For the better part of the past two years, we have read study over study detailing the manifold forms of violence inflicted on the population of this tiny strip of land – maybe to compensate for the screaming silence on or relativization of these horrors by so many colleagues and institutions. 

Yet most of these readings only reiterate to what we already know. We know the casualty counts, the satellite images, the story of Hind Rajab. We all know them and what they are symptoms of. At least, those of us who want to know. 

There is an exhaustion that is not only emotional but epistemic: the sense that Gaza’s archive of horrors has become so heavy, so routinised, that it no longer clarifies anything. It merely accumulates. And in that accumulation, the place and its people risk dissolving into function – into a screen for moral and political performances and a symbol for the erosion of rights-based global order that, let’s be honest, never truly served those now paying its highest price.

Abdalhadi Alijla’s Fearful in Gaza does not accept this economy. It does not offer Gaza as piecemeal material for a political lesson. It refuses the familiar rhetorical contract in which the reader is permitted to feel only if the text supplies the requisite volume of shock, and in which the writer is expected to translate lived reality into the idiom of an international audience. 

I finished Fearful in Gaza with the distinct feeling one sometimes has after reading a work that is neither “extraordinary” nor “representative”, and yet more unsettling than either category. In fact, the book stays with me to date precisely because it does not contain something shocking in the way the world expects writing on Gaza to shock. Instead, it trusts in being taken seriously in its own, very quiet way. 

Alijla insists, with remarkable discipline, in the irreducible seriousness of the ordinary. He writes about growing up in Gaza with an honesty that is strikingly frank and unsparing. “Ungeschönt” (unvarnished?) we say in Germany, where we seem to have a precise word for everything but for the brutal Israel occupation and the genocidal violence deployed in Gaza. 

Contrasting with the semantic acrobatics of German officials or media in trying to avoid certain terminologies, Fearful in Gaza comes with a sobering clarity. In fact, its language is almost plain and precisely for that reason it is deeply affecting. Everyday routines, small pleasures, and moments of intimacy and care are described with the same clarity and in the same breath as moments of shame, humiliation, and the slow sedimentation of fear into the biographies of every protagonist of the book. 

But most importantly they are presented without moral staging for a specific audience. Unlike so many recent publications, Gaza appears here not as a metaphor or a case study, but as a real place of home, with all the contradictions that implies.

Two Voices, One Childhood, No Setting

Formally, the book is written in two voices: “The Son” and “The Mother.” While the son, Ayk, carries the main line, his mother interrupts, mirrors, adds weight, and often presses down on the same memory from another angle. What results from this structure is a family memoir that does not seek harmony but remains fragmentary dissonant. 

The son’s narrative registers the world through the eyes of a child and without full comprehension, the mother’s narrative registers the same world as a horizon of responsibility and vigilance. However, the mother’s interventions do not function as explanatory commentary. Alijla does a great job portraying the mother as an authority in her own right, with her exhaustion, anger, tenderness, and practical intelligence. Through her testimony, he makes visible the labor of keeping a child alive in Gaza, without ever romanticizing or lionizing this task.

Violence enters into this relationship of mother and son not as a spectacular event that can be easily morally consumed, but as a persistent atmospheric condition that reorganizes the child’s and the mother’s cognitive and emotional architectures. 

As a pressure that seeps into the logic of childhood and quietly deforms it. There is the children’s fascination with military jeeps, and their instinct to domesticate them by giving them animal names, as if naming could tame the terror. The gesture is, on the surface, playful, a small act of imagination. But it is also a way how a child makes fear manageable by giving it a known shape. 

Effectively it is also a technique of survival in a context of constant uncertainty: In one moment, school is school. In the next, it is no longer just school – when the teacher distributes pieces of onion because its smell helps against tear gas or when children are marched across the schoolyard at gunpoint and with their hands up. 

This scene that illustrates the carceral nature of a child’s life under occupation is described without theatrical punctuation, which is precisely why it becomes difficult to forget. One feels, reading it, the thinness of the wall that is supposed to separate childhood from coercion and harm, and how quickly that wall is pierced. In another passage, the mother describes waking her son at the first sound of military engines, because she is afraid his heart could stop during a nightly raid. 

There are passages that are even more difficult because they do not offer interpretive scaffolding. A scene of sexual violence against children is observed through the eyes of a six-year-old who cannot yet name what he sees but carries the fear from this incident for years, as if the body understood something that language could not yet organize. The description does not force emotion, though. Alijla refrains from converting the scene into a moral exhibit. He merely describes, and the description itself is what unsettles.

Home, Not Symbol

The comparison to other recent books produced under conditions of war and siege is unavoidable, not because they are the same, but because they share an ethic of focusing on the ordinary. That is what makes Fearful in Gaza feel closer, in spirit, to books like Tijan Sila’s Radio Sarajevo or Tony Doherty’s This Man’s Wee Boy than to much of what is marketed as “Middle East” conflict literature. 

This kinship that has less to do with geography than with scale. Sila’s Sarajevo is not presented as a grand theatre for questions of belonging amid ethnic conflict. It is a toilet where the family sleeps, crude jokes, and the brittle bonds of boyhood. Likewise, Doherty’s Derry at the onset of civil war in Northern Ireland is made intelligible by being rendered small and specific through the joys and tribulations of childhood and a son’s fragmentary recollections of his father, shot dead on Bloody Sunday. 

Alijla does something similar, but with his own temperature. Through his recollections of everyday kitchen situations, quarrels over schoolwork, neighbourhood routes, and the stubborn persistence of habits even when these habits become risky, he gives the domestic and the routine a dignity that public talk about Gaza rarely allows. That matters because so much writing and commentary in Europe and North America treats Gaza as a symbol first and as a lived world second. 

Since 7 October 2023, this symbolic reflex has only intensified. Gaza is increasingly made to carry debates that are, in practice, not about Gaza at all, and more about the moral self-positioning of distant audiences: about legitimacy, about the right vocabulary, about whose grief is permissible and what forms of violence are justifiable. 

In Germany, where public debate has largely concentrated on a self-referential struggle over the country’s historic responsibility, this dynamic has been particularly stark, with the effect that Palestinians appear, at best, as a footnote to someone else’s ethical drama. In this climate, Gaza functions like a floating signifier, a symbolic container filled with meaning ascriptions that harden moral frontiers, prevent empathy, and criminalise solidarity, policing what can be said and who is cast as decent or dangerous. 

Alijla’s refusal to write Gaza as allegory matters here. By returning again and again to the small things, to the mother’s vigilance, to the child’s strategies of coping, to routines disrupted and reassembled, Fearful in Gaza withdraws Gaza from the role of rhetorical object and gives it back its status as a place where people live, remember, disagree, and endure. 

Gaza is presented as home in the literal sense, that is, a place where your life happens, where you learn tenderness and cruelty in the same day, where you absorb contradictions because you have no choice. In the end, this is how the book becomes political: It trusts the reader to feel the humanness of its protagonists without being pushed to do so. 

This is, for me, the central reminder the book carries: Sometimes the most powerful political writing is precisely that which simply tells what it is like, without the implicit bargain that the reader will only pay attention if suffering is presented at maximum volume.

Exile as Aftersound

The frame of the book is also a story of later, of what comes after the spectacle. Towards the end of the book, Alijla describes his cumbersome relocation Sweden, where he lives and writes today. From this exile, he was forced to witness from afar Israel’s destruction of the very home he remembers so affectionately and the death of the people who populate his memories: Of the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood, located East of the so-called “Yellow Line” drawn by Israel straight across the Gaza Strip, where nothing but rubble remains. Abdalhadi’s mother, whose voice structures the book and anchors many of its most intimate passages, was killed in an Israeli drone strike in May 2025. 

Against this backdrop, Fearful in Gaza has become something it never meant to be: A record of places and voices that have been violently disappeared. The book’s closing movement thus performs a subtle shift. What started as memory becomes preservation. In this sense, the memoir holds a powerful truth. Namely that neither geographical nor temporal distance, neither occupation nor physical destruction can erase what we hold dear. They only alter the modalities. 

Sleeplessness, sensory echoes, the sea as an unexpected trigger may puncture the author’s everyday life in exile. But these punctuations are not just reverberations of trauma. They testify to the continued presence of a world that did not end simply because the narrator left it. In Fearful in Gaza, the mother’s voice offers the vocabulary of Ghourba, longing and estrangement, and with that the sense that “after” is not a clean temporal category but a different kind of living with the same thing.

When I closed the book, I did not feel better informed. Nor did I feel morally validated in my political position. Instead, there was a quieter recognition, bordering on embarrassment, of how often we mistake information for understanding. And so the introductory question returns, but changed slightly in tone: Why do I still read books like this?

