Feminist Nahda Worldmaking
and Genealogies

In Leila and the Wolves and (based on Saglier’s analysis) The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived, Heiny Srour presents reconstructions of what Sylvia Wynter would likely consider the interdependent and internecine “knowledge orders” of the Levant- specifically Lebanon and Palestine- and the Third and Fourth World in general (On Being Human as Praxis, 30). Something that I realize becomes more apparent when engaging with materials/practices from precolonial cultures is the coloniality (and Westernization) of time, with Laroui and Wynter explaining that its supposed linearity enforced by a “finished” and “complete” past begets the colonial master’s belief in natural dominion over it, specifically in the narrative of “history,” or more generally, storytelling (Arab Film & Video Manifesto, 12). What Srour confronts is the cognitive dissonance exhibited by Arab men in their recognition of this colonial distortion and simultaneous ignorance of its relevance for Arab women’s subjugation. In Leila and the Wolves, she reconfigures the shared Arabic and Western patriarchal erasure of female characters from revolutionary narratives by amalgamating the experiences of women throughout the Levant and their most mundane to extreme modes of resistance.  

Srour largely portrays this chauvinistic cognitive dissonance by using Rafiq- as Saglier explains (96)- as a vessel to embody the representation of that Other (male) epistemic world in the Levant, but what Saglier discusses less- yet I find more interesting- is how Srour addresses the various colonial contradictions through cinematic style and narrative structure, and in a way that does not simply “include” women in the realm of revolutionary cinema as-it-exists but transforms how we understand and thus represent resistance. Naturally, Srour’s framing device with Leila at the museum in London provides a sort of guide through the structure, but the most important segment of this fourth-cinematic future-narrative was when Leila pointedly asked Rafiq “Do you know why people were able to resist so long,” to the surging British colonization of Palestine in the late 1930s, because Srour then answers this question with the film’s following narratives, effectively putting us into Rafiq’s shoes. Leila (because Srour) always exists outside the narrative, as “the ultimate storyteller,” while she draws Rafiq (us, the people) into the narrative as different integrated characters because she is not just “rewriting” a more honest and complete history but also delivering a rally cry for decolonial resistance and praxis. Of course, other decolonial feminist Third and Fourth World women could already understand- if not also navigate- the epistemic variances in praxis between them and most men of their ethnicity/race and class; Srour was using the third-cinematic element of her film to not just advocate various modes of decolonial feminist resistance and historicization (storytelling) but also expose how “build[ing] solidarities against colonialism, within the Arab world, and between women and men” is the lifeblood of this praxis: solidarities amongst epistemic worlds (76). 

Earlier this week, I saw a tweet with a screenshot of a YouTube thumbnail- Why Revolutions are Hard to Write- to which the tweet replied, “Revolutions are hard to write for authors cuz most of them don’t read about actual revolutions.” This applies to first and second cinema especially, for their inability to reconcile with other modes of thinking/being reflects the individualism of colonialism and capitalism, and revolution represents the critical juncture at which one mode is threatened by its extreme. If the camera is truly the gun, then expecting a bunch of Western artists and auteurs- whose only sense of revolution is learned in their revisionist history books- to accurately depict actual war, revolution, and resistance is as foolish as putting them on the battefield. Srour’s second film so clearly exposes that this also applies to Arab men! By disallowing Arab women from telling their (hi)stories of decolonial resistance- because also disallowing them from resistance itself- but also insisting that this resistance is the primary mode of thinking/being for Arab survival, Arab men are not just denying the epistemic world of Arab women from existing in the cultural memory (in its history) both past and present, but are also thereby colluding with the colonizers in subjugating Arab women. The opening scene of the grandmother and her granddaughters- although not the chronological beginning of the narratives- shows that patriarchal reinforcements of misogyny permeate the region’s theologies as well, and are thus precolonial. So of course participation in neither the “war on liberation nor the national economy” wrought women’s liberation (Srour 86), because men had constructed gendered subjugation into the lattice of society itself, but colonialism presented the opportunity to further alienate the feminine episteme into its Other world. Srour shows that not only is this world that Arab women have cultivated beautiful, but it’s also the lifeblood of Third World culture and decolonial praxis, and so she floats in between so many different lifelines and lifetimes and narratives exposing that everywhere, all the time, throughout the Levant, there were decolonial feminists working to free everyone, including men, from the clutches of colonialism, but native misogyny was (men were) always-already there, directly impeding resistance.

