Habibi Shahīd

Guidequotes (1)

The legitimacy of dance among the Muslim peoples has been in question for centuries. 

Lois al-Faruqi, Dance as an Expression of Islamic Culture

If all we are can be stated in words, why does our being also need to be articulated in music, as every known human culture seems to suggest?

Andre Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity

I think that poetry and an oral tradition are particularly significant for Arab culture. Poetry was something that existed in the spoken word. At the same time it frequently had to make use of symbols and metaphors to express something that could not otherwise have been spoken… Perhaps cinema is the same. It too has to make use of metaphors and symbols, in keeping with this lack of directness that so characterizes Islamic society… Here everything is a little bit devious, a bit unformulated—the unsaid, and so on. This is why the camera is so amazing. It’s in complete harmony with this rather repressed language.

Moufida Tlatli, Interview

You see it in the making. You’re participating in the aestheticizing process.

Elia Suleiman, Interview

People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate. (And, if they cannot articulate it, they are submerged.) A Frenchman living in Paris speaks a subtly and crucially different language from that of the man living in Marseilles… to say nothing of the man from Senegal--although the "common" language of all these areas is French. But each has paid, and is paying, a different price for this "common" language, in which, as it turns out, they are not saying, and cannot be saying, the same things: They each have very different realities to articulate, or control…

James Baldwin, If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?

Aesthetic beauty was intuitively conceived as that which stylized and disguised nature, or avoided it completely in abstract design.

Lois al-Faruqi, Dance as an Expression of Islamic Culture

Introduction

An embodied kin/aesthetic praxis percolates through Tunisian cinema so vigorously that it is a crying shame Dr. Lois al-Faruqi could not live to appreciate it. She conceptualizes a set of Islamic aesthetics saturating not only Islamic arts- from archiecture to dance to poetry- but also the various geocultural frontiers across which Islam has travelled, such that its imperatives are “the hallmark of the art wherever and whenever artists influenced by Islamic culture have lived and produced.” (7) The production of “intricate geometric, calligraphic and vegetal arabesques,” thus become the aesthetic hallmarks of films influenced by Islamic visual and literary arts, such as Heiny Srour’s Leila and the Wolves with One Thousand and One Nights, but this is by all means not a panoramic aesthetic praxis within the Arab world nor the Levant. Particularly, Elia Suleiman’s sushi aesthetic (a self-proclaimed choreography) provides an opportunity to briefly prospect the translation of a globalized aesthetic from one cultural form to another, opening the door to another, possibly relational, shakshuka aesthetic shared by two Tunisian films- Moufida Tlatli’s Silences du Palais and Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et Le Mulet- that reflect Faruqi’s aesthetic principles of abstraction, repetition, serial structure and mini-climaxes as well as her sociological analysis of Arabic visual, literary, and performing arts as Islamic cultural forms in both native colonial and postcolonial immigrant contexts. This argument serves as less of a judgement concerning whether Suleiman was right about his personal set of aesthetics- a rather comparative and reactionary point of departure of presumed mutual exclusivity- and more of an inquisition into his aesthetic connotation of food, dance, and film with one another in dignifying the former as a semiotic cultural form as much as the other two- a more relational and potentially revolutionary ground of cultural imbrication.

Reaching beyond Suleiman’s intellectual efforts in creating his “sushi aesthetic” requires a genealogical trace of (what he considers) “Japanese cuisine.” (Suleiman 89) Farrer and Wank dedicate the introduction of The Global Japanese Restaurant to explaining how the cuisine of the eponymous establishment is very different from that of Japanese cooking practices in Japan, but has been constructed as an authentic representation through, inter alia, “‘culinary imaginaries’… labeled in national (or sometimes regional and ethnic) terms as the association of particular tastes, ingredients, dishes, drinks, and etiquette with the people seen as living in a specific nationally defined space.” (Farrer & Wank 8) Coupling Jonathan Jackson’s elaboration of aesthetics in “Improvisation in African-American Vernacular Dancing,” with Adrienne Kaeppler’s of aesthetic principles in “An Introduction to Dance Aesthetics,” yields the general definition of aesthetics used in this argument: “intersecting concepts of cultural value and criteria for action”;“although usually applied to a specific range of cultural forms (“the arts”), the evaluative mode is applicable to all social and cultural life.” (Jackson 41; Kaeppler 161) Therefore, culinary imaginaries can be understood the perceived aesthetics of a particular community’s cuisine, especially with Farrer & Wank contending that the “striking aesthetic” of the raw fish on white rice worked in tandem with “the social environment of the sushi bar, the sushi master, and the concept of the omakase (chef’s choice) menu” to popularize and globalize the dish throughout the 70s despite raw fish being typically unwelcome outside Japan. The notion of cleanliness, neatness, and choreographed order are therefore the hallmarks of Japanese cuisine’s, but especially sushi’s, “‘modern’ image, [which] has as much to do with these blended imaginaries of exclusivity, craft, and expertise as with the taste itself.” (134)

The notion that this “aestheticizing process… [is] anti-bourgeoisie” is contestable to say the least, because of not only the inherent bourgeois restaurant culture- especially of France- that global Japanese service models such as the sushi bar must negotiate, but also the scene in Divine Intervention when the israeli settler offers Arabic coffee to the zionist officers on the sidewalk before Manal Khader walks by (Suleiman 89). In “The Arabfuturist Drive-By,” I explored how the Palestinians represented the housemaid between Suleiman’s “[bourgeois] dinner table” of zionists on the sidewalk and the unseen kitchen from which the settler emerged with the coffee- and how Khader is walking through that checkpoint, through their conversation, through the police cars- during this culmination of Suleiman’s sushi aesthetic. When considering both Dr. al-Faruqi’s works and Andrew Bowie’s “Aesthetics and Subjectivity,” the incompatability of this aesthetic with an Islamic paradigm becomes apparent (2). Suleiman explained that the sequences with Khader strutting through checkpoints visualize his deliberation on “Kant and beauty… a beauty that is so aesthetic and can violently transgress, in other words, feminine beauty in this case.” (87) Such a naturalistic (and even though extensively choreographed, still simplistic) representation of beauty clearly negates the abstract and ornamental imperatives of Islamic art, so his “individualistic perspective,” shaped more by Judaism and the degodded West than Islam, certainly leaves more room for a sushi aesthetic than a shakshuka aesthetic, but just how much?

