in the voice of Salem, performatively situating Salem as a responsive addressee.

In the same breath that Halwani addresses Salem, she refers to “Those who are now listening,” the film’s audience and potential responsees. By interpolating the potential of a public response to Salem’s plight, the very style and temperament of the film carries the traces of Halwani’s decades-long political engagement. The possibility of “greeting the dead” alludes to capacities of people in Lebanon to become responsive addressees.

Halwani’s gesture, here, is difficult, as it claims a proactive engagement and public exposure of the potential of Salem’s plight, while memorializing and mourning the actuality of Salem’s plight. Between these temporal rhythms of a present-future and present-past, memory takes place within and without the photographic frame, resonating through emotional, personal, political, and public entanglements.

Archive becoming repertoire

Not much of the almost 16 minutes of The Last Picture…While Crossing consists of original footage. The film rather consists mostly of earlier video taken of Salem in her apartment and at the SOLIDE protest tent, so that it is to some extent made up of bits and pieces of video patched together by Halwani. The juxtaposition of apartment and tent says something about Halwani’s own dilemma of having to juggle domestic responsibilities and political commitments. The tent itself has over the years transpired as a sort of nomadic trespassing of the private and public, especially concerning predominating, domesticating expectations of womanhood (a theme I return to below).

The sources for the “extracts” from other films and previously shot video are referenced in the end credits. Otherwise, as the opening still-image of the photo-collage suggests, photographs of Salem and her children, of other disappeared people, and of activists around the protest tent dominate the film. Against a black background, the opening scene of the poster-collage has a prosaic effect of compressing space to the surface of the overall image. The poster includes variously sized photographs, some in color and some in black and white. A large, frameless, shoulder-length image of Salem dominates its top half, while surrounded by smaller, separately framed photographs of her family. In fact, the upper, frameless image of Salem supports a number of smaller family photographs that have been pasted onto the surface.

This opening, still-image introduces a number of themes woven into and energizing the film. These include the second-person mode of address by which Halwani in her voice-over speaks to Salem, situating her as an interlocutor. There is the image of Salem waving a hand in greeting, looking directly at the point of view. The use of photomontage and photo slideshows is intended to reference broader circumstances of a personal plight. In addition to these themes is the political significance and emotional resonance of photographs for the activist relatives of the disappeared. A formalist approach would probably note the interesting exchange of still and moving images (photography and film), foregrounding the very technique of filmmaking.

Related to this is a further aspect of Halwani’s attraction to the physicality of photographs, concerning the way in which they are cut and pasted together in her film. According to her patchwork, collage-like application, photographic frames cannot contain the referential force of picture and voice. Symptomatically, as well as by design, the significance of a photograph or voice has always to take place as a relational exercise of exchange, of further exposure. The significance of a photograph has thus to be regarded in terms of circumstance and occasion, concerning circulation and reception, exhibition and viewing, site-specific modalities of embodiment. Due to the pressing, perhaps conflicting urgencies of Halwani’s emotional responsibilities ⁸ and political activism, she does not regard photographs as lifeless objects whose capacities are exhausted by their referential registers. Indeed, through her activism and creative work on her film, Halwani transforms collections of photographs into performative repertoires.

As becoming-repertoires, photographs circulate through various institutional and non-institutional settings, inhabit place, and constitute impulses of temporal embodiment. Between “the archive and the repertoire” (Taylor, 2003), a photograph accrues capacities that are always site- and cite-specific (for example, a photograph can be cited for different reasons, depending on the terms of references by which it is labeled and collected, rendered a retrievable resource).