Because every now and then a book refuses the roles assigned to it and, by doing so, leaves an even deeper mark.

The post Gaza, Not a Metaphor: Childhood, Memory, and the Refusal of Spectacle appeared first on Untold.

Apart from the aggression itself, the Italian Army was directly responsible for reprisals, execution of hostages and internment in concentration camps of approximately 100,000 civilians in the regions where it garrisoned, namely Dalmatia and parts of the Dalmatian hinterland, the province of Ljubljana, and Montenegro. The authors of the appeal suggested that the Italian President Sergio Mattarella would pay an official visit to one of the concentration camps created by the Royal Army established in July 1942 on the Croatian island of Raab, as a significant act of repentance. 

Hosting a total of 10,000 inmates over the span of 15 months – mostly partisans and their relatives arrested during counterinsurgency operations–living conditions in the camp lead to the death of 1,400 people, including many children.

Known only as a holiday destination to the Italian public opinion, Raab – Arbe in Italian – is the site of a memorial, erected in 1953 by the Yugoslav government, and of an annual commemoration. 

Yet, no Italian state representative has ever paid an official visit to it and no Italian politician has ever taken part in the annual celebrations. A ‘non-site of memory’ for the Italians, Raab is therefore the most glaring manifestation of Italy’s unwillingness to come to terms with its own past and to construct a shared memory with the former victims of Fascism’s expansionism. 

No wonder, then, that the scholars’ appeal was utterly ignored by the Italian authorities.

Italy’s refusal to come to terms with its wars of aggression

The wars waged by Benito Mussolini’s regime as part of the Axis drive to reshape the world order have long been relegated into oblivion. While in the immediate post-war years the Allied powers were inclined to let the countries invaded by Mussolini prosecute Italians guilty of war crimes, the Cold War led them to reverse their attitude. Italy was part of the capitalist bloc and shedding a veil on its past was instrumental to its rapid integration into the anti-communist camp. 

Some of the formerly occupied countries followed a quite similar strategy. In 1944, for example, Greece, one of the victims of Italy’s aggression, saw the establishment of an anti-communist regime, engaged in a civil war against the Communist Party. While at the end of the war its political leadership had sought the extradition of many Italian war criminals to be prosecuted in Greece, it became now eager to receive support from the anti-Communist camp. Therefore, it promptly shelved the war crimes issue to avoid tarnishing good relations with Italy. With the Tito-Stalin split of 1948 and Yugoslavia’s rapprochement with the West, the latter refrained from requesting the prosecution of Italian war criminals.

Furthermore, Italy’s memory focused largely on the resistance movement against the Germans that had developed after the armistice with the Allies in 1943. The image of a people collectively engaged in the fight against fascism overshadowed the past, even if some of those very people had fought before on different fronts to realize Fascism’s imperialist dreams. 

Not unlike other countries in Europe, the Italian public opinion rooted its memory of the war in the stereotype of the ‘bad German’, an easy escape from the responsibilities of many Italians who willingly partook in the Nazi endeavour to reshape the world order and in the extermination of the Jews, Roma and Sinti people, and other groups deemed undesirable.

The swift demise of Italy’s colonial empire, including present-day Libya, Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia, all lost during WWII, contributed to obliterating that part of the country’s past as well. Italy’s bloody counterinsurgency in Libya, started shortly before Mussolini’s rise to power (1922) but reaching massive dimensions in 1930-32, remained unknown to the wider public for decades and has yet to be integrated into the collective memory of the Italians.

The aggression against Ethiopia in 1935, a key step in the formation of the Axis alliance, opened up Italy’s decade of war. While poison gas and bombing of civilians to lower their morale were used to crush the enemy during the war in 1935-36, operations to repress resistance to Italy’s rule were compounded by brutal violence against civilians in the following years.

Since 2012 a mausoleum to Marshall Rodolfo Graziani, directly responsible for many of the massacres perpetrated in the colonies and considered a war criminal by many post-colonial states, stands on his grave in Affile, near Grosseto. Erected with public money, Graziani’s monument is a shameless testimony to Italy’s difficult relationship with its past.

A late scholarship

Memory and scholarship are often non-communicating vessels, yet, in the immediate post-war years, Italian historians actively cooperated in silencing this subject. While an international scholarly output on Italian colonialism started to appear, Italian scholars shunned the topic of Italy’s colonialism until the 1960s, when Angelo Del Boca, not an academic scholar but a journalist-turned-historian, began to publish the first monograph on the Italo-Ethiopian war. 

To no surprise, his studies were met with strong resistance from part of the Italian public opinion and several historians. A partisan during the war, in the 1960s, Del Boca was attacked by the former Minister of the Colonies, Alessandro Lessona and by several associations of African veterans. Later, in the 1990s he conducted a debate with renowned journalist and historian Indro Montanelli, who denied Italy’s use of gas in the Ethiopian war.

Even more delayed was the formation of a body of scholarship on Italy’s occupations during WWII. Not until 2003 was a monograph encompassing all Italian occupied territories (Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania, France) published. Unsurprisingly, Davide Rodogno’s book was acclaimed by many as a pioneering and long awaited study and was later published in English  by the prestigious Cambridge University Press.

Del Boca and the myth of ‘Italians good people’

Italy’s public memory was even slower in acknowledging what the historians brought to light. A step forward towards wider popularization of the subject came with the publication of Del Boca’s book Italiani brava gente? Un mito duro a morire (Italians good people? A hard-to-die myth) in 2005. 

It appeared in the heat of controversies over Fascism – two years earlier Silvio Berlusconi had publicly affirmed that Mussolini had never killed anybody and his internment camps were just “holiday resorts” – the book took the myth of the ‘good Italian’ head-on, describing episodes of violence committed by the Italians, between unification in 1861 and the Second World War. 

The book did not aim at constructing a counter-stereotype to the self-portrayal of the Italians as good-natured people, incapable of perpetrating violence, with that of the ‘bad Italian’. Rather, as Del Boca affirmed in the short introduction, his concern was to show that the Italians acted in the “most brutal manner” just as other people did in “analogous situations”. The book is now available in English, published by the Indian Seagull Books with the title As Cruel As Anyone Else: Italians, Colonies and Empire, a wise choice encapsulating Del Boca’s main argument.  

Spanning eight decades, the narration highlights episodes of mass violence of very different nature. It starts with a description of the bloody war fought by the Italian Army in Southern Italy against the brigandage, armed bands of former soldiers of the dissolved Kingdom of the Two Sicilies Army and individuals opposing the unification of 1861. Del Boca’s narration moves then to the colonial context, portraying internment in Eritrea in the 1890s. He focused in particular  on the camp of Nocra, an island 55 km from Massawa that hosted up to 1,000 inmates in 1892. As in Raab during WWII, the camp, which remained in place from 1887 to 1941, hosted opponents of Italian rule in unbearable conditions. 

In 1900, Italy took part in the repression of the Boxer rebellion in China using extreme violence to quell the Chinese anti-colonial uprising, acting ‘as cruel as­’ the other colonial powers. Del Boca then describes the ferocious reprisals conducted by the Italian army in Libya in 1911 in response to the massacre by the Ottoman forces of Italian soldiers who had surrendered in Sciara Sciat. 

The following chapter contains a fierce denunciation of General Luigi Cadorna’s stubborn and irresponsible conduct during the First World War, which led to the death of thousands of soldiers in useless attacks against the Austro-Hungarian forces. Del Boca’s father, who served as a soldier under Cadorna, used to tell his son war episodes that always ended with fierce accusations of the General: “our real enemy”.

With Fascisms’ rise to power, Del Boca’s account becomes more focused on colonial violence. Between 1922 and 1932 Libya became the theatre of a fierce campaign of repression against the local resistance to Italian rule, with 100,000 civilians interned in camps. Developed only in recent years, a Libyan scholarship in English employs the category of genocide to describe those events, a perspective still absent in the Italian scholarship. 

Finally, the book dwells on the Italian war in Ethiopia, with a chapter dedicated to the massacre of the monks of the Ethiopian-Orthodox monastery of Debra Libanos in May 1937 and to the repressions in Slovenia, during the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941-43.

An editorial success, Angelo Del Boca’s book is more an account that urges critical reflection among the wider public, than a systematic study. Apart from the main theme of the book, a number of red threads run across it. For example, Del Boca often highlights the incongruity between Italy’s aspiration to a status of great power and the limited means to attain it. He harshly lambasts Italy’s political leadership for its ambitious but unrealistic plans, for which, like in the First World War, the usual ‘rank and file’ paid the price. 

Inevitably doomed to failure, this drive towards a status of a world power was paved with instances of extreme violence against those who did not abide by Italy’s rule. Repression of opponents was at the core of Italy’s nation building, both inside the country and in its expansionist endeavour. 