The fake wedding is the best narrative to analyze both how Arab women sustain the lifeblood of Third World culture and decolonial praxis, and how native misogyny acts as an obstacle to be tackled for true liberation. First of all, it took until my second watch to appreciate just how amazing (hard) this segment is, because traditional male revolutionary cinema and media always includes the typical young, muscular, male guerilla soldiers collecting and distributing their arms, but here Srour presents a handful of Palestinian women of various ages, bodies, and dress performing an entire cultural practice/production- an entire Palestinian wedding- for the dissemination of guns and homemade bullets, which we saw elderly women making a few minutes before. These visuals- so boldly in broad daylight as well, as opposed to the clandestine meetings and exchanges at night that are typical of revolutionary cinema- of elderly women and young girls exchanging guns and bullets hidden in corn; girls and brides hiding guns on their legs and bullets in their breasts; and especially the wedding processional being watched by snipers, complicate the shared prevailing first-, second-, and third-cinematic focus on both masculine visuals and masculine sounds for war and revolution films. These films also typically include the soldiers’ war chants and mottos that inspire that passionate vigor felt and emitted by the soldiers, but Srour’s replacement with wedding songs chanted repeatedly by these domestic soldiers- these women- inspires audiovisual upending of the traditional depcition of anticolonial resistance. It provides the answer to why people were able to resist so long: not just because of the women visually “included,” nor just the mode of resistance depicted in this segment, but also (especially) the interaction of their decolonial energies transmitted through cultural song along with all these other elements. These all constitute what this segment was framed as: a Palestinian wedding- a Palestinian cultural practice- which is now cinematically likened to the decolonial resistance that it is so easily disguising. 

The choice to disguise arms circulation for decolonial resistance as wedding preparation- especially a wedding without a real groom- clearly represents Srour’s commitment to showing both the potential of pan-Arab female solidarity against colonialism and patriarchy and the embedded resistance against domination inherent in (feminine) Arab culture, with the characters using native dress, henna, wedding songs, and processional practices to appear as “pure” Arab women and adherents to the colonial regime while resisting colonial and Arab male authority. So when the Palestinian girl thinks of the native male guard, “What a beautiful man, a pity you’re a traitor,” she is subversive on multiple grounds, all of which relate to the wedding: she is assuming agency over her own romantic/sexual attraction, a freedom that Srour depicts as extremely restricted for women at this time; and she is not only engaging in decolonial resistance, which Arabic men throughout the film prohibit women from doing, but also maligning his character for not doing so, whereas resistance was depicted as the most masculine thing men could do in third cinema, thereby assuming control of and exalting her own femininity and demasculating him at once for the same reason: decolonial resistance or lack thereof. 

Srour shifts the grounds for “proper” masculinity and femininity regarding decolonial praxis, which now have less to do with properly gendered behavior and moreso with contextually appropriate decolonial resistance. Women gaining control of their feminine agency, even taking control of their masculinity if necessary, is now framed as not just revolutionary for Arab women but revolutionary for the Arab world. Those women in the first historical segment who threw pots and boiling water on the soldiers were assisting their male comrades, but imagine how much more ammunition the women in the second segment could transport if misogynistic regulations didn’t prevent male approval and submission for women to move around at that time. Or if that group of women talking about Amin’s wife didn’t care about male approval like Randa, and became their own resistance regiment, so Randa wouldn’t have to deal with leftist misogyny and those girls wouldn’t have to live in fear of familial rejection. Srour raises questions about resistance and then answers them at various points throughout the film, sometimes answering with another question. What makes it so special is not that women always have the answer, but that there isn’t necessarily anything overtly feminine nor masculine about their performance or resistance unless to distract a man from their true intentions of resistance or for their own pleasure or/as a mode of resistance. This reflects the performance of femininity for women in patriarchal societies across all time and space, and it is this reclaimed performance of gender that Srour uses to connect her fragmented narratives through time and space and provide her own nahda genealogies of and for decolonial feminist praxis within the Levantine world.

Works Cited

Dickinson, Kay. Arab Film and Video Manifestos: Forty-Five Years of the Moving Image Amid Revolution. Cham, Springer International Publishing, 2018.

Mckittrick, Katherine. Sylvia Wynter on Being Human as Praxis. Durham, Carolina Del Norte (Estados Unidos) Duke University Press, 2015.

Saglier, Viviane. “Decolonization, Disenchantment, and Arab Feminist Genealogies of Worldmaking.” Feminist Media Histories, vol. 8, no. 1, 1 Jan. 2022, pp. 72–101, https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.72.