Diana Taylor’s idea of “the DNA of performance” is relevant here, in respect to her notion of an archive as an active “repertoire..” Commenting on protest activities around the disappeared in Argentina, she writes that in a context of “[t]estimonial transfers and performance protest […t]he repertoire stores and enacts ‘embodied’ memory—the traumatic or cathartic ‘shudder,’ gestures, orality movement, dance, song—in short, all those acts usually thought of as ‘live,’ ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge” (Taylor, 2002: 155). As a “performative repertoire,,” the archive is not so much a dusty store of documents, images, or sound recordings that have been cataloged and sequestered, seldom exposed to light and air, available only for the academy or museum. A collection of “nonreproducible knowledge,,” an archive constitutes the site of memory as proactive milieu, as a taking-place of what the Palestinian performance activist-archivists Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas (2013) have called “the potential of the moment,” or else “the vitality of an archival multitude.” (p. 353). “Recoded” and “performed,” documents, images, photographs, sound recordings, and other artifacts reverberate as repertoires, as evocative, resonant practices of address and response.

Taylor extends this notion of an archive-becoming-repertoire to a younger generation of activists, the children of the Mothers of the Mayo Square:

Like the Madres, the children struggle to repossess the images and recontextualize them, either by reintroducing them in the domestic space, or by holding them against their own bodies. They, like the Madres, have become the paradoxical living archive, the repertoire of the “remains.” We see the past reiterated, not in the photographs as much as in the positioning of the children themselves. The children, like the Madres, represent themselves as the conduits of memory. (p. 164)

As I have suggested, alongside of its significance as an event in the past, memory takes place—respires, resonates, dwells—as an event of memory in the present, as rememory.

The Last Picture…While Crossing both references and performs photographic repertoires. A succession of photographs of Salem’s children follows the funeral scene at the near beginning of the film. A sequence of family photographs depicting Halwani, her disappeared husband, and children appears in the next frames. There is a certain self-referentiality in Halwani’s choice of photographs, some of which depict her and her husband looking at photographs in a family photo album. Earlier photos of women demonstrating in the streets, carrying placards, and protesting the issue of the disappeared follow these domestic photomontage sequences. The self-referentiality relates not only to Halwani depicting her own plight, but also her use of still photographs to tell a story. In fact, the photomontage can also be regarded as an illustrative reference to an analog film reel, which of course is a sequence of still photographs running through a projector. However, a significant point here, which I will return to below, concerns the gendered implications critically foregrounded by Halwani’s collage of domestic and political proximities.

On another two occasions—about 5 minutes into the film and then almost at the end—Halwani focuses on a number of portrait photos of disappeared people. In both instances, the small, passport size photographs appear alone against a black background, presented as a sequential slideshow, one after the other. None of the disappeared in these photomontages is named or identified as particular individuals. Generically, the sequential reel or slide-show works to provide a more general background to the plights of Salem and her children, as well as Halwani and her disappeared husband. We could say that the anonymous sequences serve to transform the personally intimate register of each photograph into a depersonalized momentum of public advocacy. In other words, the photographic frame traverses a relational comportment between outside and inside, physically exercising a capacity to negotiate and address personal and public modalities of reference. The resonance of the photograph emerges as a phenomenological site of address and response, bearing upon the circumstances of its framing, physically embodying various motivations and modes of comportment.

Interestingly, most of the portrait photos of the disappeared adapted by the activist relatives as ID cards were themselves first made for bureaucratic purposes—for a passport or hawiyya (ID card) or, more commonly in Lebanon, ⁹ for a khrajj keid (family status document). In Lebanon, the ID card is more important, though takes much longer to be processed than a passport. The khrajj keid is issued as an A5 size paper, upon which a passport-size photo is stapled in the upper right corner, whereas the other two documents—passport and ID card—reproduce the photograph digitally.

Such photographs, I want to note, embody their rather prosaic, bureaucratic motivation in their very form—uniformly front-on and shoulder length with a plain, contrasting background. As in passport photographs, the person photographed should have a neutral facial expression, gazing directly back at the camera, with no shadows in the background or across the face. Glasses should sit squarely, while head coverings, if worn, shouldn’t cover the face. Not only are the face and eyes of the photographed person important, but depth of field should be almost nonexistent, flattened-out to the surface. To work as an identity card or passport photograph, a person’s image has to appear almost characterless, or inanimate, amenable to bureaucratic procedure and process.

