Where
His Hands Decay, Mine Begin
by Rabab
Ghazoul
Video, 2004
Butetown History and Arts Centre, Cardiff,
Wales
Venue website: http://www.bhac.org/exh.html
Reviewed by Aparna Sharma
Film Academy, University of Glamorgan
aparna31S@netscape.net
Yearning for an impossible homecoming
and seeking to locate herself, in Where
His Hands Decay, Mine Begin, British
Iraqi artist, Rabab Ghazoul expresses
her in-betweenness, a constant presence
of de-territorialized existence; instituted
by her familys migration to Great
Britain. The video work shown at the Butetown
History and Arts Centre, Cardiff is deeply
touching and abounds with problematics
surrounding post-colonial identity and
its representation and renders inadequate
any attempt to define the cultural borderline
as purely empowering or weakening.
In this piece, Rabab converses with the
two cultures she emulates in varying measures.
Through her conversation, she reflects
a hybridity, comprising a constant moving
back and forth, in which the co-ordinates
of space and time are confused. The piece
is composed of two video loops projected
on either side of a free-standing wall.
The wall serves metaphorically as a page
with two sides that are distinct, yet
proximate and inseparable.
The first loop, as one enters the exhibition
space, depicts the disparities between
the cultural impetuses Rabab is exposed
to in a manner that they appear conflicting,
almost irreconcilable. Rababs hand
is seen writing an
English text
on one side of the frame and an Arabic
text on the other. Loss of language and
with it a possible world, a home, and
a way of being deeply echo in Rabab: what
you can say in your language informs a
huge part of what you can lay claim to
being. To lose words is to lose identity.
To lose words is to feel like you have
lost claim, says Rabab.
The distinction between the two scripts
(Arabic written from the right of the
page to the left and English from the
left to the right) literally sets up a
fracture reinforced by the content of
the texts. While writing in Arabic, Rababs
hand is hesitant, almost childlike, as
if frozen at the age of ten, when she
left Iraq. She picks on and questions
the subject of the English text, i.e.
herself, referred in the second person.
This script contrasts sharply with the
English one, written fluently, with a
command. This text is about the crisis
of losing language; and in this the subject
position switches between the first and
second persons.
The second loop in which Rababs
hand performs a conversation with her
fathers, restores the work from
slipping into the extremes of gloom or
exoticism that might be propelled by the
first piece. The inter-generational conversation
spans varied gestures and emotionstracing,
seeking, reaching out, withdrawing, and
resisting. Without a clear progression,
this conversation indicates the complexity
rendered by the experience of migration:
upsetting traditional, convention-bound
subjectivities; injecting new positionings
that challenge existing social order.
There is a hint in this piece of an interrogation
surrounding the patriarchal, socio-religious
order, for Rabab the Islamic systems.
The conversation meanders through contingent
moments of unease, warmth, and a sheer
play of movements between father and daughter.
This dialogue is smattered with disjunctions
between vocabularies, encapsulating very
personal narratives of movement and change.
As the dialogue evolves, a sense of proximity
surfaces between the two characters. There
are distinctions of gender and culture,
but they appear implicated in a constant
mode of negotiation. The social codes
the hands adhere to dont appear
as given or inherited.
Rababs
hand moves rather hypnotically: not entirely
feminine, assertive, or contained. Her
fathers hand bears more restraint.
It is marked by a skin condition, Vittiligo,
acquired post migration, whose visible
index serves as a metaphor of colour.
Subtle though their gestures are, in the
backdrop of the political and social crisis
Iraq has encountered over the past decades,
they reflect deep and profound transgressions
and reinscriptions.
Though the narratives within the images
comprise a sense of movement, the formal
realization of the work is however, problematic.
Both the videos are filmed from a top
angle, which provides a view of the subjects
in interaction. The viewer is situated
in a sharply defined position; there is
no attempt at creating proximity with
either of the categories within the image.
But in not using any other angle, or position
of viewing, Rababs piece suffers
from a fixity. This fixity pertains particularly
to the cultural and ethnic position of
the subject. In the absence of a differing
angle, a sense of proximity or distance
in comparison to that of the existing
frame: This fixity weakens the speculation
and tension underpinning the work. The
viewer is not provided any formal means
to participate in the complexity of the
narrative, which is so crucial given that
this work has been exhibited to a largely
Western audience. And though the framing
maybe an intentional way of distancing
the viewer, this fixity lacks adequate
dynamism to deliberate on that intention.
There is a disjunction between a narrative,
which problematizes ethnicity as consistent,
and the fixed frame that almost forecloses
any possibility for the audience to engage
beyond its existing understandings of
the ethnic subject, which are rather limited
in a Western metropolitan location.
With elements such as Arabic calligraphy
and the soundtrack (Rabab reciting an
Arabic poem), this work bears all the
charms of the exotic other;
but it is an effort without care for some
rather obvious risks. Where his hands
decay, mine begin, is a classic example
of a work whose cultural specificity is,
in a sense, its own limitation. Rabab
knows of most of her viewerss levels
of cultural awareness. There is no easy
resolution for the viewers relationship
with a work of this kind; but the piece
does achieve in sharing a raw, deeply
personal and vulnerable territory.
Performance, sound and accompanying text,
enforce the disparities Rabab encounterslinguistic,
cultural, generational, and those of genderbut
leave no clear or contained definitions
for the subject. In Rabab, tradition and
modernity seem to have lost their way.
Work indicates an interrogation, that
touching of spatial boundaries at
a tangent, which Homi Bhabha discusses
with relation to the hybrid subject in
the Location of Culture. Where
His Hands Decay, Mine Begin, is an
unsettling work that goes as far as opening
the interstices of culture.