She Is Not Captured!

CU LTURKWORKS She Is Not Captured! FARIDEH FARHI THE PERFUMED GARDEN a documentary by Yamina Benguigui, 2000 (52 minutes) First Run/Icarus Films THE WOMEN OF HEZBOLLAH a documentary by Maher Abi-Samra, 2000 (49 minutes) First Run/Icarus Films A FEMALE CABBY IN SIDI BEL-ABBES a documentary by Belkacem Hadjadj, 2000 (52 minutes) First Run/Icarus Films There is really no need to mull over a predicament that is clear enough: a woman of Middle East and North African origins is not only badly represented, she has been and is caught in an ideological crossfire to which she has contributed little, even if every once in a while, in the crossfire, she momentarily relishes the opportunity to claim a useful image ofher own. On a good day she can be considered worthy ofwar waged in the name ofherliberation from her fanatical brothers and father and she can also be the undeterred and unforgiving cultural bearer of resistance to Western penetration. The exoticism and seductiveness of her past can easily trade places with her angry and lamenting eyes and waitings of the present without much explanation or context. Like a chameleon she changes colors, presumably without prompting. Like an empty frame she can be the repository ofanyone's imagination. Today she is mostly framed as a "Muslim" woman, with a politicized religion as the sole marker ofher identity. She hangs onto it sometimes righteously, [Meridians:/eminism, race, transnationalism 2002, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 82-8]©2002 by Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved. 82 but mostly tentatively. And ifshe reportedly rejects it, then there are other unitary attributes that come along: Westernized, modern, and so on. "Woman," with all the multiplicity and variety that the term implies, is usually hard for her to fathom. Enough said! Are there alternative ways ofcapturing this woman? Orat least are there ways to give context to her rather puzzling and haphazard behavior? The three documentaries reviewed here, one by an AlgerianFrench woman and two by Arab (one Lebanese and one Algerian) men, offer a great opportunity to reflect on these questions and more. The Paris-born Yamina Benguigui's The Perfumed Garden not surprisingly is the most provocative and carefree ofthe three. Drawing its name from the most contemporary ofall the ancient sex classics, penned by Sheikh Nefzaoui of Tunis reportedly at the beginning of the sixteenth century and hailed as the "Kamasutra ofArabia," Benguigui's film begins with a meditation on sex, with not clearly explained allusions to a North African past that perhaps was not as sexually repressive as today. But the documentary ends up mosdy talking about love or, more accurately, absence of love in a world ravaged by the crisscrossing and at times violent confrontation of traditionalism and capitalism. Young, middleclass Algerian female university students, with or without veil, complain about the premium put on their virginity by the society and their families (mothers explained everything to them when they were young), while young middle-class Algerian men sitting notvery far away talk eloquently about how getting sex "between thighs" and withoutpenetration (relying on videos that teach them how) is not that difficult—but love is. The men find fault in societal and familial relations that forbid pleasure in the name ofsin and shame and the fact that "girls today are only interested in the material side," while acknowledging that most boys think ofgirls as "whores." Their non-penetrative sexual favors can essentially be bought by money dispensed in more imaginative ways than passed around on street corners. The dissonance between the two sets ofconversations— girls uncomfortably talking about social mores and family obligations and boys comfortably talking about the kind ofsex they can getwhile still complaining about social mores—is as revealing as it is expected. I have had similar, albeit contextually textured, conversations with separate sets ofyoung men and women in Honolulu and Tehran. The lament on both sides is really all about not connecting, not loving, not being loved, and displacement, made possible—but only partially explained—by the fetish over sexual and material goods. SHE IS NOT CAPTURED! 83 Interestingly, though, Benguigui's émigré young men interviewed in Marseilles seem to think that they...