Thus, having read the book, one is tempted to conclude that while being just another instance of how colonialism was an inherently violent phenomenon, Italy’s relation to violence is indeed peculiar, being a belated nation and a belated colonial power, infused by a sense of having to catch up with the great powers. Italy’s nation building and its imperialist project was suffused with the idea that the ‘essence’ of the Italian character needed to be improved to fit the myth of the ‘Great Italy’, to use Emilio Gentile’s expression. At the very core of Fascism’s palingenetic ideology was the idea of creating a ‘new man’ out of the weakling Italian, turning him into a soldier forged in steel.

Italy’s ‘patriotic’ history

While there is by now a consistent body of scholarship on this topic, its reception by the wider public opinion seems still a long way off, the more so as the politicization of the debate around Italy’s past often stands in the way of critical reflection. 

Since 2004, Italy’s memory of the Second World War centres on the so-called ‘Day of Remembrance’, namely the National Memorial Day of the Exiles and Foibe. This date commemorates the Italian victims of Yugoslav partisans’ reprisals at the end of WWII and the exodus of the Italian communities living in Istria and Dalmatia after the war. 

As argued by many critics, the institutionalization of this memorial day contributes to obscuring Italy’s responsibilities in creating those very conditions that led to the expulsion of the Italians. 

This should obviously not mean to reduce the responsibility of those specific killings to a mere consequence of a previous injustice. Yet, it seems evident that the choice of day, that closely recalls the Holocaust Remembrance Day, as well as the frequent use of a vocabulary drawn from the Holocaust, feed into a representation of Italy’s experience in the Second World War as a mere martyrology. 

This is confirmed by the memory politics conducted by the present government of Giorgia Meloni and by many local administrations governed by the political right, and the habit of intimidating those historians who offer a more nuanced view. 

Far-right politician Maurizio Gasparri has recently gone so far as to threaten to bring to court historian Eric Gobetti, the author of a successful book about the Foibe massacres, for his ‘denialist views’. 

With the electoral success of Giorgia Meloni, political conditions in Italy seem as bad as ever for this to change. Indeed, not unlike other countries and, where a new wave of ‘patriotic histories’ accompany the rise to power of the far-right, Italy,  ‘as anyone else’, is decidedly moving towards the adoption of a memory culture pivoted on self-victimization. 

The post As Cruel as Anyone Else: How Italy Evades its Colonial Atrocities appeared first on Untold.

Frau Hoffmann was a tall woman. Short grey curls, bags puffy under her eyes – the nights grew shorter with age. She had a long, lined face and a slightly stooped back, though not because of the pressures of school routine or the attendant stress. Most of the students were small, arrayed before her on their chairs. It was not her habit to talk down to them. Aras must have thanked her a hundred times, and she had asked him to call her by her first name. But it was too soon, and in Aras’s head she was still his German teacher, someone owed respect. ‘Of course, I’m happy to!’ Frau Hoffmann said.

His mother stood next to them, clutching a folder stuffed with papers. Frau Hoffmann turned to Nadia: ‘I don’t know if Aras mentioned this to you, but I’ve actually been to Aleppo. I went on holiday there with my family. A remarkably beautiful city, a gorgeous city.’ Nadia inclined her head and asked, ‘Did you visit the castle?’
‘Citadel,’ corrected Aras.
‘Yes, of course. I heard it was destroyed.’
‘Just the back of it,’ Aras said.
‘Just the back of it,’ Nadia nodded.

As a boy, Aras used to go in and get lost there, the citadel, always on the hunt for a new stage. Once, with one of his cousins, he had gone looking for the hill where Abraham was said to have milked a cow – the reason why the city where they lived was called Halab: white, like the milk. Getting lost in the citadel was a kind of ritual. Inside, time was blurred. There was always something new to find. Once, with another cousin, he discovered the tomb of Salah al-Din’s third son. Another time they clambered down into the dungeons, where people had once poured acid. Their search led them eventually to the throne room, one of two spaces preserved in their original condition, although nobody really believed the interiors were original. Still, the patterns, the geometry – Aras had sat down and tried to count the squares, the triangles, the sequences, but they seemed to never end. The citadel was a vast labyrinth, an adventure playground. In it he would never go astray. Other visitors, used to seeing children without parents, would drop him off at the main entrance, where he would wait with the guards, picturing the battles in which the citadel had never been taken – the moat was simply too deep – until at last his family emerged and he re-joined them. Back then they didn’t know the citadel’s afflictions would persist, or that the increasing damage to the city would come to seem like an inverse prediction of the past, when Aleppo’s nickname al-Shaba’ – the white mingled with the black – had once referred to marble. Now, it meant ash and rubble.

The ground offered its solid, uneven foundation to other people who stood nearby, their eyes glued to wristwatches, to phones. Nervous glances. Cigarettes appeared in the corners of several mouths, while other people chatted with their companions. Only a very few had come alone, and those were the ones who looked around. It would take nerves of steel to be here by yourself, thought Aras, smiling at them. They hadn’t rolled out the appointments system yet, when phones would put each person in a queue, sorted alphabetically.

The doors opened. Anybody standing directly in front of them, the metal doors, was swallowed up. If you wanted to be first through the mill you were first to arrive, because the mill ground slowly. Frau Hoffmann, Aras and Nadia passed through the entryway. Their pace was slow, a pace not rushed, not hasty, not reluctant, not without purpose, but with confidence low. The floor reflected back their steps, tiled; a reception desk was directly opposite the entrance. A corridor on the right led to the Citizens’ Registration Office. Their path took them left, up the stairs. The silicone on the banister was red, worn. The door now facing them was mint green, silver-handled, ring-scuffed. Five people were gathered around it. No obvious order. Aras memorised the faces, hoping that they – and perhaps the door as well – would memorise his own, so that when the sixth face came they’d know whose turn it was.

The last time Aras had taken leave of the place was four years earlier, and he’d believed it really was the last time. A fond farewell. Not that he was a credulous person. But when, verdict by verdict, more dead were added to the chants each Friday; when cities were cut off from electricity, water and all forms of communication, when there followed more and more arrests, more and more disappearances; when the dictator, who described his own people as too ill-educated for reforms, decided to smother the revolution beneath a sky thick with hails of bullets – Assad or we’ll burn the country to the ground, said the walls, Assad for all eternity, they said and said again; when soldiers who didn’t want to fire on their brothers and sisters, on their girlfriends, neighbours and relatives, joined the Free Syrian Army; while Nadia alternately sat in front of the computer screen or stood out on the street, outside embassies, local government buildings or the Reichstag, hoping to hear the one piece of news that would end it all; Aras had realised then that it wouldn’t be long before he saw this building once again, and now, after two years, he had. Goodbyes aren’t forever.

So while the European Union debated on that very day, a day like today, whether to supply the Syrian rebels with weapons – Germany didn’t think it was a good idea, because it would just mean the opposing side would arm themselves still further – the banister opposite the mint-coloured door provided Aras with some small support. The tiles at his feet worried him. They captured his attention. Black, cracked in certain places, split. Somebody had fought against their power, perhaps, tried furiously to bring the place down with their feet, over and over, others following, a pathetic attempt. Were the cracks evidence that the police had made a pact with the floor, offering it different faces, and the floor, in return, had exercised the harshness of state power? Aras’s vision went red.

Nadia and Frau Hoffmann were chatting beside him.
‘Can you translate?’ his mother asked.
‘A man was on trial, and the three judges sentenced him to death,’ Aras translated. ‘He was offered a last wish, as is often the case. Normally, most people ask to see their mother again, or they ask for food, that sort of thing. But this man thought he was clever, so he asked to learn German.’ Nadia was building up towards the punchline. ‘The first judge said, “No, we can’t grant that wish.” The second judge agreed: “It would take far too long. We’ll never get round to carrying out the sentence.”’ Realising he knew the joke already, Aras braced himself for Frau Hoffmann’s reaction. ‘The third judge said, “We should grant him his wish. He’ll carry out the sentence himself.”’ The others by the door, whom Aras had almost forgotten were there, joined in with Frau Hoffmann’s laughter. ‘I’ll have to tell my students that one,’ she chuckled. ‘Priceless.’

[…]

There Were Days (original German title, “Da waren Tage”) is Luna Ali’s debut novel, written and published in German by S. Fischer in 2024. 

Aras, the protagonist, observes the Syrian revolution from a distance. Born in Aleppo but raised in Germany, he was in his first semester of law school in 2011 when the revolution began. As violence in Syria escalates, the conflict increasingly permeates his life in Germany. From lecture halls to immigration offices, during an internship in Jordan, or as a guest on a political talk show, Aras relives the anniversary of the revolution each year as a merging of reality and imagination. Thus, the novel There Were Days asks how the desire for freedom—and the repression of that desire—shapes the life, actions, and language of the protagonist in the diaspora. 