Many of the photographs used by the activists, and reproduced in Halwani’s film, are in black and white and carry signs of wear—creases and blemishes, or else perforations marking their former attachments to documents. The starkness of their formulaic reproduction as instances of bureaucratic procedure contrasts with the highly charged affective and public resonance of their use to signify a personal fate, an emotional relationship to this fate, and an engagement of political protest and action. I make these observations without drawing a normative distinction between the bureaucratic formalism and emotional livelihood of the portrait photographs. For, while the formulaic reproduction of a person’s visage may well conflict with an experience of their personality and intimacy, the compression of the face to the surface of an image can better serve to render a person’s features identifiable, which of course is important for the relatives searching for their disappeared. Otherwise, in the physical absence of a loved one, such a compression renders the face a stronger presence and accessible mode of contact and emotional comportment.

These manifold and overlapping phenomenological resonances dramatically come to life in a scene in Raheb’s film Sleepless Nights, which I alluded to above in my introduction. This is when, at almost the middle of the film, the two principal characters, Assad Chaftari and Miriam Saiidi, cross paths at an exhibition for the disappeared. Titled Missing, the exhibition is part of a larger ongoing project—Memory at Work—by UMAM Documentation and Research. ¹⁰ Conceived in 2007 and first shown in 2008, the exhibition traveled around the country, mainly to the cities of Saida on the south coast and Tripoli on the north coast. Missing is comprised of a large collection of portrait photograph images of the disappeared in Lebanon, reproduced in A4 and A3 formats. Each print carries the name, date of birth, and year of abduction/disappearance in Arabic and English at the bottom.

The exhibition consists of a large space, with the portrait photo-images placed uniformly in rows. The uniformity of the pictures encompasses both the style and size of the framed images and the particular way in which they are arranged. Some of them are attached to walls or partitions, while others hang down from the ceiling, so that a viewer can walk around amid, and in between, the faces. Almost all of them are composed according to the format of an identity photograph, the faces compressed to the surfaces of the photographs. Thus, the uniqueness of each face uniformly conforms to a collective, contributing to a momentum of public exposure and claim for public recognition and accountability. Within and without the photographic frame, the images gain resonance and significance in respect to their taking place as a performative repertoire, as an exhibition traveling around the country.

Uncanny womanhood/motherhood

In The Last Picture…While Crossing, Halwani includes a written dedication to Salem, which appears almost at the end of the film, just before the credits. With white script over a black background, in Arabic and English, its second-person mode of address enfolds an intimate tenor. I reproduce its form and ellipses (except for the line spacing):

Odette.. This is my symbolic greeting to you … and through you, to all the mothers of kidnapped children … here in Lebanon and anywhere else in the world … and to all the mothers who passed away before the return of their children, before they even knew what happened to them … some died of grief … some were killed after the perpetrators blackmailed them and sucked them to the last penny … some committed suicide because they could not tolerate survival following their children’s forced disappearance

Halwani associates Salem’s plight with those who have had to engage and act on motherhood as an experience of the loss of children, extending motherhood to a modality of political activism. At the same time, she projects a sense of her own experience of learning to inhabit her house in the aftermath of her husband’s abduction, which she shortly recounts in her film. Her home—for most people a preeminent site of familiarity and intimacy—comes to be experienced as a site of violation, of helplessness, even a desecration, taking on an obscure and dramatic resonance. Home becomes unhomely, or uncanny. In his preamble to his famous essay “The Uncanny,” Freud notes an inchoate ambiguity to the term heimlich, or homely, remarking that the term has come to connote the very opposite of security and familiarity. This ambivalence he calls das Unheimliche: “everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.”(Freud, 1955: 225)

According to Hélène Cixous’s famous reading of Freud’s essay, his choice of literary examples tends to assume the feminine as a repressive modality (or “accomplishment,” as mentioned by Judith Butler, 1995) of masculinity. Referring to Freud’s use of the popular story and opera “The Sand Man,” she remarks that the figure of Olympia remains frozen by a hermeneutic, masculinist complex of romanticism: “Again, the beautiful Olympia is effaced by what she represents, for Freud has no eyes for her” (Cixous, 1976: 538). Cixous’s remark provides an avenue by which to refer to the hermeneutic pulse beats of Freud’s own secret, uncanny repertoire, to recognize how the home can constitute an alternative equation of femininity and political sensibility. Indeed, a striking aspect of Halwani’s film is its concentration on the home, though a concentration that hardly limits it to conventional notions of domesticity. By this, I mean that the unhomeliness of home is not so much pathological, but rather, political. Not merely secrets of straying from a gendered ethic of decorous homely conduct, uncanny intimations arise once womanhood extends to modalities of public activism.

