Constellations Series: Craving Mangoes
Constellations is a series of responses to Mosaic’s virtual production of Dalia Taha’s KEFFIYEH/MADE IN CHINA, curated by Fargo Tbakhi. We invited Palestinian artists, writers, and thinkers to contribute pieces which are in conversation with Taha’s play. Some pieces will directly respond to the episodes; some will merely take them as a point of departure. All of them will be thoughtful and beautiful articulations of Palestinian artmaking, thought, and expression. Our hope is that this series can expand on and strengthen Mosaic’s commitment to Palestinian culture-workers, creating a constellation of artistic expression which mirrors and honors the loose, non-linear structure of KEFFIYEH/MADE IN CHINA.
Today, visual artist and writer Lamia Abukhadra responds to our second episode, “Craving Mangoes.” She writes about refusal, moral vs ethical orientations, and the political frameworks informing the grief in this episode.
Ahlan wa sahlan—welcome. Thank you for being here.
Cross Section of Mango (2021), Lamia Abukhadra. Digital drawing courtesy of the artist.
Image description: On an off-white background, three cross-sections of mangoes are drawn in pencil and colored with paints. They are arranged on the page with two halves side by side at the center, and a third one just below. The third cross-section has a grey, uneven stone at the center of it, rather than a pit. The image is titled “Cross Section of Mango” in pencil at the top. One section is labeled with the following text: “You’re his mother/ you’re his father/ there might still be hope (the word “hope” is struck through). The section below is labeled “he doesn’t throw stones.”
Craving Mangoes and the Generative Space of Refusal
The mother and father are reluctant. Standing, sitting, or pacing in what we imagine is a waiting room of sorts, they have been called in to identify their son. At first it is unclear if the boy is dead or alive, the couple is unwilling to clarify the fact. The viewer is also unsure if the boy’s parents are in a morgue, a hospital, a jail, or another institutional space.
For several minutes the couple speaks around the subject of entering the room in which their son awaits them, creating a protracted state in which the details of the family’s daily life emerge, but the state of the boy is left unknown. We hear that the boy was wearing a green shirt and black cardigan belonging to his father; that the watch the boy wears on his right arm is out of battery, forever stopped at 5 o’clock; that the mother had a toothache; that the boy is only twelve. The parents even discuss the local green grocer and his son, Ali, who may have taught their son to throw stones, yet they deny the possibility that their son would ever throw a stone.
In an absurd manner, as soon as the conversation nears decisiveness, it suddenly switches topics.
Mother: Are you going in?
Father: I can’t.
Mother: Why?
Father: They say it’s difficult.
Mother: What?
Father: To identify him.
Mother: But I told you.
Father: What he’s wearing?
Mother: That he doesn’t throw stones!
Father: You think he’s the only boy in town?
And on it goes.
They do not enter room 2345–a room number whose institutional universality comes into uncanny opposition with the familiarity that emerges from the couple’s discussion. Something prevents the parents from initiating the rupture that awaits them on the other side of the door.
(They try to enter)[1]
When I first read the script for the scene Craving Mangoes in Dalia Taha’s Keffiyeh Made in China, I was immediately reminded of the 1962 surrealist film by Luis Buñuel, Exterminating Angel. The film centers around a group of wealthy dinner party goers who, filmed twice arriving through the foyer,[2] are later incapable of leaving the lavish party.
The characters, Mexican aristocrats, enjoy an evening of dancing, food, flirtation, and gossip, slightly hampered by the lack of servants who all left under urgent pretenses at the exact moment the guests arrived. When the appropriate time to end the evening comes, the guests seem to decide to overstay their welcome and settle in for the night on the couches and floor of the music room. In the morning, while some of the guests are amused by the impromptu slumber party, many are disturbed by the lack of etiquette they exhibited. Yet all attempts to leave are met with distractions or sudden changes in conversation, until it becomes clear there is an invisible line keeping the aristocrats from leaving the confines of the room. Hours turn into days and the situation deteriorates as food and water becomes scarce. Though the doors remain open and the windows unlocked, there is force at work simultaneously keeping the hosts and their guests trapped inside and the soldiers sent to rescue them from entering.
Buñuel never makes clear what it is, but much like in Craving Mangoes, an invisible force befalls the characters of Exterminating Angel, preventing them from crossing a threshold in space and time. Whereas in the Exterminating Angel the force seems to be natural, as if circumstances within the universe have aligned to create a threshold around the house; the force in Craving Mangoes is connected to the political context.
In a lecture I listened to recently titled Ethics: Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, theorist Fares Chalabi introduced the difference between philosophical thought based in morals and ethics. Whereas moralism is based on the relation of causality between body and soul and the control of the body through the values created by the soul, ethics operate on the understanding of the real in order to act as one body and soul.