The excerpt is from the third chapter. It addresses the most direct impact of the Syrian revolution’s repression on Aras: his family’s desire to escape the war. The chapter is set in March 15th, 2013, at the Foreigners’ Office (Ausländerbehörde), where Aras, his mother Nadia, and his former German teacher attempt to submit a Verpflichtungserklärung (declaration of commitment) to secure family reunification—the only safe passage between Syria and Germany at the time. To achieve this, they depend on Frau Hoffmann, whose income qualifies her to provide a guarantee (Bürgschaft). The chapter explores the dehumanizing bureaucracy of the Foreigners’ Office, which reduces individuals to subordinates, while also unravelling the intricate web of politics, (post-)colonialism, and kinship, ultimately fostering solidarity.

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The post 2013 – Getting the process going appeared first on Untold.

It is fitting then that Peter Wollen’s Friendship’s Death (1987), the one film that Swinton chose from her extensive filmography to be shown at Berlinale this year – a film centered on the very idea of boycott’s political efficacy and its ethical, humanistic urgency – was screened in the film program of On Strike Berlin, an alternative programme running parallel to Berlinale in various venues across the city. 

Indeed,the program was organized collectively by On Strike: screenings & talks striking Berlinale to answer a call by Strike Germany and Film Workers for Palestine to boycott this year’s Berlin Film Festival. On Strike cites numerous reasons on its website for joining the boycott. Among them the German state’s foreign policies pertaining to Israel’s assault on Gaza, German politicians’ backlash against expressions of solidarity with Palestine, and the events that took place at the 2024 Berlinale, including the recriminations in Germany against the Israeli documentary filmmaker Yuval Abraham and the Palestinian filmmaker and activist Basel Adra, the co-creators (alongside Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor) of the searing documentary No Other Land (2023), documenting the displacement and destruction of Palestinian homes by the Israeli army in Masafer Yatta, in the occupied West Bank. 

The film won Berlinale’s Best Documentary award and subsequently the Best Documentary award from the American Film Academy at the Oscars, yet faces censorship and reprisals as it screens globally. 

To counter this climate of silencing voices speaking against the decimation of the Gazan population, the illegality of forced displacements, and against Israel’s assaults, as well as to create a richer climate of discussion about the ongoing occupation of Palestine, the screening of Friendship’s Death featured special guests: British film scholar Nicolas Helm-Grovas (presently writing a book titled Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Towards Counter-Cinema) and Palestinian editor and educator Hazem Jamjoum, moderated by filmmaker Philip Rizk, to contextualize the film’s socio-political and historical context, and its present relevance.

The emergence of a political consciousness

Wollen’s Friendship’s Death tells the story of an extraterrestrial android called Friendship, sent to Earth on a peace mission. Friendship originally is meant to address the United Nations in New York, hoping to persuade humans to abandon their bellicose ways and their annihilation of all life forms. Much of Friendship’s journey to Earth is enclosed within the larger philosophical consideration of her quest for autonomy: A sophisticated robot – a futuristic AI – uploaded with advanced data and facts about Earth by her extraterrestrial creators, she nevertheless originally lacks the sense of  self-determination. Not cognizant of having a choice to decide her own fate, she will only come to it slowly. 

This aspect of self-determination and autonomy, mingled with Friendship’s undying fascination with and compassion for humanity, serves as the basis for Wollen’s launch into historical and political debates running throughout the film. In this sense, Wollen’s film is particularly urgent today, because its underlying theme is the emergence of a political consciousness, and the contrast between passivity and commitment, with Friendship’s android mind serving as a cognitive tabula rasa, in which this consciousness emerges.

The film’s historical backdrop is “Black September” of 1970; the action takes place in a hotel in Amman, Jordan, where Friendship lands, after her spaceship crashes mid-flight. Friendship loses her documents, suddenly becoming a non-entity: As an android, she’s trapped in the human shell, essentially undocumented, and stateless – a fact that immediately aligns her with all the Earth’s political outcasts, as all people denied their dignity, and their civic and political rights. This position gradually pushes Friendship from her original impartiality and wish to complete her mission to her alignment with the oppressed and the dispossessed; a stance that leads her to abandon her diplomatic mission and join the Palestinian cause.

Questions of solidarity 

Friendship has only one close contact at the hotel: Sullivan, a British journalist who is covering the Middle East conflict, and is sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle. Friendship and Sullivan are stranded at the hotel, in the midst of Jordan’s civil war. This aspect of the film, in particular, gained much from the Q & A discussion, during which speakers framed it within international solidarity and the 1960s’ revolutionary movements. 

Solidarity is indeed a motif running through the entire film. There are the limits of Sullivan’s solidarity, in the sense that his job is to report on the conflict, yet he doesn’t see the possibility of an immediate positive outcome, and, by the end of his stay sounds defeatist (Wollen’s critique of Sullivan aligns with the criticism that Adra makes in No Other Land of journalists expecting immediate resolution to a conflict spanning decades). 

There is the clear theme of Friendship’s solidarity with humanity – her concern about its self-destructiveness, which makes her empathize with both the Palestinian and Israeli victims; an empathy which doesn’t preclude her recognizing that her peacemaking mission is bound to fail; she is more likely to be captured, and used by the US industrial complex to manufacture weapons of destruction, than she is to convince militaristic societies to abandon their quest for power. In this sense, while Friendship’s boycott of her mission is undershot by pessimism similar to Sullivan’s, it is uniquely linked to her acknowledging that she isn’t an innocent bystander; as a robot, she is part of the techno-military complex that perpetuates wars. Wollen clearly also means to say that we are all implicated in the foreign policies and territorial grabs of our governments.

The equally pertinent question of solidarity on which Wollen touches, explained in detail by Hazem Jamjoum during the film’s Q & A, lies with the Middle East: Friendship’s Death records a critical moment in Middle East history, when, after Jordan hosted Palestinians in the wake of the Arab defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War against Israel, the idea of Pan-Arab solidarity that had mobilized the region in the early ‘60s, giving rise to the idea that the Arab countries would liberate Palestine, comes to an end, as Jordan attacks Palestinian resistance fighters: “A crushing moment for the notion of the Arab revolution.” 

Jamjoum also stressed in the Q & A that the student movements aligned with Palestinians, some formed into militant factions, were anti-authoritarian and anti-monarchist, which put them at odds with regressive Arab regimes. One might add that, in Europe, solidarity with Palestine was inscribed in an anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, anticapitalist ideal, which also died in the 1970s.

Friendship’s answer to this collapse of solidarity is manifold. When questioned about her position on the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacking planes, she commiserates with both the fear and suffering of the kidnapped, and the anger and desperation of the hijackers. 

In a crucial conversation with Sullivan, Friendship relates how she ventured outside the hotel, to Jerash, a city in the North of Jordan, and was picked up and interrogated by the Jordanian Army Patrol, alongside her PLO escort. Friendship repeatedly confides her helplessness trying to ensure her escort’s safety; she fails as they are separated – a traumatic episode, which, not incidentally, coincides with Friendship identifying the hotel in Amman as “home” for the first time. 

Similarly, in No Other Land, Abraham tries to safeguard Adra and others as the Israeli army bulldozes Palestinian homes, yet Adra’s cousin dies of a bullet wound after being shot by an Israeli soldier. Like Abraham’s, Friendship’s political consciousness evolves out of a profound sense of helplessness, and a growing awareness that the efficacy of her civilian actions is limited. 

Can cinema forge a vision of solidarity, dignity and justice?

Both Sullivan and Friendship face choices with political implications: Sullivan returns to England; Friendship stays in Amman. Wollen shows her wearing a militant uniform, and in the voiceover, she is heard reading a note, hidden in her pocket, to her future killer. The film ends with Sullivan reminiscing about Friendship years later, in London, trying to watch a film she left behind, finally decoded with a more advanced technology. Yet Friendship’s file is an abstract puzzle of signs, in a way suggesting that humans still lack the wisdom to receive her message. 

Lacking a coda, what remains of Friendship’s legacy is her choice to bear witness and her sacrifice – Wollen gives Friendship the most searing lines in the film, in which she expresses her desire for her existence to have meaning, looping back to the film’s ethical resonance. Friendship chooses to resist, but it is Sullivan who tells her tale, and his daughter who decodes Friendship’s film. In the end, Wollen’s film expresses a hope that cinema can forge a vision of solidarity, dignity and justice; or, to quote Swinton’s Berlinale speech, to be a vehicle for inclusion, making us consider “what sovereignty means to humans” – one of the most pressing questions of our time.