Halwani has told her own story to the media on many occasions. One of the more impressive occasions was in April 2011, some 30 years after her husband was disappeared. In this instance, she was interviewed in an almost hour-length edition of Al Jazeera’s Arabic program زيارة خاصة. ¹¹ Compered by Elsie Abi ‘Assi, the show structures a format of intimate one-on-one interviews.

During the interview, Halwani recounts the incidence of her husband’s abduction: two armed men identifying themselves as government agents came to their home one afternoon and took him away, on the pretext of wanting to talk to him about a car accident. “My son answered the door. I was in the kitchen with Adnan, as we helped each other to prepare lunch …” Halwani’s account includes many references to the familiarity of the domestic scene, which she contrasts to the intrusion. She goes on to remark about her son, Ziad, 6 years of age at the time: “He told his dad that there are some men at the door asking for him, and then ran back to the television where he was watching a cartoon film, with his brother.”

This account of her own plight informs her approach to Salem’s estrangement from her home. In her film, Halwani references Salem’s eventual move to the protest tent in terms of the capacity of women in Lebanon to juggle domestic responsibilities and public activities. By showing how Salem (sitt al-khaymeh) converted the interior of the protest tent into a domestic-like scene of cooking and washing, the film avoids associating the private and public realms as a binary opposition. The tent itself establishes a place that is neither private nor public, but a relational site of exchange between personal plight and public exposure. Halwani, Salem, and other activist women challenge the conventional gendering of public and private space. Due, in part, to the urgency of their quests, their courage, as well as their relative lack of resources—such as education, wealth, and the contacts such resources afford—they are ill-disposed to playing the game of conventional political decorum.

As Halwani recounts in the interview, the abduction of her husband became a pivotal incident in her life, bringing in its wake her efforts to learn how to appreciate that the domestic scene need not be one of secrecy and withdrawal from public life. In late 1982, she organized a public protest with others, mostly women whose husbands or sons had been disappeared. Halwani has articulated her story to Humaydan:

Things happen spontaneously, without prior decisions. Once, I made a call through a radio station in the Western part of Beirut (Voice of Arab Lebanon), asking women whose sons or husbands disappeared, to join me in my daily visits to religious and political leaders, and to militiamen. I said it would be more effective if we were many women, but I never thought or planned of establishing a committee or an association. Unexpectedly, hundreds of women and children attended the meeting which was decided to be in Cornish Al-Mazra‘ah, near Jamal Abd al-Nasser Mosque, and which turned out to be our first demonstration. It was 17 November 1982. I was expecting to see only five or even ten women waiting for me … (p. 101)

This action inaugurated the Committee of the Families of the Kidnapped and Missing in Lebanon (Lajnat al-Ahl al-Makhtufeen wa al-Mafkudeen fi Libnan). ¹² The Committee and subsequent protest movements, including the SOLIDE tent, became transformative sites for an exchange of personal trauma and political activism. Such movements encompassed cultural, social, and political practices in which women subjects learned to become activist subjects. In doing so, they challenge a predominating patriarchal political sensibility for which the public and private are kept discrete, along with a division of labor defining set roles for women and men, or else heteronormative expectations of femininity and masculinity.