The Shakshuka Aesthetic

There is nigh nothing more anti-bourgeosie than Hind Khoudary’s Instagram story, last month from Gaza, of an infectiously smiling Motaz Azaiza- squatting with a plate holding oils and a pan full of food next to the open flame of a small grill filled with scrapwood- captioned, “Someone is excited to have some Shakshuka[!]” (Azaiza & Khoudary 2023)

bless his heart. shakshuka comes from tunisia btw before isr*elis try to claim that as theirs too… may Allah bless them and fill their stomachs inshallah (3).

Its culinary origins are at a crossroads of geocultural frontiers all too reminiscent of, even while contrastive to, the repressed theological and colonial-cum-globalized political imperatives of Suleiman’s sushi aesthetic. Rafram Chadda notes that shakshak derives from Amazigh tongue (in which words with double consonants are frequent, like couscous), commonly misattributed to Arabic, 

Although the base of shakshuka [“all mixed up”] and its nomenclature are originally Amazigh… Andalusian Muslims and Jews who were expelled from Christian Spain around the 15th and 16th century brought with them a cultural ‘know how’ and influence that would transform the Tunisian part of the world. Aside from the usage of chili peppers, which came about after their arrival, these Andalusians also imported an obsession for eggs, a term coined ‘Moorish Ovomania’ by food historian Charles Perry… (emphasis added) (Arem 2023)

The base is not a static entity, with the “stew-like vegetable dish” predating the New World arrival of tomatoes so its colors and textures as well as the ingredients themselves fluctuate “​​based on seasonality and ingredient availability.” The dish’s fluid form is compounded not only by its availability as a meal at any time of the day, but its similarity to many other cuisine’s dishes such as the tomato-based Italian uova in purgatorio, Spanish pisto manchego, and Mexican huevos rancheros, or, more interestingly, the American breakfast skillet with a potato base! The former dish’s aestheticizing process- although in final form appearing most similarly to shakshuka- is tied to the Christian theological imperative reflected in its name, culinary style, and presentation, relatively similar to the colonial imperative influencing the culinary simplicity of huevos rancheros for the 16th century ranch workers who created it; pisto, loosely translated as ratatouille and cooked by “let[ting] everything simmer and meld together,” represents the enduring (vegetal) Arabesque influence of the Moors on Spanish cuisine and culture like paella; the latter potato-based dish, from experience, most clearly reflects the shakshukan mixing up of ingredients being the primary influence on their autonomous aestheticizing, but there is little historicization of this dish. These comparisons are presented in order to highlight shakshuka’s unique aesthetic positionality in relation to similar dishes: the Islamic imperative of “stylizing” and “disguising” nature through the “dissolution of matter,” combined with evolving political and colonial realities that then reflect in its simplicity disguised through mixing. (Faruqi 355)

This is also the aesthetic recipe for the films being analyzed here. The idea that pisto is unique for allowing the vegetables to stew in their own juices exceptionalizes the broader aesthetic of Islamic stylization of nature: allowing minimal olive oil and gradual melting of various vegetables to alter their own taste rather than through augmentation, while melting them together to also disguise the culinary simplicity. The Amazighs were already stewing different vegetables together, but they also added warm spices to the traditional use of tomatoes and chile peppers brought by Andalusian exiles. The idea of the ingredients’ autonomous aestheticizing is important; where the sushi master choreographs a form that he deems aesthetically pleasing after the individual ingredients are already made consumable (reflected in the aesthetic imperative of form and image being enforced after the original dish was created), the shakshuka maker dissolves the raw base ingredients into one another as they are interfered with relatively little, slightly stirred or mixed by utensil or rotating the pan. Again, the individual ingredients matter little here, only insofar as they gustatorially and visually dissolve together into an aesthetically pleasing form without interference from the chef. Shakshak was thus easily subsumed into the Islamic canon of dissolution of matter and ornamentalism during the Islamic conquest of the Maghreb; the stark contrast of the eggs brought by Andalusian exiles centuries later was offset by their natural setting into the vegetal base with no interference (4). The potentialities here for a (multi)colonial line of historical analysis are striking, but we must turn our attention to Tlatli.