The post Solidarity, revolution and an android in Amman: A review of Friendship’s Death appeared first on Untold.

When war ends, loss takes form. News headlines would focus on numbers of victims, the missing, the wreckage of streets and homes, the cost of rebuilding. But these figures, though necessary, would fail to capture the full shape of loss. Beyond the physical destruction, war unravels social norms, breaks relationships and shatters the inner worlds of the survivors. Loss becomes more than just absence, it transforms into a quiet, pervasive defeat that is felt in the rubble outside and the emptiness within. 

When war ends, loss settles in. In the face of tragedy, the human mind seeks meaning through stories, symbols and shared experiences. When everything else is stripped away, literature, art and culture become tools through which we attempt to understand what was lost, what remains, and what might still be. Loss manifests itself in many forms in art, each capturing a different facet of human experience. 

Horror, landscape, exile, trauma and shame are five themes that often emerge in the aftermath. These themes aren’t mutually exclusive, many artworks dealing with loss could fall into more than one category, reflecting the layered nature of this loss.

Horror

War is not only lived, it imprints itself on landscapes, bodies and memories. After the Holocaust, Theodor Adorno questioned whether poetry could exist in the wake of such immense suffering. “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism,” he declared, confronting the magnitude of horror and the overwhelming responsibility it imposes on the artist. 

This agonising reflection lies at the heart of the survivors´ struggle, whether those who directly experienced the violence of war or those who witnessed its impact from a distance. Whether on the battlefield or through the cold glow of a screen, anyone who bears witness to such horrors, becomes, in some way or another, a survivor of it, and irreversibly shaped by its presence. 

Maisara Baroud’s “I’m Still Alive” series gives visual form to the horror that is war. His black-white illustrations, deeply rooted in his personal experience of living through the war in Gaza.

Baroud’s figures, which are often distorted, fragmented, and trapped in suffocating, liminal spaces, seem suspended on the threshold between life and death, numbness and raw terror. The horror he conveys in this disfigurement of both body and soul carries a haunting presence, probing the inaction that allowed the machinery of death to keep turning, keep devouring lives like shattered glass.

 

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Bayan Abu Nahla’s “War Portraits” reflect a similarly unsettling reality, focusing on how the horror of war imprints itself onto the body. In her portraits, faces are etched with grief, their eyes heavy with agony. “Our eyes are unlike any others,” she writes in an instagram post, “They are open windows to horror.” 

For Abu Nahla, these faces don’t only depict suffering, they embody it. They speak of pure horror: the death of loved ones, the erasure of everything once held dear, and the violence that strips away the soul’s layers, exposing raw, unfiltered pain. 

Reflecting on her work, Abu Nahla explains: “My art is melancholic, sorrowful, and pointed. It takes on the function of art in catharsis by expressing the despondency planted within us by a cruel life.” 

 

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Landscape 

War doesn’t just claim lives, it transforms the land itself, leaving scars that persist long after the violence subsides. The landscape becomes a testament to destruction, a witness to the remnants of countless lives once lived. 

Tammam Azzam explores this theme in “The Syrian Museum” (2013) where he overlays Syria’s war-torn landscapes with iconic artworks from the history of Western art. He superimposed Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss against a backdrop of bombed-out buildings, starkly mixing love and tenderness with ugliness of ruin. 

 

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The cruel irony in Azzam’s use of masterpieces by Da Vinci, Matisse and others is a stark reminder that the same humanity capable of creating sublime art is also capable of unimaginable destruction.

Another powerful reflection on the lingering scars of war is “Monument to the Living” (2001-8), a Marwan Rechmaoui’s miniature replica of Beirut’s infamous Murr Tower. Once a sniper post, a prison and arms depot during Lebanon’s Civil War, the unfinished thirty-four-story office building remains standing, a skeleton monument to a violent past. 

Deemed structurally unfit for rehabilitation, and too costly to demolish, the tower serves as an “unadorned testament, both to the arbitrary tyranny of the war, and to the inanity of the social, sectarian, and urban constituencies engendered by the failing post-war order.”  

In 2022, an architect reimagined this same tower as a cemetery turning “Murr” into “La Mort” (برج المُر/برج الموت,), reclaiming a site of violence and transforming it into a final resting place for the dead, highlighting once again the complicated set of interactions between war, death and memory in modern urban spaces. 

In these works, landscapes are not only spaces but also living records of the legacy of war. The land in these works is hardly a neutral backdrop but an active participant in post-war narratives. It bears the weight of destruction, the scars of trauma in its ruins, in its walls and in the people who inhabit them. 

Exile

The memories of war often endure in the body and heart long after the physical wounds have healed. Among the deepest of these wounds is the loss of home –whether forced or chosen, the act of leaving one’s place of origin is such a haunting experience for survivors. Mona Hatoum’s “Suspended” (2011) captures this ever-present theme of loss.

Mona Hatoum’s installations also explore gender, race & politics, working in a variety of media including scaled-up household objects, transforming them into foreign, threatening, dangerous things. pic.twitter.com/wPtjaUGsdy

— Bedford School Art (@Bedford_Arts) September 28, 2020

The installation features a room filled with wooden swings, each engraved with street maps of capital cities, hanging obliquely, moving even when untouched, mirroring the relentless dislocation of people, places and memories. The swings’ unsettling movement becomes a metaphor of the lives of those who have been displaced, always in motion, always longing for a home that has been uprooted, no longer exists or can never be reclaimed. 

This exploration of displacement links back to  Doris Salcedo’s “Shibboleth” (2007-8), where a giant crack splits the floor of London’s Tate Modern, symbolising the rupture caused by war and separation. The term “Shibboleth,” a word used to distinguish people who belong from those who do not, highlights the way in which invisible borders (be social, political or cultural) exile people from belonging. 

Like Hatoum’s swings, Salcedo’s crack represents more than a division of space; it becomes a symbol of the dislocation felt by those who have lost everything–their homes, their communities and their sense of self. 

For war survivors, life is forever divided into a before and an after, separated by an unbridgeable rift in both space and soul. For those displaced by war, the loss is of not only a home, but of a self that existed within. The rupture created by displacement, like Salcedo’s “Shibboleth” is a wound that remains visible, never fully healed, even when covered up – Tate Modern filled the crack, but a scarred floor remained. “This is a remarkable symbol of the possibility of healing through figurative and literal closure,” writes Dr. Doris Maria-Reina Bravo “however, the mark is also an obstacle to any attempts to erase the past.” The scar, like the trauma of displacement, cannot be erased, and true healing is only found in facing what’s been broken. 

Trauma

The trauma of war is loss manifested. It simmers beneath the surface, quietly but relentlessly, seeping deep into the survivors’ souls, altering how they navigate their lives and shaping everything from random life moments to the very essence of being. 

Dario Robleto’s work engages with the intersection of war and trauma. Often described as a “material poet”, Robleto’s creations explore how conflict reshapes the deepest parts of the human soul, as in his 2004 piece, “A Defeated Soldier Wishes to Walk His Daughter Down the Aisle.” 

The installation of a pair of worn military boots struggling through sand and rice, evokes the soldier’s post-war reality, where a man is physically and spiritually fractured. Here, the simple act of walking one’s daughter down the aisle is no longer an act of joy, but one that is weighed down by unspoken grief and a sense of brokenness. 

War distorts life, turning family, love, and celebrations into echoes of what might have been. The work lays bare the reality of trauma: the painful gap between who one was and who the war forced them to become. 

Survivors of war often grapple with a conflicting spectrum of emotions: the yearning to forget contrasts with the need to remember, personal grief merges with collective mourning, and the urgency to move forward battles against paralysing apathy. The weight of survival feels even heavier than the instinct to live, as the past continues to haunt the present. For many, survival itself, becomes too much to carry, leading them to tragically take their own lives. 

How does one go on when their world has been erased? How can a fractured identity be rebuilt when the markers of home no longer exist? 

Alfredo Jaar’s “The Eyes of Gutete Emerita” (1996) addresses these harrowing questions by focusing on the trauma borne out of witnessing unimaginable violence. Through a photographic installation centred on the eyes of Gutete Emerita, a woman who witnessed the brutal killing of her husband and two sons during the Rwandan genocide, Jaar forces viewers to see war through her eyes. 

Her gaze is haunting, filled with an unbearable knowledge that cannot be unlearned. In her eyes, the enormity of loss is transformed into something deeply intimate yet universally devastating. Jaar’s work acknowledges that trauma is inescapable, a weight carried by those who survive, shaping how they move through a world that they no longer recognise. 

Shame 

Another aspect of war that is represented through art is the unbearable truth of the actions people are forced to take to survive. Toni Morrisson captures this with devastating beauty in her novel “Beloved,” telling the story of Sethe, a woman tormented by the memory of the daughter she killed to save her from slavery. “It was not a story worth telling” says Sethe, reflecting on the deep shame tied to the most painful choices that can consume one’s soul. 

