Traces of Diaspora -and Exile- in Art (Emily Jacir and Mona Hatoum)
🍉 Diaspora, that is ‘a scattering or sowing abroad’;
derived from the Greek word διασπείρω (diaspeirō),
which in turn is composed of διά (dia), ‘between, through,
across’, and the verb σπείρω (speirō), ‘I sow, I scatter’.
The mass displacement and dispossession of the Palestinians- is a prolonged and complicated predicament that can be traced back to 1948, the formulation of the State of Israel, which resulted in the political disenfranchisement of a people and consequently saw the forced subjugation of the masses by the means of military violence and oppressive policies. Remembered as ‘Nakba’,¹ Arabic for ‘the catastrophe’, this historical date signifies for Palestinians not only of the tragic events and their disastrous aftermath but also the ongoing injustices and severe tragic restrictions, prohibiting their mobility within the increasingly expropriated territories, still suffered today. Artists, Mona Hatoum and Emily Jacir, have aesthetically addressed and explored the complexities and tensions underlying the Palestinian diaspora’s precarious relation to an unsteady notion of ‘homeland’ in the works Measures of Distance and Where We Come From, respectively. Strategically contending with representation and visibility through image and text, both artistic portrayals share a conceptual yet performative and autobiographical response to the fragmentary conditions of exile and statelessness.
Born in Beirut to Palestinian parents in 1952, Mona Hatoum found herself an exile in Britain, during a short trip to London, after the war broke out in Lebanon in 1982. This formative experience of displacement and confinement informed much of the early political yet poetic works by the multimedia artist- and is directly addressed in the video, Measures of Distance (Fig. 01), from 1988. For Hatoum, as much as the project portrays the strong and intense weight of emotional intimacy in the relationship between mother and daughter, it also equally ‘speaks of exile, displacement, disorientation and a tremendous sense of loss as a result of the separation caused by war.’² The several layered components of this uncharacteristically personal and intimate film, measuring in at about 15-minutes, are constructed in such a way that every frame bears an abstract sense of complexity. Filled with a multiplicity of dilemmas and tensions, even extending to concerns regarding race and gender, a rich myriad of contradictions and meanings is imbued into the ‘literal closeness and implied distance’ expressed and explored in the piece.
A series of grainy stills of Hatoum’s mother in the shower, taken in extreme close-up by the artist during a short visit back to the family home in Lebanon, appear as if behind a curtain or veil, as dark lines of texts from letters the mother has written, from Beirut, to the artist, in London, are superimposed on top. This overlapping of visual elements in Measures of Distance,³ partially conceals and, at the same time, subtly reveals the woman inhabiting the naked body as it obstructs and limits the viewer’s perception of the image. The artist inserts herself into the project by slowly and clearly reading aloud the contents of the letters, translated from Arabic to English, without a trace of emotion. A taped conversation plays in the background, in which the mother is openly and candidly speaking about her feelings, sexuality, marriage, the father’s objections to the artist’s close observations of her mother’s naked body, and her future hopes and wishes for Hatoum as her daughter. The mother’s animated and expressive tone juxtaposes and intercuts the daughter’s rather somber and monotonous voice- signaling a loss in cultural difference between the mother and daughter who have been torn apart and geographically separated by war.
In his seminal text, Reflections on Exile (1984), Edward W. Said, specifically refers to the Palestinian condition, as ‘the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between self and its true home’;⁴ a sentiment that seems to be poignantly enacted in Hatoum’s portrayal. The formal structure of Measures of Distance places a focus on material mediation, in the use of similarly composed overlaying of imagery and soundtrack, and its potential to convey a relationship and experience occurring simultaneously on different levels of intimacy. The contents of the letter recited aloud by the artist recounts and mentions the war, along with discussions on absence and the mother’s tender expressions of concern and longing for her daughter (to return). The Arabic script running across the image throughout the film, ‘seem almost like barb wires’, observes Ingvild Goetz, which promptly brings ‘up associations with imprisonment’⁵ and evokes a sense of constant estrangement, both physically and emotionally. Moreover, a link can also be drawn between the body of the mother and the words communicated via text and speech, perhaps as a way for the artist to return or trace the ownership of these meanings back to their origin- in a fragmentary gesture of recovery.