Silences du Palais

Poetry allows this: it gives a fantastic freedom. You only have to have a small amount of imagination to extract another reading from the words… Arabic culture has not been a culture of the image. We have preferred to express ourselves through words, through poetry. One could almost say that there was a sort of blockage in relation to image, which was something we had to learn, something we had to adapt little by little to our own culture. But the effort of mastering something new also leads to something good: a new mode of expression, but one that is right for and specific to this culture. Poetry is made up of a superimposition of images on words. (emphasis added)

Moufida Tlatli, Interview with Laura Mulvey

Understanding Tlatli’s film through the lens of a camoflauged coalescence of natural flavors in shakshuka (or a dissolution of matter in Faruqi’s terms) adorned with the passive infiltration of a foreign element, eggs (ornamentalism), aligns rather closely as a cultural praxis to Tlatli’s insistence on a poetic Tunisian cinema. The image denotes the most naturalistic portrayal of reality- of Allah’s creation, of Allah Himself- as is prohibited in Islam. For Tlatli, the symbols and metaphors used for imagemaking in Arabic poetry are translated into the camera in a rather peculiar way, “captur[ing] small details about something one is trying to say,” and she later cites (01:28:00) the scene in which Alia is preparing for her first performance upstairs. It is noteworthy that Tlatli searches for new mediums and modes of language to complement and reinforce one another, so that while the similarly repressed languages of Arabic poetry and cinema reflect one another (the former begetting the latter), the language and relationship between Khedija and Alia also reflects the language of cinema, all their censorships and repressions becoming relational:

Everything is transferred into symbolism… The scene has to convey the way that Alia’s fate is hanging in balance. Is she going to follow in her mother’s footsteps, and gain access to the Upstairs in the way Khedija had done? Is she going to replace her mother? We see the mother watch her daughter literally taking her place, sitting in front of her mirror, putting her lipstick on, making her gestures. And Alia confronts her with a look which says “I’m going to follow your example.” At that moment the mother realises that she is going to lose her daughter, who is about to go Upstairs and sing, and that there is nothing she can do about it… she has to obey the beys. She is impotent. Alia exploits this in a rather childish and Machiavellian manner (5). (Tlatli 13)

Even if they had not been the main characters, Alia and Khedija are thus well established as the symbols of a debased Islamic aesthetics by the countless times they are called beautiful by Lotfi and the colonizers; not just “beautiful,” but Alia’s beauty is always mentioned either in relation to her singing or as an inheritance from Khedija. This is especially the case with Si Bechir, who remarks, “What a beauty,” over Alia’s sleeping body before Khedija walks in; then asking, “She’s as beautiful as you. Are you scared?” before raping and impregnating Khedija (01:02:18). 

On the surface, Khedija and Alia simply represent the two debased, illegitimate Arabic arts/languages of song and dance, which is why “… the kitchen is the living heart of the film.” (Tlatli 7) When Khalti Hadda says, in her final words to Alia, that the servant women of the palace were taught “one single rule: Silence,” (01:58:33) it serves to juxtapose the earlier scene in which we first met her upon Alia’s return to the palace- the only time we explicitly learn one of the Silences they were taught: Alia (00:12:27). This elision serves to highlight Alia’s symbolism of the status of Arab singers. It is made very apparent that although Sidi Ali gave Alia the impetus to begin singing professionally, and Lotfi gave her supposed protection in such a degraded profession, she (retroactively) unlearned their Silences in the kitchen, the emphatic location in the film. Where the servants must practice docility and subservience in perpetuity when in the presence of their masters, they frequently argue and fight, cry and wail, yell and scream, sing and dance, all in the kitchen, which Tlatli also acknowledges is where most of the long takes are. The viewer’s eye and memory is thus trained to recognize the kitchen the most- to see and hear, taste and smell, all the debates and discussions, food and drink, which we see them make throughout the film, further setting us in Alia’s vantage point. 

Barbara Sellers-Young explains how the illegitimacy of (solo) dance in Islamic cultures is allegedly marked by the un(der)development of “legitimizing structures of a named movement vocabulary and the direct transfer of a vocabulary from teacher to student,” so transmission is a “matter of observation through community participation.” (126) While Alia observed everything she wanted to, Khedija still forbade her from dancing. This departs from a Western feminist analysis of the film, assuming that, “women who belly dance are less prone to self-objectification and have better body image than non-practitioners… patriarchy is dependent on women’s alienation from their own bodies, [so] profound embodiment makes women more resistant to both the male gaze and heterosexist social structures.” (Hawthorn 10) So, since Alia developed her voice as a means through which to emote inarticulable pain- namely the alienation she felt from both the servants and first floor as Tlatli explains the attic was her safe haven and music studio outside both (8)- in a very similar fashion to the revolutionary songs like “Green Tunisia,” which she sang at Sarra’s wedding, the assumption would be that she inherited this from Khedija. She did not; Khedija hates her debased body. You cannot embody any aesthetics through an abject medium, for the “cultural value” is always-already negative, almost an antiaesthetic.  

When Khedija’s parents did not return to take her home- when she was condemned to eternal stasis- the prospect of mobility within palace walls through Sidi Ali was likely cultivated and then swiftly destroyed (6). This assumption can be garnered not just from the presumably consensual pregnancy and relationship itself, but also the scene in which Khedija washes Alia’s hair before her dance (00:33:02), whence she explains that if Alia is ever lost, no one- not even Sidi Ali- can save her. Hedhili delivers the next view lines rather poetically; she is explaining how Ali has made her hate her body and dance through both poetry and parental advice. A man’s touch- both in dialogue and action from Sidi Ali, Si Bechir, Houssine, Lotfi, and Sarra’s brother- thus becomes a euphemism/synecdoche for (hetero)sexuality and rape after this birds and the bees discussion. Not only was abortion still illegal at the time, but also the child- symbolizing the nation- enraptures the parents so that rejection of a wanted child results not just in death, but being killed from the inside out (both Khedijah and Sidi Ali, albeit more slowly); the old order of a nation being torn apart when it cannot adapt to new realities, to revolutionary forces. Khedija knew that as a maid, “if something happen[ed]” and Alia became pregnant, she would either have the child and remain dependent on the father to raise it under Islamic patriarchy (and afford to raise it under capitalism), or be forced to undergo a “series of abortions” like Khedijah, either way to please the father; her illegitimate, fatherless status would prevent the former option from ever happening, though. Alia would have, in effect, remained dependent on the father to confer citizenship onto her child while she herself could never gain citizenship, because her mother is her father, and because her mother was in the same situation, but without a mother nor a father (7). They are members of a completely differently imagined community than their alleged family. 