Actions made to preserve life can haunt survivors forever, leaving a stain on their souls that time may never fully erase. Shame, in this context, is not only personal, it’s collective, shaping how societies confront, or fail to confront, their own pasts, and the weight of their own actions or inaction.

But there also is another kind of shame: the shame of witnessing, the shame of being spared, the shame of being safe, of holding onto loved ones, of watching horror unfold, powerless to stop it. Poet Hala Alyan gives voice to this unsettling shame, writing: “I always sign out of my Instagram. I watch and watch. Then I log off. At the core of this is the shame. The shame of the here. The shame of all that the here offers: spare water, radiators, antibiotics, the ability to log off.” 

Here, shame is not tied to action, but to inaction, to survival itself. It is the shame of distance, of being both here and there, free yet somehow trapped. This is why war extends beyond the battlefield, haunting even those who are not directly in its path. 

In Half-Life in Exile, Alyan captures this torment, the compulsion to bear witness, to transform the wreckage of grief into something tangible:
“Is it compulsive to watch videos?
Is it compulsive to memorize names?
Rafif and Ammar and Mahmoud.”

Later in the poem, she confronts the unbearable question: “Was the grief worth the poem?”  It is the guilt of turning devastation into art, of creating something from what should have never been lost, should have never been forgotten.

 

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Christian Boltanski’s “The Reserve of Dead Swiss” (1990) grapples with the collective shame tied to the gradual erasure of the dead from memory. The installation features metal boxes resembling old storage containers containing a photograph of a man or woman, collected by the artist from Swiss obituaries. Illuminated by desk lamps, the repetitive, almost identical structures highlight how the passage of time erases the traces of those who once lived, reflecting a gradual disintegration of memory, and at times, a sense of shame for forgetting, for failing to hold on to those who are no longer with us. As he reflects, “Nowadays we die twice: once at the moment of our death, and the second time when no one recognises us in a photograph.” 

By naming and acknowledging the dead, Boltanski’ returns a degree of presence to lives which might otherwise fade into oblivion. It is here that the bitter heart of loss lies: the absence of recognition, the erasure of existence. 

This absence resonates powerfully in Gaza, and similar war-torn regions where countless lives end without an obituary, proper funeral, and sometimes even without the retrieval of the body. Perhaps these lives, too, deserve their own metal boxes, their own sanctuary of remembrance.

How do we cope with loss? Can we rebuild what has been destroyed, and if we can, will it ever be the same? The answers are rarely clear, and art, while offering solace or reflection, does not always provide them. 

Loss reshapes us, altering our sense of self and of the world in ways we may never fully understand or recover from. Perhaps the question is not whether we can recover from loss, but how we learn to live alongside it.

The post When War Ends, What Remains? Art, Memory, and the Weight of Loss appeared first on Untold.

She wanted the child, but she was sure she and her husband couldn’t afford it. They had barely anything to eat every day. She was weak and was wondering about her health and life after delivering the baby. I started searching carefully for help around, despite disagreeing with her will, and I discovered an impressive undergrowth of female rebellion and resilience among midwives, even in the village where I was living. Ultimately she decided to keep the baby. Exactly the opposite of Isra’a and Ahmed in The Burdened. 

It takes a lot of courage to make a movie like The Burdened . Gamal, the director, was born in Yemen where he lives and works. In the North, in Sana’a, an area controlled by the Houthis, the beautiful Belqis cinema is in ruins. In the South, Yemeni cinema started a new season only in 2018 when Amr Gamal made and produced Ten days before the wedding, his first movie, a Yemeni comedy about life in the midst of war. At that time, the director used to rent hotel halls for weddings and transform them into cinemas to project the movie. People waited in long queues. Tickets were available online.  The complicity of the security teams at the entrance was what made the screening possible in the end. Yemenis loved Ten days before the wedding, shot with an extremely low budget and with locals acting as extras.

“My inspiration comes from the Italian neorealist cinema of Roberto Rossellini,” Amr Gamal told me, when we met in Aden. “I’m a huge fan of Rome, Open city as well as Cycles’ thieves by Vittorio De Sica. Maybe it is because our Yemeni society in the South after the war looks like the Italian one in post-Fascism. But I wish to tell stories of real people, inside real cities. I don’t want to fictionalize anything. I stay stuck to reality”. 

We met under the main mosque of the older neighborhood of Crater, a district in Yemen’s Aden governorate, where British colonization started. In front of us stood the shattered building of Crater Hotel, once a luxurious spot in the city. Now there are plans for reconstruction, funded by the UAE, after Houthi and Saudi-aligned bombs reduced it into a gruyere. It was impossible to have some privacy: every two minutes a random guy, girl or family showed up and asked Gamal for a selfie. 

Despite its isolation, Yemen is still a country with an active youth very connected to the global world via social media. It has its influencers and celebrities. And Gamal is definitely one of them, a young man, proud of being Yemeni with a huge sense of global cinematic culture.

“Look at this building”, he told me. I saw a simple house, two floors, in colonial British style. “There, for some time, lived Artur Rimbaud, the French poet. I consider this a holy place for the history of the city. And look how it is neglected now. It’s a pity.” I was sure that his second movie could be a leap in quality. And The Burdened really was.

The Burdened has received widespread critical acclaim from both film critics and audiences. It was nominated at the 2024 Oscars and won several awards at various international film festivals after it was screened in Berlin in 2023. It was later screened at many other international film festivals, including Sydney, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, and Durban. The film was commercially released in theaters in Taiwan and France in 2023, and its commercial screenings began in January 2024.  

Jonathan Romney of Screen International said, “What’s striking is how extremely spare and to the point Gamal’s storytelling style is: there’s zero fat on the bones of this story, giving the film a taut directness”. Jay Weissberg of The Film Verdict described the movie as “a rigorously controlled, moving evocation of a family exhausted by the difficulties of keeping it all together”.

“This is the story of a couple who decide to proceed with abortion, going through many steps to succeed, and keep getting rejected. Making abortion illegal, as it is in Yemen, will never stop people from doing it. And these characters will just risk their lives,” says Gamal explaining his inspiration for his movie. But this movie explores more than abortion rights.  “This family simply couldn’t afford another child,” he clarifies. “They were already sinking. It’s not about what’s forbidden and what’s not. It’s about a personal decision to survive. In a way, this dilemma represents the whole Yemen crisis. We have a bigger population now and no future.”

The production of the movie was far from easy. The 70 days of shooting were marked by intense challenges. Gamal’s production partner, the well-known Yemeni YouTuber Mohsen Al-Khalifi, recounts the full story:

“During filming, we faced extreme heat waves, power outages that lasted up to 18 hours a day, and rapidly deteriorating currency. When we began shooting, one USD was worth 800 Yemeni rials, but by the time we finished, the exchange rate had surged to 1,500 rials. This economic turmoil sparked public outrage, forcing us to halt outdoor filming for several days. Later, in early October 2022, Aden descended into civil unrest, trapping our crew and cast in a modest hotel in Crater for three days. The hotel was the only safe place, as the streets were rife with random gunfire. On top of that, the health system in Yemen was collapsing, and several members of our crew fell ill with fevers during an epidemic.”

Despite these obstacles, they managed to complete the entire film in those 70 days, not leaving out a single scene. Remarkably, they were able to shoot all of the outdoor scenes—which make up 40% of the movie—using a large number of extras, the largest group ever assembled for a film in Yemen. “I’m not exaggerating,” says Al-Khalifi. “We had more than 500 extras over the course of the movie.” The main cast consisted of 50 actors and actresses of various ages, many of them first-time performers, who were selected through auditions announced via social media.

If you don’t find these numbers and challenges surprising, you likely don’t understand how difficult it is to make a film in Yemen.

In reality, Yemeni cinema – understood as cinema produced in Yemen and made by Yemeni directors – is quite limited. It is much easier to come across movies with an orientalist flavour that look at Yemen romantically or films using Yemen as a setting. The first type includes “A new day in Old Sana’a” by Baden Ben Hirsi, a British director of Yemeni ancestry. The film was produced in 2005 and received some attention both at the Cairo International Film Festival and at Cannes. 

The second type includes the films that Pier Paolo Pasolini shot in the country in the Seventies (“A Thousand and One Nights”, “The Walls of Sana’a”). Even the fiction films and documentaries by Khadija al Salami (“I am Nojood”, “Scream”), the first Yemeni woman director and producer, were partly shot in Yemen but produced in France. The only case of in-house production, before Amr Gamal, was a 2008 work strongly recommended by the former Minister of the Interior to prevent the hemorrhage of young Yemenis into the ranks of al-Qaeda. “The losing bet”  by Mutaher al-Masri, produced by Fadl al-Olfi, tells the end of two Yemeni jihadists, returned to the country after years abroad to recruit new members and carry out deadly operations in Yemen.