In her Master’s thesis, Neither Here Nor There: Families of the Disappeared in Lebanon, Humaydan writes that while the activists she interviewed would not identify themselves as feminists, they are nevertheless engaging “motherhood” as a process of “socialization,”—an insight she quotes from Joe Fischer’s (1989) work on the women of the Mayo Plaza Movement in Argentina. The compelling suggestion here concerns how womanhood is not simply left at home once a person becomes an activist—as though womanhood (and manhood, for that matter) is strictly a characteristic exercised in the home. Rather, womanhood becomes an affiliative process that includes acting in public domains.

For Halwani, we could say, as well as for Salem, they come to embody womanhood by refusing predominating notions of gender as pre-discursive and pre-affectual, as somehow beyond modalities of social and political exchange. Rendering gender a social and political process, they challenge predominant expectations of motherhood not by refusing to be mothers, but by refusing to embody motherhood as an ontological condition.

While Humaydan notes that within patriarchal social and political circumstances, it is often women as mothers or wives who are expected to search for the disappeared and grieve, this does not take place as a conformity to predominating modalities of conduct and exchange. “It is important to argue,” she writes, “that if a woman starts her search believing that it is her role as a mother or a wife, moving into the public arena gives her access to a wider context of empowerment that she did not possess before” (p. 89).

Joe Fischer’s term for patriarchy is “machismo,,” according to “the Latin American brand of sexism.” As she explains,

Machismo emphasizes a division of functions, capacities and qualities between male and female that seeks to confirm the superiority of the male. The relationship of domination-subordination established between men and women, and the specific characteristics ascribed to each have come to be regarded as “natural.” The “natural” role for a woman is that of wife and mother and her proper place is in the home. (Fischer, 1989)

Fischer and Humaydan had intimate contact with mothers of the disappeared, structured in the main through interview formats. Neither Here nor There: Families of the Disappeared in Lebanon and Mothers of the Disappeared were produced, to adapt a quote from Fischer’s preface, “out of a profound sense of solidarity,” with mother-activists of disappeared subjects. While their respective studies conform to objective protocols of academic research (referencing and footnoting, clear justification for the style of their interviews, institutional acknowledgment), they are not dry exercises of streamlining their subjects and subject matter into preexisting theoretical and methodological formulas. They rather exercise a sense of how the activities of their research subjects constitute both physical and hermeneutic practices that ultimately work to fray any neat and orderly conceptual application.

These studies would have been very different had men produced them. Most men learn very quickly that to accomplish capacities to embody and exchange gender requires conformity to certain modalities of intimacy (a primary modality constituting an avoidance of intimacy as such). Not only did Humaydan and Fischer have a certain access to their interlocutors that male researchers would not afford, but they also pick up insights that men are likely to miss. In another context, the anthropologist Susan Slyomovics (2005) demonstrates this critical sensitivity. In her book on human rights in Morocco, she draws a comparison between activist Moroccan mothers and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo: “Both groups exploited cultural and religious expectations about motherhood, enlisting a disparate array of male authority figures—politicians, judges, prison guards, policemen—to locate missing children.” The male authority figure is not to be refused or refuted, but rather adapted and put to work, though by evoking aspects of this figure’s livelihood that usually have no consequence for political and public life: “Are you not a parent too, the Moroccan mother’s pleaded ” (p. 154).

Slyomovics (2005) wryly observes that while most human rights organizations and institutions in Morocco are run by men, “the pioneers of human rights are mothers, sisters, and wives who advocated on behalf of imprisoned family members” (p. 154). This observation does not assume universalizing categories of gender and sexuality—whether adhered to or transgressed—but is rather attuned to the “added interpretive value” (p. 8) of the “performance” of human rights. Which is to say, dialogically attuned to the actuality of claims to human rights that may well not have been named, hermeneutically embodied, and exchanged, as “human rights..”