In a truly Arabesque manner, this sequence of events from Khedija’s first performance upstairs (00:33:20) until her second “performance” (00:47:40), as well as the scenes immediately preceding and following, exhibit the film as much as the entire narrative itself; au cœur is the articulation, transmission, and translation of language. Before Khedija’s dance is the above scene in which the imperative of distrusting Sidi Ali is established. We then have the motif- the struggle of articulating oneself and one’s language- Khedija’s dance, or movement language, and Alia’s observation. Alia then struggles to mimic the dance wearing Jneina’s dress and makeup; not only is she displeased with herself (not even having watched Khedija’s full performance) but Jneina catches and chides her, saying she’s “born to be bad” like her mother (00:40:30). After this, she pretends to sleep to avoid speaking to her mother after the party;

…this tension is released with completion of the idea and a return to the recurring sound pattern of the mono-rhythmed poem [at the end of the poetic bayt, or couplet]. Such a point of tension release in each bayt of poetry is known as a dafqah or "outpouring." (Faruqi 12)

Tlatli and Islam’s poetic prowess shines through the sustained rhythm of the present-day sequence; everyone, especially Alia, but not Mroubia, moves with a determined lethargy as if walking through invisible water. The national disenchantment is certainly panoramic. We return to our next motif, a young Alia going to the attic to practice singing and playing Sarra’s lute. She sings of lost love and the refusal to open one’s heart and trust their abuser at neither a word nor a gaze, but then as soon as she sees Sidi Ali observing and applauding, she’s elated. This returns us again to adult Alia, who, similarly elated, who turns her smile into a frown as she conjures the final motif memory of the modular sequence: Khedija’s performance that finally made Alia realize she was of a different family and community. She begged to see Khedija’s dance, not knowing that Khedija was only doing maid duties that night. While the narrative implies that Alia never learned this, she could tell that night was different from the others. When she cannot spy, she can observe her mother’s behavior following the performance; whereas the previous night Jneina and Alia were mad while Khedija was happy to see her daughter, this night Jneina was mad at Khedija- both women confused and being driven crazy by her relationship with Ali- who projected this onto Alia. This also reflects why so many of the other women lash out. Alia then goes to her bedroom to cut herself out of the “family photo” with Sidi Ali and Sarra. She later follows her mother up to Ali’s room, only to fall asleep watching another woman with Si Bechir. It is almost comical that Khedija knew her daughter was tired, and Tlatli exploits this with editing to show that Alia saw Si Bechir but not Sidi Ali with Khedija. We finally reach the end of this third motif for another break during which Alia takes what is presumably her headache medication and washes her face (almost as if to get Sidi Ali out of her head, as she started taking this medication after she went mute). The next scene, as Tlatli explains, Houssine is essentially saying, “You are all fighting. Stop it. The fighting has started outside.” 

Repeated is Alia’s internal struggle to learn and emulate her sister and mother’s behaviors and languages, being met with barriers (her mother’s or Jneina’s refusal, men’s advancements, sleep) to be overcome (spying from another room, running away to the attic, the next motif) interspliced with breaks of a self-reflective adult Alia; as a child, she could not yet conceptualize the struggles she was actively watching her mother endure, enunciated by comically falling asleep right in front of Ali’s room yet tragically waking up when Si Bechir grabs Khedija. Tlatli emphasizes how Khedija’s struggle, the aestheticizing process, is not a subjective process of determining the beauty in nature, but a subservient process of very naturally articulating what (body) language that audience considers beautiful, then being discarded, disrespected, and forgotten after the performance, like many Arabic dancers and singers. The narrative translation of (Islamic) aesthetics and the reality they reflect from dance to song, embodied by Khedija and Alia respectively, reflects Tlatli’s formal translation of (Islamic) aesthetics and its reality from poetry to cinema. That would imply, then, that the struggle for spoken Arabic to gain aesthetic autonomy and recognition outside its community (especially in a French context) must exist for Arabic cinema as a nonliterary cultural form as well. Where Tlatli narrativizes her  metaphor for the struggles of Arab dancers and singers, Kechiche metaphorizes the struggles of Maghrebi immigrants and filmmakers. 

Most important, though, is the film’s dedication to her actual mother.

La Graine et Le Mulet

[T]he social world can no longer be demarcated along such artificial bifurcations as private home and public space, or the bourgeois distinctions between the personal microcosm and the sociopolitical macrocosm... The family, exposed as a cultural construct or a set of signifying practices, becomes subject to semiotic processes of selection and combination and open to dissolution or redefinition.

K K Seet, Mothers and Daughters: Abjection and the Monstrous-Feminine

It is equally apparent that Mulet is dedicated to Kechiche’s father, juxtaposing the roles of feminine and masculine authority in the Muslim social body even within the title itself (8). The land and sea are dichotomized so that their reflexive collapse in distinction on the boat offers itself, and the dish, as a synecdoche for Maghrebi immigration and acculturation. The collapse and reconstruction of the family most clearly displays this social unit’s liminoid juncture between and breakdown of “artificial bifurcations [such] as… the bourgeois distinctions between the personal microcosm and the sociopolitical macrocosm.” Kechiche would consider it “indecent” using one of his characters to express a political opinion, allowing him the freedom to blend genres and cinematic modes of expression to create a new style of neorealist melodramedy that hides its poetic sensibility under the linguistic and world-built conventions that the characters are negotiating. In other words, macrocosmic France has now subsumed any semblance of the abject bifurcation between the native and colonialist epistemes displayed in Silences, especially since this realisateur grew up in Nice whereas Tlatli did in Tunis. Thus, Mulet is not depicting the axis of power about incoherent social bodies (France, Ottoman Beys, Arabs and Berbers), but the power plays in acculturation within a new (very nationalist-oriented) body; it is no longer about creating the shakshuka aesthetic, but its acculturation into the French canon as Franco-Tunisian.