Al-Khalifi is well aware of the immense burden the production work placed on his shoulders. “We (Gamal, Amjad Abu Alala, and Mohammed Alomda) founded our own production company, Adenium, but securing financing was a struggle. In the end, we managed to secure funds from Station Films, a Sudanese production company,” he explains. When asked why they faced similar challenges during the making of their first film, Ten Days Before the Wedding, Amr Gamal is clear in his response: “We still believe that cinema is a universal language—a medium that can transcend borders and speak directly to the world. I received threats from militias and unidentified individuals, but I don’t care.”

Al-Khalifi adds, “One of the key themes in our film is sacrifice and survival. In the story, a family makes the difficult decision to ‘sacrifice’ a newborn in order to survive. But how many other sacrifices are being made because of the war? Poverty kills more people than bullets.”

After the huge success of Ten days before the wedding, Gamal had the chance of living abroad. “I gave this a thought,” he said, “and I received many offers but what will happen to me if I leave Yemen? I will be a fish out of the sea”. Gamal chose to stay in Yemen, despite residency opportunities in the United States and Saudi Arabia. 

So again, he started a new project. These days, Gamal and his trustworthy crew are filming around Aden and Yemen. “We cannot disclose the new project and the plot. For sure, our participation in Berlin helped us a lot. Now, we are fully focused on finishing it. Making films in a country like ours requires a miracle, and we still need many of them. But we want to tell our untold stories. At any cost.”

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The student uprising that ousted Bangladesh’s fascist prime minister cum dictator Sheikh Hassina on 5 August 2024 has continued to articulate its aims in terms of abolishing inequalities based on any and all forms of discrimination. While an interim government has been formed and includes representatives of, for example, the student movements, civil society organisations and some Indigenous communities from the Chittagong Hill Tracts, representation for Bangladesh’s tea garden workers, remains absent.

Watching Baganiya, we understand why. The film deals with the 150-year-old inequalities of tea garden workers (self-titled as baganiya) labouring in the Champarai tea estate in the Moulvibazar division of Sylhet, a north-eastern region of Bangladesh. 

Colonial oppression

The tea garden workers were brought here from other parts of India in the 1800s by British imperialists and local middlemen. Originally under the British East India Company, Champarai now belongs to the state owned National Tea Company Limited under the chairmanship of Sheikh Kabir Hossein, a relative of the now ousted but active Sheikh Hassina. 

Though Baganiya precedes today’s revolutionary Bangladesh, its scenes and the communities it represents bear the marks of abuse, neglect and continued colonialism which Bangladesh’s student body is currently, and most visibly, challenging. While the movement was triggered by protests against government job quotas, youth unemployment and middle class wealth disparity, the call for an end to a fascist state not only tackles the dictatorial rule of Sheikh Hassina and the Awami League, but also challenges the state apparatus in the way it has functioned since Bangladesh’s independence in 1971. 

The messages being chanted and painted across the country and diaspora remain clear: the freedom of some cannot be sustainably built on the oppression of another.

Baganiya offers a specific but important position to consider in this moment of social and political change. The colonial oppression of tea garden workers in the country necessarily must be part of the change the revolutionary part of Bangladesh’s population wishes to make. To do this, it is necessary to consider the ways the state relates to these communities and society at large. 

The making of a film

Documentary films about tea communities in Bangladesh are a popular focus for Dhaka-based filmmakers, artists, ethnographers and academics, with many being screened locally at middle class institutions and universities in the capital. Humaira Bilkis’ oeuvre joins this canon. 

I first watched Baganiya in 2019 at the Goethe Institute in Dhaka, a space nestled in the older upper class district of Dhanmondi and a popular space for cultural events visited by local middle class and foreign patrons. The film is remarkable in its use of sound, allowing for minimally edited soundscapes of the natural environment in which the tea trees thrive and the communities labour and live. 

Bilkis makes a point not to over explain, or to provide an overly probing narrative, but rather follows the people she has chosen to focus on, like Padmaluv Bunarjee and Sojoy Yadav, who both answer questions and at other times just allow the camera to join them through their days and thoughts. 

On the one hand, this offers a sense of the tea communities from within their homes, at work in the tea gardens, and over adda (chat, conversation) between duties. But given the asymmetrical power dynamics between the filmmakers—who are ethnically Bangali, of the Muslim majority, educated, middle or upper class, and based in the state capital—and the tea workers, the absence of the filmmakers in Baganiya left me with a sense of unease. Why did they come to the tea gardens? Why then? How did they negotiate their access? How did they nurture their relationships with their interlocutors?

Bilkis describes the way her relationships to her interlocutors developed: “I first came to the tea gardens to make a workshop film that was partly facilitated by an NGO around 2007. I had no intention of making a film.” She was just spending time in the community and slowly their relationship developed. 

“I started making the film much later, in 2015,” she recalls. “I initially wanted to make the film about a young orphan girl who was living in the village on her own, and who was supported by everyone, this was really remarkable for me. But I ended up going to India for a year and when I came back she had fallen in love and left the village.” After that, the subject of her film somehow shifted. “I have most contact with Sojoy, he is very active and politically astute, working in the tea garden labour union himself,” Bilkis explains. 

The focus on Sojoy is palpable in the film—he gives us the political context of the space the film is navigating.

Asymmetrical relationships

The unequal social positioning of Bilkis and the tea garden workers and how this affects their relationships are emblematic of the relations of patronage that develop between people of different classes in South Asia working and/or living together. “When the tea garden workers were on strike a few years ago, they were fighting for a 300 Taka minimum wage (EUR 2.30). Sojoy called me during that time and said ‘we need food’. So we put money together and sent them food so they could continue to live. They only reached a 170 Taka minimum wage (EUR 1.30).” 

For Chandon, a teenage boy avoiding school and whom the film follows mostly through his roaming in the tea gardens, Bilkis and her film crew were actively involved in his future building. “We paid for his college fees, but finally he didn’t go. He works now: we really wanted him to be able to finish school. This is really sad for me.” 

Bilkis is well aware of the asymmetrical relationships and how they are necessary both to support Sojoy, Chandon and the tea garden communities, as well as to provide her subject matter as a filmmaker. Like many in Bangladesh, as the student movement has also shown, she is aware that these relationships do not sustainably ensure the autonomy of those oppressed by state and structural violence. Especially given the historical, colonial nature of the oppression of tea garden communities in Bangladesh, more than social awareness, structural change through state policy is necessary to ensure sustainable change.

Having spent time in Sylhet through friends who have generational ownership of tea gardens or family members who are managing them, I have been part of the power structures that hold up the inequalities I lay out here. Many people escape Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka to Sylhet in order to enjoy time in nature and away from the city. Sylhet is teeming with eco lodges, bed and breakfasts, and large scale resorts catering to domestic tourists, who drive or hike through the tea gardens. What for some is a place of generational oppression becomes a leisurely escape from city life to another. 

“The community in Baganiya is far removed from the dominant tourist trails, though many come to visit the waterfalls close by,” Bilkis describes. People trying to capitalise on the touristic potential of the area come from outside the tea garden communities and are met with resistance. “Sojoy is one of the biggest fighters against building tourist infrastructure in their area. Once a man came from outside trying to convince him that they should build housing for tourists. I was standing on the side with my bags and the man pointed at me and said ‘Look, she has nowhere to stay, if there was housing she could stay there.’ Sojoy laughed and said ‘She’s staying at my place.’” 

A struggle for equality

Sylhet distinguishes itself economically and linguistically from the rest of the country. While the language spoken in the area, Sylheti, is considered by some to be a dialect of Bangla, the national language of Bangladesh, it has a different script and many locals and people in the diaspora argue for Sylheti to be recognised as its own language. The region is also known to be wealthy due to the high remittances sent to communities there from abroad, particularly the UK. Nestled within this region, the tea gardens form a microcosm of isolation not only nationally but regionally also. 

This isolation is central to Baganiya. In the first minutes of the film, Sojoy tells us that the British brought or coerced people from different parts of India to the tea gardens that are now in Bangladesh. These people came from vastly different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, so there was little possibility to unite against their shared oppressors. Bringing communities thousands of miles from their original homes, and further alienating them by denying them land rights or access to social development, left the tea garden communities isolated both from their land, their labour and each other. 