Display at Tate Britain. (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hatoum-measures-of-distance-t07538)
Tethering between rupture and repair, the emotional and tumultuous immediacy of the traumatic events and entanglements of war, exile, and displacement are evoked in the exacerbated dislocations re/presented in Hatoum’s Measures of Distance. ‘Connecting homesickness to familial distance, the video poignantly joins a desired maternal communion with its foreclosure,’⁶ as noted by T.J. Demos, in its enactment of homecoming expressed through defiance and loss with great pathos, fragility, and vulnerability. The consolidating and intertwining of disparate components, in this sense, articulates and produces an intimate account of the mother and daughter in an imaginary moment- as spatial and temporal distances are effectively collapsed. However, the multifaceted layering inherent in the construction of the piece, ultimately, prevents the viewer from isolating an interpretation as it becomes complicated by a multitude of undefinable cultural and linguistic translations which are essential to reading the work in its entirety. Thus, as asserted by Edward W. Said, it is ‘transformed by choice and conscious effort into something simultaneously different, ordinary and irreducibly other and the same, taking place together’;⁷ creating a presence that is adjacent yet never fully reconcilable.
“If I could do anything for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?”
A single question posed to exiled Palestinians living in cities scattered across the world by the multidisciplinary artist, Emily Jacir (b. 1975- ). Simple yet profound, it foregrounds and initiates the project, Where We Come From (Fig. 02); the premise of which is set upon Jacir’s possession of an American passport as it enabled the artist to travel freely in Palestine to fulfill her solicited requests. Commissioned by Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, in Jerusalem, and carried out in 2001–3, fourteen years after Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance, this artistic venture plainly documents, and serves as witness to, the Palestinian refugee’s inability to travel to and around locations in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza- or, in other words, return to the land they regard as and call ‘home’, a place that according to Edward W. Said, ‘is beyond reach or no longer exists’.⁸ Bringing together some thirty respondents, Jacir’s appropriately paradoxical approach to this devastatingly complex and seemingly irresolvable conflict determinedly cuts through the convoluted intricacies and directly addresses the people who are personally at the centre of this unresolved discordance.
Harbouring every intention of following through on the gathered responses, the artist takes it upon herself to set out and cross the required physical and psychological borders on behalf of those who, due to their unfortunate political status, are not permitted to do so. The submitted replies were mostly of a pragmatic and sentimental nature, expressions of highly intimate yearnings — hugging a loved one, eating a favourite meal, watching the sunset — actions often taken for granted. Far from the overtly desperate appeals or unattainable pleas for some political mitigation from the negations and limitations unjustly imposed and enforced upon them, these were the humdrum concerns that evokes a sense of ‘fact, memory, and aspiration’ for the collective exiled Palestinians, exemplified in the ‘requests for Jacir to pay bills, visit one’s family, or water one’s trees’.⁹ Passed the point of being immediate, emotional, and shocking, they reveal a condition of exile which, over time, has been drawn out and accepted as a prosaic everyday reality. Out of this undertaking, as Said posits, is a ‘creative juxtaposition of wish, wish fulfillment, and wish embodied’,¹⁰ visually and conceptually represented in pairs of corresponding photographs and texts, displayed in a split two-part diptych format.
A framed white panel with clearly printed black words, describing in both English and Arabic, an individual’s personal request, is presented next to an unframed yet finished glossy coloured photograph. The image captures and registers Jacir’s efforts in executing the tasks; however, the body of the artist only appears in the fleeting appearance of a shadow. The cast silhouette, in this case, serves as a painful and poignant reminder of a presence that is neither material nor active- and in effect, conveys a remaining / lingering desire, described by Demos as ‘phantasmic, vicarious, ghostly’.¹¹ Absence and desire are constantly at play in Jacir’s almost complete realisation, or actualisation, of the wishes of those who are denied the basic rights and access to entry and mobility in their homeland. Although the artist endeavours to offer a sense of connection through performative and artistic mediation, the gesture can only ever conclude in an unsatisfactory manner. Rather than portray the individual subjects who have replied to her query in this project, Jacir makes apparent their visual absence and the impossibility of ever adequately bridging ‘the rift of separation’;¹² a crucial fracture that Stuart Hall has identified to be at the crux of any diasporic experience.