Norindr haphazardly mentions the film’s dedication to Kechiche’s father as an aside- an unnecessary testament to his, already rightly established and justified, dissection of the film as a melodrama. Such a treatment of this information- especially considering Slimane’s part was originally Kechiche’s father but he died before filming- is… a choice. In his and Hafsia Herzi’s (Rym) interview with fellow Tunisian, Olivier Galzi, Kechiche explains how,

The character was inspired by my father and inspired by this entire generation of men that worked a lot, that made lots of sacrifices... [w]ho worked on construction sites for their children, so that their children could lead better lives... they were often themselves living in self-denial, they gave a lot. And in any case, I wanted to pay tribute to them, I also wanted to express the affection that we had for them, this generation, these new generations, mine, Hafsia’s and the upcoming one, and to express our tenderness for them. (Kechiche 2008)

Extricating racialization from the representation of working class immigrants in France would have to be a conscious choice of the writers/director, and it certainly was not here. Farrer & Wank explain how restaurants and cuisines- and their culinary imaginaries- are bound in their ethnic, regional, or national contexts; far too bound in a country like France- where Professor Okiche explained, in response to my discussion question during the the Nov. 6 “Cinemas of the Maghreb” lecture, that the racial caste hierarchy of America is more accurately yet still relatively translated as a nationalist struggle- to pretend that because Renoir could not fully conceptualize the racialization of immigrants classes, like the purportedly darker and less civilized Italians in Toni, that means this important aspect must be elided from Kechiche’s work. He very purposely chose to represent the memory of his father as a fragile patriarch struggling to open a couscous restaurant for his family and community, whose survival hinged on cultural prostration through food, music, dance, and death. Thus, Norindr’s insistence on auteur theory and French political cinematic analysis both ignore the imperative of an illegitimate Tunisian aesthetics.

Kechiche does not center the Islamic cinematic aesthetic imperatives of serial structure, repetition, or abstraction, not solely because his style is more identified with a French genealogy, but also because he and Ghalia Lacroix infuse this genealogy with what he empirically knows to be the imperatives of Tunisian aesthetics for an entirely new pace. Norindr makes the assumption that it is either/or- Beur or auteur, banlieue or poetic realist- and that the former modes are automatically ghettos because Franco-Maghrebi realisateurs are confined there indiscriminately, so then Kechiche must align more with the latter, resisting Western confinement by… confining oneself to a Western tradition? As a French and Southeast Asian cinema/studies scholar, it is understandable that his geneoalogical trace focuses on France, but if he was not going to include other Franco-Maghrebi filmmakers in comparison, this was the wrong movie to analyze with a mononational lens. The incredibly potent, relational symbolism for immigration combined with the film’s tribute to Kechiche’s father binds this film to its mother country even if it was not distributed there; relational because without perpetrating realisme aigu which Renoir considers too claustrophobic both cinematically and narratively (Norindr 57). This binding speaks to the continuum of intracommunal relations all too characterstic of diasporic movement- both narratively and metanarratively- across the Mediterannean, the globe, and time itself, especially with Ghalia Lacroix writing, editing, and married to Kechiche. Perhaps the argument could have been made that this is simply a relational indiscriminate working class immigrant film then- highlighting the struggles for first-generation immigrants to leave a stable foundation for the next to grow from- but this narrative’s relation to his father makes it too specifically Tunisian.

He explains that his approach to producing his films is “setting everything up so this life can spring forth, so we’re not ‘fabricating’ it, even though it’s an artifice- cinema.” (Kechiche 00:02:01) It is precisely this negotiation, his attempt at subverting the duplicity of cinema- the choreography of its reality- that leads him to the dance of death dénouement. It would have been impossible to subvert the air of artificiality in cinema without bringing the actors together as a community before shooting began. The problem is creating a community from these strangers who can at once appear a simultaneously disgruntled and content family of immigrants and the various neighbors they interact with, and at the same time allegorize their nation that is never mentioned. Kechiche understands that in a globalized world, and especially the gastronomical hub of France, food is one of the primary allegories (or stereotypes); however, their liminoid status- not yet full Frenchmen, even if not still immigrés ou immigrants- is magnified to infinity when confronted with les français blancs and implodes on itself in the end. When Rym and Slimane conduct their interviews with the bureaucrats (00:59:05), who insist that their project cannot get approval in its current presentation and preparation, it is not simply a refusal to accept the shortcuts required of their working-class conditions, but also a symbol of French nationalism’s irreconcilability with foreign modes of expression. This has alienated Slimane and the Tunisian/immigrant community much more than the French working-class due to the language barrier, highlighted by Slimane’s dependence on Rym to explain the project (likely as a joke about second-gen immigrant children translating for their parents). With this symbolism, the denial for authorization serves as a symbol of denying Tunisian immigration-cum-accultration, literally denying them entry to the port. This dinner party- this “test”- is then the no holds barred dossier into the Tunisian family, by allowing these bureaucrats and government officials to finally see and taste what has until now been the only symbol of Tunisia: the grand matriarch’s couscous. This is where the beginning and end of the film meet.