In the context of the revolutionary moment in Bangladesh today, Baganiya inadvertently presents an important question: how can Bangladesh develop equality intersectionally across socio-economic strata, genders, religions and ethnic communities? In retaliation for its downfall, the Awami League has instigated violence against Hindu and other religious minorities (though partly this violence is also ‘organic’). The student movement remarkably responded by protecting non-Muslim religious sites, homes and businesses. These are scenes until now unseen in South Asia at this scale. 

The Awami League’s actions show that religious-based violence remains a potential instrument to destabilise community and state. But the actions, art and organising potential of the students and their supporters tell a new story and project a different kind of future. A dismantling of existing power structures should necessarily entail a new beginning for tea garden workers also, no longer defined by their labour alone and state-sanctioned impoverishment, remembered through elite holidays in the tea gardens or film viewings in the city. This, however, is unlikely. 

Asked if the student movement is providing momentum for change for the tea garden communities, Bilkis responds with a bleak outlook. “Unfortunately, I don’t think there is going to be any change for tea garden workers now. The government has been saying for years now that the tea gardens aren’t economically viable.” While their labour has been their yoke for generations, the tea garden workers are also reliant on his labour for their income. Without it, and in the modus operandi of successive and current Bangladeshi governments, they may lose all leverage in their struggle for equality.

BAGANIYA is available for global streaming on Cinelogue– a collaboratively curated streaming platform dedicated to cinema by the Global Majority.

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The book sheds light on how different factors affect environmental activists’ plans and pursuing their goals. The way political systems work—whether they are open and democratic or not—plays a big role in shaping how these activists protest. According to the sociologist and Professor Rob White, the way the government reacts to environmental movements influences their strategies and demands. For example, groups like Just Stop Oil and Ende Gëlande justify their disruptive actions by pointing to the failures of democratic decision-making and the complicity of states in perpetuating climate chaos.

The recent introduction of the UK Public Order Bill in May 2023 highlights how governments are increasingly cracking down on public dissent. This new law imposes severe penalties for actions like blocking roads and disrupting key infrastructure, all under the guise of protecting public safety. It also gives the police broader powers to stop and search individuals, making it easier to control and suppress protests. 

The harsh sentences given to activists from groups like Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil, as well as Judge Kollery KC’s reasoning for these severe punishments, underscore a growing intolerance for non-violent protests. This trend reflects a move towards more extreme measures aimed at stifling dissent, demonstrating how the state’s response can significantly shape the nature of environmental activism. 

Despite such repression, Alberro’s book shows that harsh government actions don’t stop activism—in fact, they can sometimes make it stronger. For example, the Italian ‘Salvini bis’ security decree of 2019, which imposed tough penalties on protestors, actually led to increased resistance from NoTAP activists. Similarly, the French government’s effort to ban the group Les Soulèvements de la Terre only made the group’s members more determined to fight on. 

As criminologist Anna Di Ronco notes in an article about criminologist research on environmental and social harm, “The activists haven’t been discouraged; if anything, criminalization managed to unite us even more.” This suggests that repressive measures can backfire, leading to greater unity and commitment among activists.

In Public power in the age of Empire, Indian author Arundhati Roy powerfully highlights that choosing between different activism tactics—like being peaceful or militant—is often more about strategy than ideology. The book looks at how various factors, including politics, social class, and personal background, influence these decisions. For example, activists from privileged backgrounds might face fewer risks from arrest, whereas working-class activists of color might face much harsher consequences. This illustrates how different contexts and personal situations shape the tactics that activists choose to use. 

Moreover, Alberro’s book also argues that the effectiveness of tactics is often context-dependent. For example, a hunger strike might be futile without media coverage to amplify the message. Similarly, peaceful petitions may be inadequate in the face of severe ecological threats, such as deep-sea mining for rare earth minerals, which poses substantial risks to marine ecosystems. The International Seabed Authority’s issuance of contracts for seabed exploration, despite significant opposition, exemplifies the dire need for more aggressive forms of resistance.

The book emphasizes the often subtle and delayed impacts of environmental activism, akin to the nature of climate change itself. The struggle for movement-building involves both failures and successes, with each mobilization contributing to the broader fight against ecological degradation. The prolonged resistance to the Lützerath village eviction in Germany, despite its eventual failure, inspired global solidarity and strengthened the resolve of other activist groups.

As climate shocks intensify, the ‘radical flank’ of environmental mobilizations is expected to expand and diversify. In an article on the radical flank of the climate movement, Dana R. Fisher and Quinn Renaghan argue that radical transformations are born of profound discontent with the status quo and cannot occur without some degree of violence against oppressive institutions. However, Alberro’s book cautions against uncontrolled violence and hate, advocating instead for tactics that build socio-ecologically caring communities and undermine the foundations of the dystopian present.

Radical Environmental Resistance: Love, Rage, and Hope in an Era of Climate and Biodiversity Breakdown provides a compelling examination of the interplay between contentious politics and radical environmentalism. It underscores the necessity of disruptive actions in challenging systemic inertia and achieving meaningful change. As environmental crises deepen, the book serves as a crucial resource for understanding the strategies, struggles, and resilience of those fighting for a more just and sustainable world. 

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Having missed most of his classes and exams at university, his French residency is not renewed and he is given 30 days to leave the territory, after which he would become an illegal, undocumented immigrant, unless he finds a job. Given the urgency, Sof has no other choice but to accept employment at his father’s relative’s Muslim burial house, where he will accompany El Haj (Mostafa DjamDjam), a mysterious, taciturn character, in his burial rituals. Little by little, a whole new, unexpected universe opens up before Sof, which summons him to reconsider his cultural and social affiliations, and to reflect upon his own journey thus far.

The viewer is able to follow the multi-layered path of Sof’s growth and process of mental maturation while he attempts to reckon with his own past: his mother’s passing while he was young, his turbulent relationship with his father and siblings, the way he is perceived by a potential lover who ends up orientalising him, his relationship with the diverse Muslim community and the role he plays in washing their corpses, his growing mentee relationship with El Haj…all these delineate individual threads which taken together, draw a complete, rounded portrait of a young man’s efforts to speak truth to one’s self. 

The strength of this coming-of-age film undeniably lies in its ability to weave imbricated stories posited at the juncture between personal narratives and the common theme of belonging, while superbly managing to navigate the complexity of identity and identitarian discourse, without ever falling into the easy trap of stereotyping. Unlike many other films tackling such themes, Six Feet Over represents a reconciliation with one’s multiple beings in the form of a poetic and at times, comical ode. The film won the Silver Yusr for Best Screenplay at the Red Sea International Film Festival in 2023.

Six Feet Over (Karim Bensalah, France, 2023, 96 min.)

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Yellow Bus opens on a joyful morning in Ananda (Tannishtha Chatterjee) and Gagan (Amit Sial)’s small apartment, set in an unnamed, hot and dusty city in the Gulf. The morning routine resembles that of everyday: mother Ananda prepares breakfast and lunch boxes, father Gagan gets ready for work on the construction site, while daughters Ravina (Aarushi Laud) and Anju (Kshethra Mithun) prepare for yet another day at school, at the renowned Al-Ameer Academy, a beacon for future economic emancipation. The Indian family moved to the Gulf before the girls were born, searching for better life prospects and economic stability. All seems perfectly in order and the family displays scenes of an idyllic, harmonious life.

Ananda sees her daughters off as the school yellow bus comes to collect them. Soon after, however, she receives a fatidic phone call from the school administration announcing the tragic turn of events: Anju, who had fallen asleep during the ride, has been left to suffocate to death in the blistering, boiling bus, parked for hours under the midday scorching sun. The school headmistress hastily places all blames on the Pakistani driver and the Filipina bus attendant, which, as she reports, have been promptly dismissed. She hastens to bury the accident, offering compensation money to Ananda, which the latter refuses.

Here, a tension between Gagan and Ananda arises. While the father is keen to stoically accept his fate and carry on with life, Ananda’s search for truth and accountability becomes unquenchable. Her own  investigation on the case progressively reveals the intricacies of a rotten system capitalising on neo-liberal values, on the exploitation of cheap, disposable labour, and a discriminate or non-existent judiciary system. Gagan is very much aware of his vulnerable position as an Indian construction site manager in the Gulf, one whose residency and thus livelihood is incumbent on being submissive to the system. Ananda, on the other hand, embodies the undefeated mother’s relentless fight for justice and accountability. Her refusal, from the onset, to accept the official narrative of a series of negligence and mishaps and to submit to her humble position of a powerless immigrant woman eventually brings about a sense of justice.

Bednarz’s award-winning modern-day thriller sheds light on an all-too common series of tragic events which afflict the underground, vulnerable working force of the Gulf, for whom the cost of justice often represents too high of a price to be pursued. It further weaves the portrait of the universal, staunch mother figure -superbly acted by Tannishtha Chatterjee- in the face of brutal, yet avoidable plights.

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