I was immediately reminded of a discussion I had some months ago on the concept of nationalism, where a friend of mine, Ayreen, offered this thought: Israel is a moral construction whereas Palestine is an ethical composition. It is important to understand the distinction between the driving forces behind the settler and indigenous populations in Palestine, as they frame their respective relations to imaginaries, land and landscape, as well as living and nonliving entities, and create entire systems of perception.
The settler population acts through a moral framework based on fixed values of what bodies and the world in relation to the body should measure itself against. These transcendental truths are upheld through the order and control of the body at all costs. Bodies must be perceived according to the values and power relations of a settler ethnostate; institutionally, or not at all.
Palestinians live in relation to the matter (bodies, landforms, communities, dwellings, ecologies, etc.) around them; their understandings and perceptions of life are rooted in the interactions taking place through the enduring mutual attention[3] between that matter and their bodies and souls. Within and outside the confines of Palestine for the last 73 years, Palestinians have been resisting the established order of settler colonialism in pursual of self-determined relations between one another and their land. The disruption of fixed ideologies is the basis of ethical frameworks, as lived understandings and perceptions change in relation to the matter changing around them.
Jerusalem: a tourist walks down the street towards an Israeli police van. In Hebrew, the police radio crackles, “32 to 24, are you still in front of the tree?” “Yes,” says the policeman. “Stay where you are.” “No problem,” her responds. “Wait for instructions. Don’t move.” “Got it.” He obeys.
The young woman approaches, says to the policeman in a French accent, “Hi, sorry, I’m lost. I would like to go to the Holy Sepulcher.” The policeman gets out of the van and takes a look at the woman’s map, then looks at his surroundings, and down at the map again, unable understand the map–a colonial tool, his colonial tool–in relation to the land surrounding him. “You know what, just a minute,” he says, going around the back of the van. He pulls out a blindfolded, handcuffed Palestinian man, recently detained.
The handcuffed man speaks as if he is a customer service representative and not a detainee, “Yes, can I help you?” as the woman explains she is trying to reach the church in the Old City. Still blindfolded, he “looks” around and begins to give thorough directions on how to reach the church. When he finishes, the officer leads him roughly back into the van. The tourist cheerily thanks the police officer and goes on her way.
In an interview he gave in 2015, Elia Suleiman speaks about this scene in his film, Divine Intervention “The tourist is of course a metaphor, but a metaphor linked to a reality I saw. The Israeli soldiers cannot give directions to a tourist in an occupied land that they are unfamiliar with, that they did not live in and have no roots or history in. The blindfolded detainee, however, can.”[4]
Last June, Ahmad Erekat was running errands on his sister’s wedding day when he crashed his car into a booth at a military checkpoint. The video recordings of the incident showed the young man exiting the vehicle with his hands up as he backed away from the Occupation Forces stationed there. He was shot six times–three of the bullets entered Ahmad’s body while he was lying on the ground– and denied medical attention.[5] He was not able to attend his sister’s wedding, nor was he able to marry his own fiancée the following month.[6] He died on the street.
Nearly a year since his execution, Ahmad’s body has not been returned to his family. He is one of the 70 Palestinians whose bodies remain within the custody of the Israeli authorities.[7] Ahmad’s life was taken suddenly and brutally; in death, his body is kept from his family, unseen and unburied. For Ahmad Erekat, his family, and those living under occupation, the very visible forces of settler colonialism are at work, denying agency in life and death.
On May 24, 2021 a child in Beit Hanina is detained by the Israeli Occupation Police Forces for throwing a stone. His younger sister is crying, pleading with the police to let him go. Inside the car, the boy sits quietly with his hands in his lap. He is not blindfolded. The police officers are dead-eyed. Someone asks the girl why she is scared.[8]
The mother and father never enter the room. Why?
If one were to read the scene through a psychoanalytical framework (a framework founded within the confines of moralism), they could say that the couple is experiencing denial or madness as they begin to grieve the loss of their son. Such a reading would deny the political context which provoked the rupture and its subsequent grieving process in the first place.
The invisible force at work in Craving Mangoes is refusal.
Despite the insistence of the phrase “he doesn’t throw stones”–in what appears to be an interiorization of the imposed moralist values of occupation– the parents’ act of refusal takes place within an ethical framework, one where understanding is informed by the material realities of occupation and settlement, and whose perceptions operate under the struggle for self-determination. In refusing to perceive their child as dead, as criminal, as anything but their twelve year old son, they claim agency in a situation with full understanding that their reality allows them so little of it, and they do so in order to generate a new reality.