Call and Response: A Conclusion

In the first scene, there is the rather comically uncomfortable but forgettable scene with Majid and Madeleine. Forgettable because while everyone remembers he is cheating, it is forgettable just how uncomfortable her fetishization of him is. She is not shown again until halfway through the film (01:08:50)- very naturally and unassumingly- then again of course on the boat; both the affair itself (especially because Madeleine is not his only mistress) and voyeuristic closeup of Majid smacking her butt are stressed more than her softly giggling, “Hurt me.” (00:03:09) Norindr may not have perceived Majid as the portrayal of an obvious Maghrebi, but Madeleine clearly did; her request is not just a general sexual fantasy but an Orientalist one unfulfilled by her white bureaucratic husband. The ending is similarly a depiction of Orientalist pleasure, but turns what was once comic into a devolution of tragedy. 

The tragedy begins when Majid drives off with the grain; Olfa repeatedly calls him but he does not respond, and Riadh is stupefied, at a loss for words all too similar to Slimane in his interviews. Now, the family must prostrate themselves in order to survive both because of external pressures- Slimane basically being fired, then denied authorization, and now the guests are getting restless- and internal ones- his and Souad’s nonconfrontational attitudes towards their children, begetting Majid’s mess. This does not begin as a group decision nor a group effort, but Rym alone first realizes someone has to stall. After Rym decides that she must run home and prepare to dance (02:15:45), we cut to Slimane running for his stolen bike. Once he reaches the top of the mini-bridge, we turn to see the kids and only the kids; once we turn back, Slimane is off running already. This symbolizes that we have reached Kechiche’s (Faruqi’s) mini-climax for this restaurant scene module (and the climax for the entire narrative) as Rym distracts, and in fact pleases, the Frenchmen- the primary conflict in the “here and now.” (Norindr 55) This dance would not have been as successful in distracting the guests without call and response.

Rym’s suggestive looks and gestures towards the old men, causing them to either make similar ones back, play new tunes, or move around/closer to her; Lilia and the others getting the guests to clap along; but most importantly, Latifa’s realization that if Rym will help by dancing then she must help by making couscous, all represent call and response through Rym’s dance. Returning to Jackson’s text, “call-response, signified variously in couple dancing and circle dancing (within which traditional divisions between participant and observer are broken down as a soloist dance sin mounting response to the interaction of a fully engaged chorus),” this cultural form is recognized as one of the most revolutionary aspects of slave dance and African tradition, which is why it is so effective at protests and rallies. It can be an action, a sound, a look, or any type of engagement between performer and “audience.” Reflective subjectivity is the key: reflecting the subject’s, the caller’s, call and thus recognizing their subjectivity, but with enough subjectivity from the response to not necessarily repeat the exact same form- to add one’s own aesthetic flare if necessary. Jackson notes that this form is normally used in rituals, and Faruqi briefly mentions a similar form in intimate settings, especially with raqs al-sharqi, but is that not what this represents? This community’s tragic but intimate opening of itself, very vulnerably, for these Frenchmen to judge and decide if it is worth French sensibilities? They know that a particular image must be projected, just as with the creation of the global sushi bar. This image is reflected at the beginning of the film: the voracious Oriental man (and now the erotic Oriental woman). In this opening scene, Majid is more shameful and comical than anything, appearing to be simply a horny Magrebhi tour guide giving into a tourist’s Oriental fantasy, especially now with the viewers knowledge that we were in fact looking at his father working in that very same port in the next scene; in the closing scene, it is rather sad to see this community sell an Orientalist image of itself in order to survive within a French episteme. While Latifa’s couscous provides hope before Slimane’s collapse closes with tragedy, her call-response to save the restaurant while Majid is nowhere to be found implies that the famille recomposée offers some revolutionary hope to reconstruct the Tunisian family and nation from the inside out.

Although set up as a typical denouement in which the interwoven details of the narrative converge to reveal their relation, this performance superficially appears as the bemoaned third act gun (9). This is a Trojan horse, for it is the relation- and breakdown between the distinction- among the performers and servers that relates the colonialist imperative of relating the native’s service and (artistic) performance so as to destroy subjectivity. In enforcing a paradigm of aesthetics on artistic performance- like music, dance, and food- the ideals of an autonomous subjective aesthetic as well as an autonomous cultural one are elided in favor of serving the dominant episteme. This is where Kechiche’s film meets Tlatli’s, as the denouement serves to make its primarily French audience uncomfortable with both its formal conventions- the bemoaned plan-séquence reflecting Tlatli’s long takes (initially to capture quotidian life of the immigrants but then to simultaneously plant us both in the restaurant and following Slimane) and voyeuristic close ups on Rym’s fetishized and Slimane’s dying bodies in self-destructive motion. The continuum of music over black in the end reflects this relation in formal techniques- the implication that all these events are typic of Maghrebi immigrant life struggling to survive in France. Whereas at first, Majid’s call-response seems rather broken (the camera and dialogue paradox- turning left towards Madeleine when he says right to symbolize the betrayal of his ichra to fulfill his lustful desires- enunciates this), by the end, the same French stereotypes against Maghrebis are in place but now their subversive call and response communication offers hope they will finally become symbolically accepted into the French nation while using their subservice language of call-response (whose aesthetic principles only they comprehend) to negotiate their collective identity and the nation’s Orientalist aesthetics (the collapse of land and sea). In the spirit of this subversive communication’s reflection of Kechiche’s cinematic language, there is no French categorization of his cinematic mode of expression, and for an argument to assume so is to superimpose French aesthetics onto his couscous (10).

