John Carlin’s piece earlier this month in The Times magazine on Egypt’s Light and Hope Orchestra (£) celebrates women’s visibility and power. Ironically, it was entitled “Female. Arab. Poor. And Blind.” The orchestra is composed of 34 blind Muslim women (all wearing hijabs) who can impeccably play “at least 45 pieces of classical music” without notes to read and a conductor to follow, but through their extraordinary memories.
Again, earlier this month Haifaa Al Mansour’s Wadja, the first ever film made by a woman in Saudi Arabia (where cinema is illegal) was screened at the Venice Film Festival. The groundbreaking film tells the story of Wadja (played by Waad Mohammed), a rebellious 11-year-old girl, who enters a local Koran reading competition, planning to use the prize money to buy herself a bicycle, in a culture where women are not encouraged to cycle.
Earlier this year Abeer Zeibak Haddad released her extremely powerful documentary, Duma, about women speaking out about their experiences of rape and sexual assault, generally regarded as the first ever film to shed light on violence against women in Palestine.
Power and creativity resonates within the music of the Light and Hope Orchestra; in the story of the making of Wadja, and in women’s articulation of their damaging experiences in Duma. Each of these examples of women’s work is significant in terms of women’s visibility within cultures and societies that remain male-dominated.
Critical debates around women and the gender politics in the Middle East are increasingly stimulating. In the context of film this is particularly due to the expanding interaction between writing by scholars, critics and filmmakers from Western perspectives and from within Middle Eastern countries.
The issue of representation is important in thinking about women, power and creativity – not only in political terms, but also in relation to the media’s representation of women. Who is representing and who is represented? Can, for instance, filmmakers or journalists represent accurately different people, including those who they are not? Can men represent women and vice versa? In the context of film, for instance, does it matter if there are not many women directors? This last question is especially pertinent if it is believed that only women can represent women, or that they do it generally better than men. It is from this perspective that the absence of women directors leads directly to absences from the films themselves.
Women filmmakers from the Middle East tend to focus on issues including virginity testing, so-called “honour” crimes, female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and rape, which continue to be (at times religiously) practiced. Abortion is illegal or extremely restricted even in cases of rape in some countries. Making these issues more visible through the media is a complex task which may have different implications and reiterate differences between different cultures and societies. Yet, there is an urgent need for women to be more visible, more audible, more powerful. As Wadja’s director Al Mansour has commented in an interview:
“Women have to stick together and believe in themselves and push towards what makes them happy. We just need to push a little bit harder against tradition. We need to do things and make things and tell the stories that we want to tell. And I think the world is ready to listen.”
The images in our minds about aspects of women’s issues and womanhood may predominantly come from the field of visual representation. To understand different types of womanhood from around the world more positive images of women are needed. Reality and representations of different realities have a strong connection. To create a positive change in the status of the real requires a parallel change in the media which seeks to represent the real.