Clasping one another's hands as they leave the waiting area, they decide to go to the green grocer to buy their son, who is decidedly, perceptibly still alive, mangoes.
Notes
[1] The only stage direction written for the actors in Craving Mangoes
[2] Roger Ebert, Review of The Exterminating Angel by Luis Buñuel Chicago Sun Times, 11 May 1997, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-exterminating-angel-1962.
[3] See Povinelli’s description of Karrabing’s dirty manifesto. Elizabeth A, Povinelli, Geontologies: a Requiem to Late Liberalism, Duke University Press, 2016.
[4] Dima Choukr and Elia Suleiman. “Elia Suleiman: Pure Cinema Is Spontaneous.” The New Arab, Features, Society, The New Arab, 13 Oct. 2015, english.alaraby.co.uk/features/elia-suleiman-pure-cinema-spontaneous. Accessed 22 May 2021.
[5] Shourideh C. Molavi et al, “THE EXTRAJUDICIAL EXECUTION OF AHMAD EREKAT.” Forensic Architecture, 23 Feb. 2021, forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-extrajudicial-execution-of-ahmad-erekat/.
[6] Middle East Eye Staff, “Ahmad Erekat: Killing of Palestinian by Israel Was 'Extrajudicial Execution'.” Middle East Eye, 24 Feb. 2021, www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-ahmed-erekat-killing-extrajudicial-execution.
[7] Shourideh C. Molavi et al, “THE EXTRAJUDICIAL EXECUTION OF AHMAD EREKAT.” Forensic Architecture, 23 Feb. 2021, forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-extrajudicial-execution-of-ahmad-erekat/.
[8] The video, posted by @eye.on.palestine on Instagram is available here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CPQtEClppkQ/
Additional Threads
At the end of each Constellations entry, we’ll ask the responding artist to share Palestinian organizations, artists, or pieces they think we should know. Here are Lamia’s picks.
The Communist Museum of Palestine: http://communistmuseum.org
Reimagining Solidarity: Conference of Butterflies: http://communistmuseum.org/conference/
Description of Conference of Butterflies here: http://communistmuseum.org/solidarity/
Works by Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri: https://www.tanyaleighton.com/artists/ayreen-anastas-and-rene-gabri
Exit Plans by Reem Shadid, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri: https://perpetualpostponement.org/exit-plans/
Being in the Negative: Interview with Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: https://perpetualpostponement.org/being-in-the-negativean-interview-with-basel-abbas-and-ruanne-abou-rahme/
Nida Sinnokrot: https://www.nidasinnokrot.com
Jumana Emil Abboud’s 2018 exhibition The pomegranate and the sleeping ghoul: https://universes.art/en/nafas/articles/2017/jumana-emil-abboud
Call to cultural organisations, artists, and writers, for solidarity with Palestine: https://mosaicrooms.org/call-to-cultural-organisations-artists-writers-for-solidarity-with-palestine/
Solidarity and Palestine Advocacy Guide for Artists and Cultural Workers: https://www.instagram.com/p/CPFTBcHh37a/
Index of Cultural Institutions & Collectives Stance Towards The Current Palestinian Liberation Movement: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZojSsSn8EnCyU9Knjb8JBYU4vkUKxpyGySq2WzDuNIY/edit?usp=sharing
Lamia Abukhadra is an artist currently based in Beirut and Minneapolis.
Her practice studies and confronts the irrational truths present within power structures; specifically settler colonial power structures, derived from imaginaries, ethoses, and ontological tools, and their extractive repercussions. Western colonial inventions such as urban planning, archiving, geography, and institutionalism have major effects on the perception of Palestine and Palestinians, Palestinian daily life, intimacy, historiography, cultural production etc. Using Palestine as a microcosm of urgency and resistance, she embeds speculative frameworks, intuited from practices present long before the settler colonial project, which bring to light intimate and historical connections, poetic occurrences, and generative possibilities of survival, mutation, and self-determination.
Lamia graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BFA in interdisciplinary studio art in 2018 and is a 2019-2020 Home Workspace Program Fellow at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut as well as a 2021-22 Jan Van Eyck Akademie Resident in Maastricht. Her work has been exhibited at Waiting Room, the Quarter Gallery, Soo Visual Arts Center, Yeah Maybe, and the Katherine E. Nash Gallery in Minneapolis and in Chicago at Unpacked Mobile Gallery. Lamia is a 2018-2019 Jerome Emerging Printmaking Resident at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, a 2019 resident at ACRE and the University of Michigan's Daring Dances initiative, and a recipient of a 2017 Soap Factory Rethinking Public Spaces grant.