This is Suleiman’s position, of the epistemological liminoid condition that comes with not having a homeland, with choosing exile. This is actually precisely the grounds for autonomy that the Tunisian canon questions- the role one plays in one’s own exile, one’s death. Khedijah is understood to have much less autonomy in choosing to stay in the palace than, say, Slimane choosing to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee for every meal then trying to chase a motorbike. The alleged autonomy of the tragedy is punctuated, however, by their deaths in the middle of their kids’ odes (Alia does not start singing “Green Tunisia” until she sees Khedijah fall ill and leave the room; Rym is obviously trying to help Slimane) reflecting the unfortunate real-life tragedies that the directors are honoring. This practice of ending the narrative and interrupting the performances with death- whether as a memory or the primary plotline- serves to reflect an Arabesque cut short yet still continuing, with the diegetic music in Mulet continuing over black and Alia naming her child Khedijah. The death of Suleiman’s father is correlatedly the death of his political identity as Palestinian “as a point of departure” in his work, but what does that mean for such a politicized identity (96)? Suleiman chooses to neither have a “homeland” nor be in “exile,” yet at the same time this is the aesthetic imperative of his oppressors, an ethnic cleansing of Gaza while claiming there is no exodus because there is no true Palestinian home. The renouncement of both homeland and exile is thus only possible through two means: choice, and physical or social death. In a sense, his father’s death was the call to which he responded, returning to Palestine so he could fully conceptualize detachment from space and reconstitution of identity. This is his departure from shakshuka, whereas he reassembles his identity around the disavowl of space, as  space is only one aspect of identity and identity-making, reflected in Mulet with the disavowal of nationalist identity outside the confines of imposing Franco-nationalism. The intersections of displaced and immigrant cultures in their reconstitution of spaceless identity has created a cinematic mode through which the usually nationalist imperatives of Islamic and shakshuka aesthetics can take on more secular and globalized forms. Tlatli’s Tunisia-centric poetic cinema is translated into a greater Maghrebi and Third-World-immigrant narrative for Kechiche, despite both films being tributes to similarly selfless Tunisian parents of the same temporal generation but different geopolitical ones. Perhaps this is the break in the Arabesque where Suleiman can come in, not necessarily at any specific time or place, but in that silence in the ellipses which he and Slimane so dearly miss. 

The silence which Kechiche ruptured was the heretofore unexplained disconnect between a Islamo-Tunisian aesthetics of language through cinema in a globalized context, as a tribute to his father’s legacy as an immigrant in France, relative to Tlatli’s display of disconnect in Islamo-Tunisian aesthetics of language through the traditional arts of poetry, music, and dance, as a tribute to her mother’s legacy in Tunisia. Two different colonial realities, using the Faruqi and shakshuka aesthetics of abstraction and serial structure, dissolution of matter and stylization of nature, to express the tension between identity-making and perception through aesthetics. A consideration of Suleiman as using the same set of aesthetics- yet introducing an anti-Islamic naturalization of beauty- would thus produce interesting conversations of community-formation and identity-making not just through lingual similarities but also their aberrations.

Tailquotes

The key word here is “nonlinearity.” The nonlinear image, which is read through dispersed fragments, is the only way you can make the audience participate in the construction of the image and therefore in the construction of the story, of the discourse.

Elia Suleiman, A Cinema of Nowhere

Recognizing that the global also dresses itself in the clothing of the local, reshaping it from the inside, opens up a vast research agenda. It means that studying globalization needs to include detailed local research—notably ethnographies—of multiple conditions and dynamics that are global or are shaped by it but function inside the national and are mostly experienced as national. Cities and neighborhoods, rather than national territory as such, are major sites for such entities; and this further adds to the local appearance of it all. 

Saskia Sassen, Researching the Localizations of the Global 

Much recent theory in the humanities has regarded the human subject as being ‘subverted’ by its failure to provide a stable ground for philosophy, because, for example, of its dependence on language or on the unconscious… 
For Heidegger the dominance of the subject is subverted by our always already being located in languages which we do not invent and which we require in order to articulate our world. In the wake of Heidegger the very notion that subjectivity is a central issue in philosophy therefore gives way to the idea that subjectivity is an ‘effect’ of the ‘discourses’ or ‘texts’ in which we are located.

Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity

Lois al-Faruqi’s deliberately protagonistic approach constituted an often uncomfortable reminder that there are groups of people “out there” who want to discuss music and music-making on their own terms, as a part of their quest for asserting their cultural identity vis-à-vis the West. It is this challenge that constitutes, I believe, the most valuable legacy Lois has left for our Society. May we respond to it with a new humanism, as we recognize the need to identify in new ways with the people whose music we seek to understand. 

Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, In Memoriam

Notes

1. Also Note 1 in Wynter’s Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument, “The epigraphs placed at the beginning of select sections are intended to serve as guide-quotes, or as Heideggerian guideposts (Heidegger [Basic Concepts,] 1998), to orient the reader as the Argument struggles to think/articulate itself outside the terms of the disciplinary discourses of our present epistemological order; seeing that it is these discourses, this order, that are necessarily—as the condition of our being in the genre/mode of being human that we now hegemonically are—instituting/inscripting both of the Man of the Argument’s title, and of its overrepresentation as if it were the human.”

2. For clarification, the argument presuposes Suleiman’s association of his sushi aesthetic with his Kantian aesthetic of beauty. In “The Arab-Futurist Drive-By,” it was explained that the way in which he unravels this scene with Khader and the zionists presents it as an example of his sushi aesthetic, so he’s also utilizing her aesthetic beauty for the same paradigm. Because he’s presenting it as an anti-bourgeois and anti-Zionist aesthetic at the same time as he is offering a Western and naturalistic representation of beauty, this is the contention for considering a shakshuka aesthetic.