Whitney Musuem of American Art, New York. (https://whitney.org/collection/works/20678)
Connecting members of the community with one another, all of whom have suffered and dispersed from a similar breaking point, Jacir is seemingly seeking to construct a collective bonding amidst the fragmentation and to reassemble a shared sense of identity that demands the audience’s address. In the process of encountering Where We Come From and its components, the viewer is made to repeatedly perform the act of visual transition from language to image, between a text-photo divide, as they repeatedly read the written requests and view the pictorial resolution- over and over again- of some thirty heterogenous individuals. The continual procedure is conducted with an afforded ease, that conversely reinforces how insurmountable the translations of such longings is for the exiled Palestinians to carry out for themselves. Positioned in the perspective of the camera’s viewpoint, one is precisely made aware of the gaps and disjunctions, which Said has expressed as ‘fundamentally a discontinuous state of being’,¹³ defining the collective Palestinian diasporic experience. Since 2004, the situation has deteriorated and even Palestinians holding foreign passports are increasingly facing restrictions, being denied entry at border crossings by Israel- thus, the artist is no longer able to move freely and continue work on the project.
Language plays a subversive aspect in both Measures of Distance and Where We Come From, each work interacts with Arabic and English in uniquely individual measures, respectively, to illustrate some sense of difference and subjectivity. Arabic is stereotypically associated with the ‘unknown’ and categorised as ‘other’ in the dominant Western construct of colonial and economic hierarchy. In the deliberate choice to feature both languages, alongside each other, an emphasis is afforded to a probable self-affirming dimension in linguistic operation. The split into two languages also further designates two separate audiences, as T.J. Demos critically points out, ‘one, the exile; the other, the viewer of art — or both together, the bilingually split subject of displacement’.¹⁴ This, in effect, appropriates the reductive and essentialist difference instituted by Western hegemony, which undermines and destablises the perceptions produced and perpetuated in normative discourses. Supplemented by a photographic and filmic record and truthfulness, a descriptive power is thus re-configured to counter the active suppression and consistent threat of erasure being faced by those pushed into the periphery and, instead, directly shed light on the heterogenous lived experiences of Palestinians in diaspora.
Despite their high degrees of formalisation and minimal aesthetics, the complexity of exile emerges from within the artistic practice and works of Mona Hatoum and Emily Jacir- in the troubled sense of transfer and translation drifting between the spaces and gaps left unresolved. In so far as the subjective presence is visually absent, as in Jacir’s respondents, or physically set apart, as in Hatoum’s body, from their objects of desire, the artworks’ visual and conceptual representation stands in as a substitutive figment for the resolvent of a painful longing for a return home. Intimately addressed, and informed by their personal experiences, there remains an implicit yet resolute trace of ambiguity in the absurd and inconclusive yearning for a sense of connection or grounding. In conclusion, both Hatoum’s Measures of Distance and Jacir’s Where We Come From not only offer a counter-narrative to the dehumanising conflagrations that allegorise the Palestinian experience of diaspora and exile but also present an alternative potential in artistic practice, as a formal medium and representational strategy to challenge hegemonic structures. Underscoring the politically dispossessed and marginalised, these artists and their body of works provide a platform for a more politically nuanced and humanistic orientation towards the issue by calling attention to the experience of those affected.
¹About the Nakba, United Nations, The Question of Palestine, https://www.un.org/unispal/about-the-nakba/
²Quoted in Mona Hatoum, (Phaidon, 1997), pp, 140
³Mona Hatoum, UbuWeb Film, https://ubu.com/film/hatoum_measures.html
⁴Edward W. Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Granta 13, (1984), https://granta.com/reflections-on-exile/
⁵Ingvild Goetz, trans. Elizabeth Gahbler, Encounter, in Mona Hatoum, (Sammlung Goetz, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), pp, 17
⁶T.J. Demos, ‘The Art of Emily Jacir: Dislocation and Politicization’, in The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis, (Duke University Press, Durham & London: 2013), pp, 115
⁷Edward W. Said, ‘The Art of Displacement: Mona Hatoum’s Logic of Irreconcilables’, in Mona Hatoum: The Entire World as a Foreign Land, (Tate Publishing, 2002), pp, 15–17
⁸Edward W. Said, ‘Emily Jacir’, in Grand Street, No. 72, Detours, (2013), pp, 106
⁹T.J. Demos, pp, 115
¹⁰Edward. W. Said, ‘Emily Jacir’, pp, 106
¹¹T.J. Demos, pp, 103
¹²Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, (Lawrence and Wishart, London: 1990), pp, 224
¹³Edward W. Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’
¹⁴T.J. Demos, Desire in Diaspora: Emily Jacir, SFMOMA, (2017) https://www.sfmoma.org/essay/desire-diaspora-emily-jacir/