Similarly, Humaydan’s research—the interviews she undertook of the mothers of the disappeared in Lebanon, her existential dwelling in their midst, and her conceptual engagement with her research material—cannot be regarded as descriptively objective, but rather hermeneutically objective. By this, I mean that her research material comes to interact with her intellectual expectations, perhaps questioning larger categories and frames of reference she gains from the work of other researchers. Commenting on her subjects’ answers when specifically asked “why women search for the disappeared,,” Humaydan writes,

Being a mother is a reason given by all women who have disappeared children. Women in this sense do not contest the patriarchal system. They rather make use of the gendered benefits and privileges that the patriarchal system offers to women. They use these gendered benefits in their participation in the public sphere. (p. 87)

Humaydan notes that women activists are publicly tolerated as long as they also do some of the “emotional-work” expected of them—meaning that they should weep and tell their stories in a personal register and circular fashion, rather than engage in a public representation or political argument. Expected to be passive, women should publicly comport themselves as victims, needing the help of others to further their cause. In this fashion, Humaydan puts into relief insights that male researchers tend to underestimate.

In her research on the politics of gender and memory of violence in Morocco, Bettina Dennerlein has shown how ideological conventions frame women’s testimonies of direct and indirect political violence. She discusses the way in which male researchers “edit” women’s testimonies and allude to “the Moroccan woman” as a “suppressed” “marginalized” victim:

This way of framing the testimonies—and of suggesting a particular reading of them—is gendered and ideologically coded. It may even be seen as underpinning stereotypes and social roles that are part of the kind of dependency and structural violence against women that the edited testimonies try to depict (Dennerlein, 2012: 25)

Ever reflective and responsive toward her research material, Humaydan singles out Wadad Halwani, whom she included in her interviews, as being more adept in publicly representing a personal plight, and the work of her Committee in political terms of reference: “Wadad’s narratives are not similar to others. What she says varies between personal narratives and the committee’s discourse. Her narratives are chronological, as they mark the different successive dates of the committee’s birth, activities, campaigns and visits” (100). Yet, like the other women activists, Halwani has not only to translate her personal distress into political activism and conventions of political engagement and representation. She has also to enter and negotiate public domains that more readily accept patriarchal figures of comportment. Like the other women, she has also to contend with expectations of her extended family, as well as those of her disappeared husband’s family.

Conclusion: pitching tents

In conclusion, I want to return to my theme of rememory by contrasting the SOLIDE tent that became a home for Salem to the Rafik Hariri tent that was established at the same time, in February 2005, right after his assassination in Beirut. The contrast is instructive in respect to the distinction between memory taking place as lieu and milieu. Where activities around the Hariri tent (also referred to as a “darih,” a “tomb”; Vloeberghs, 2012) maintained a decorous channeling of political advocacy along established confessional conduits and their constituencies, the SOLIDE tent constitutes a site for alternative social and political engagement, especially concerning women activists. In other words, the Hariri tent embodied memory as a practice of maintaining established modalities, conduits, channels, and related sensibilities of community belonging. By contrast, the SOLIDE tent embodied practices of rememory, whereby the terms by which a community understands itself as a community have always to take place and emerge as a collective takes shape and coheres. While this collective, or else becoming-community of activists, overlaps with other, more established modalities (God, country, sect, confession, sporting team, etc.) by which being-with (Nancy, 1991: 14) is exchanged, it takes shape by also diverging from such modalities.

To be sure, both the Hariri and SOLIDE tents work as memorials, using photographs, candles, and other memorabilia to bear witness and maintain a public vigil. Both tents, in fact, fashion memory as a site of encouraging public interest in the personal fates of individual subjects, and in doing so, involve varying registers by which the personal overlaps with the public. Yet, there are significant differences in motivation, practice, and anticipation between the two tents. The SOLIDE tent places more emphasis on advocacy—the activists protesting in front of the UN to put pressure on the Lebanese state to more seriously investigate the circumstances of the 17,000 people who had been disappeared by militias and their political parties during the civil war.

Relational instances of lieu and milieu exercise memory as interwoven efforts to preserve and memorialize a past becoming present and situate this as a transformative practice of social and political engagement. In Halwani’s The Last Picture…While Crossing, photographs are adapted to both bear witness as sites of remembrance and mourning and initiate such transformative practices. While a more nuanced study would no doubt have to consider fractures and frictions between the activists, as well as sources of funding and media representation, in this essay, I have concentrated more on photographic practices in respect to relatives of the disappeared in Lebanon.