3. @/missfalsteenia and @/hasaniwa on Twitter, https://x.com/missfalsteenia/status/1725043213084369075?s=20 

4. In “Ornamentation in Arabian improvisational Music: A Study of Interrelatedness in the Arts,” Dr. al-Faruqi explains, “Ornamentation plays a very different role in the arts of the Arabs. Instead of reproducing in his art a scene, a living being or an object from nature, the Arab artist throughout the centuries has shown a preference for creating designs made from geometric, calligraphic or vegetal motifs (Illustration 1). Rather than taking nature itself or natural phenomena as his theme - or as his vehicle for expression - and then decorating them with beautifying addendum, the Arab artist has made his goal that of expressing himself through the manipulation of abstract and stylized motifs. From these he creates compositions conveying a sense of never-ending design. Even when he utilizes figural motifs, they are treated in ways which deny their individuality, their personality or their naturalness. Ornamentation for the Arab artist, therefore, is not an addendum, a superfluous or extractable element in his art. It is the very material from which his infinite patterns are made. Just as letters combine to form syllables, and syllables combine to form words, words in turn forming phrases, sentences and paragraphs, there are various levels of progressively more complex combination of Arabized motifs in the arabesques of both the visual and musical arts.” 

5. I find it rather interesting (almost vindicating) that she explicitly acknowledges Machiavellianism in this relationship. In trying to fully understand the relationship between realism and neorealism- both as genres, general political theories, and international relations theories- and their relatonships to neoliberalism and fascism, I thought I had only imagined an essence of (subversive) neorealism here. Especially with so many cinemas we see dealing with war or the aftermath of war, it’s easy to mislabel, but Machiavelli is one of the fathers of realist and neorealist politics, and our current political system in general. I have yet to fully flesh out the various relations- especially with this contradictory infighting between (neo)realism and neoliberalism- or see them explored somewhere that addresses the way that neorealist cinema has served to underscore fascist interests outside of Peter Bondanella’s “Italian Neorealism: The postwar renaissance of Italian cinema,” but it’s something of note. I feel as though it also highlights the precarious position of the child/girl, especially with regards to consent and thus maturity, becaue Machiavelli’s ideas regarding human nature and primal instinct, while supposedly related to adult affairs, would harm the child the most because seen as the most primal humans- with unregulated emotions, uncontrolled behavioral impulses, irrational thought processes, simultaneously undeveloped so less human but also more prone to conflict so thus more realist- they receive the most punishment and subjugation.

6. Cultivated is used here intentionally, because if Sidi Ali represents a colonialist Lotfi, then he likely planted the idea in Khedija’s head, just vaguely enough to avoid inculpation.

7. Lamia Zayzafoon explains in The Production of the Muslim Woman, “Reflecting the laws of Islamic patriarchy, the PSC of 1956 also stated that only Tunisian men could give Tunisian citizenship to their children. Even though the nation is perceived as female, citizenship is viewed as male since it is bestowed through the father, not the mother.” 

8. Grain is masculine in French, as in le grain. So what Norindr identifies as a subverted, ironic (perhaps parodic) realism is even reflected in the title. I’m honestly surprised that as a French scholar he did not mention this- obviously very intentional- testimony to his argument. Because Kechiche said he does not like to overtly politicize, it is likely simply an indication of Fouad and Latifa specializing in couscous while he brings home the fish and works on the dock.

9. Referring to Aaron Sorkin’s maxim to never give your character a gun- a means by which to confront the conflict- in act 3 that was not given to them in act 1, it’s narritively messy.

10. “Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other--and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him.” (If Black English Isn’t a Language)

Works Cited

al Faruqi, Lois. “The Aesthetics of Islamic Art.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 35, no. 3, 1977, pp. 353–55. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/430294.

al Faruqi, Lois Ibsen. “Dance as an Expression of Islamic Culture.” Dance Research Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, 1978, pp. 6–13. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1477998.  

al Faruqī, Lois Ibsen. “Ornamentation in Arabian Improvisational Music: A Study of Interrelatedness in the Arts.” The World of Music, vol. 20, no. 1, 1978, pp. 17–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43562537.  

Arem, Mansour, and Rafram Chaddad. “Shakshuka’s Origins, Where Does It Come From?” Zwïta, 5 May 2023, zwitafoods.com/blogs/news/shakshuka-wheres-it-actually-from.  

Bowie, Andre. “Inroduction.” Aesthetics and Subjectivity, Manchester University Press, 2003, pp. 1–15. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt155jcnj.4. 

Farrer, James, and David Wank. The Global Japanese Restaurant. University of Hawaii Press, 2023.

Galzi, Olivier. “ Interview with Abdellatif Kechiche .” Europe of Cultures, 23 Feb. 2008, fresques.ina.fr/europe-des-cultures-en/fiche-media/Europe00404/interview-with-abdellatif-kechiche.html. 

Lang, Robert. “The Colonizer and the Colonized: The Silences of the Palace (Moufida Tlatli, 1994).” New Tunisian Cinema: Allegories of Resistance, Columbia University Press, 2014, pp. 123–56. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/lang16506.9.

Norindr, Panivong. “The Cinematic Practice of a ‘Cinéaste Ordinaire’: Abdellatif Kechiche and French Political Cinema.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, Jan. 2012, pp. 55–68, https://doi.org/10.1080/17409292.2012.638845. 

Suleiman, Elia. “A Cinema of Nowhere.” Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 29, no. 2, 2000, pp. 95–101. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/267653.