Where
was I?? Oh, yes, I
was ranting about my screening of Lawrence
of Arabia! To re-cap: on Saturday,
May 25th, Jordanian Independence Day, I watched all 220 minutes of the 50 year-old blockbuster
for the first time. I noticed things I am quite sure I would have overlooked
had I watched this long before I came to Jordan. Of course I would have marveled at the breathtaking, cinematic
sweep of David Lean’s directorial genius, but I would not have balked at some
of his “story board” decisions about how he treated the Arabs in the film. Case
in point: as I said in yesterday’s post, in the movie the Arabs govern Damascus
for two days before the more adept Europeans step in. In reality, it was almost two
years. The French army forced them and Faisal out of Damascus. Why is this
a problem? It denigrates what the Arabs actually did, and it reinforces that the Arabs can’t
be trusted to run a government. To end the re-cap: yesterday I quoted the
Arabic proverb, Al tikrar, biallem il
hmar—By repetition even the donkey learns.
Over time, all these caricatured Arabs become the reality for the
movie observer.
You see, about 270 million people live in the 22
Arab states—and there is more diversity than most think. Over 15 million of the Arabs are Christians.
The Arabs I know seek out educational opportunities in the West. None live in a
tent. Not one travels via magic carpets. For a century the movie folks have
used Arabs as villains; the derogatory stereotypes are aimed at the young and
the old. Since moving to Jordan in 2007 I have been sensitive to such
portrayals—and I am not saying that an Arab should never be portrayed as the
villain—but almost all Hollywood depictions of Arabs are bad ones. These
celluloid images perpetuate the adverse portraits.
Let me give you an interesting anecdote about bad
stereotypes and how they come across. In 1999, my previous school, Hackley, presented the fun
musical, Anything Goes. I didn’t
direct this show (but I had directed the show in 1994 at Charlotte Latin
School) and was just a theater-goer to this musical. In the original 1930s Anything Goes there was a comic subplot
of two Chinese passengers and the portrayals trade on Chinese stereotypes. It
was no doubt hilarious in the 1930s but would definitely be seen as racist
today. So the Hackley director removed the now-offensive humorous Chinese
stereotypes and changed them to be…Arabs. I remember thinking, So it is bad to poke fun at Asians in an
Uncle Remus kind of way, but it’s okay to poke fun at Arabs???
I guess what I wish is that we could see ordinary
Arabs in films. Remember why the TV show Cosby
was hailed as a breakthrough in the 1980s? It had an affluent, ordinary
black family! Missing from the history of Hollywood film are images of ordinary
Arab men, women and children living ordinary lives. Movies fail to project
exchanges between friends, social and family events. One of my favorite
epiphanies in all my time in Jordan came in 2008 when I was chatting with my
friend Lubna here. We are the exact same age—I am two weeks older exactly. We
were chatting about TV shows our families watched in our respective childhoods.
I described a drama that my family watched together on Thursday nights. As I
described the show, she said, “I think we watched that too.” I said, “Oh, no
Lubna, that show is so American. You couldn’t have.” Well, it turns out that
while my family watched The Waltons, in the USA, so did Lubna’s family watch
the same show in Kuwait! She said she and her family loved it. Then I realized that the attention to family
and spirituality that made The Waltons
seems so American to me, worked for an Arab Muslim as well! We are not as
different as we think sometimes…
So in Hollywood movies, you don’t see Arab youth
participating in sporting events; absent are the gracious and devout Arab
mothers and fathers caring for each other and their neighbors. Where are the Arab scholars who pioneered
mathematics and science? Where are the lovers of Arabic poetry?
Of course, historically, around 1980, at the height
of the Iranian hostage crisis, anti-Arab feelings intensified. Most Americans
wrongly identified Iran as an Arab country. (Iranians are Persians, by the way,
another people altogether!)
Mindlessly adopted and casually adapted, the
Arab-as-enemy stereotype narrows our vision and blurs reality. Obviously the
world events of the last 20 years have led many Americans to believe all Arabs
are terrorists and that Arabs do not value human life as much as we do. I am
sure some Americans think every Arab is a clone of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin
Laden. I am sure many, many news producers say, “We’re not stereotyping—just
look at your television set. Those are real Arabs.”
I know, I know—movies are entertainment, not
documentaries. We should not expect reporters to inundate the airwaves with the
lives of ordinary Arabs. But maybe filmmakers have a moral obligation not to
advance the news media’s sins of omission and commission, not to tar an entire
group of people on the basis of crimes of a few.
In the last year a producer from the Cairo bureau of
the Today show decided to do a piece
on our school. The producer had decided too much news from the Middle East was
bad and they needed a good story, a happy story from the Middle East. So they
came and filmed at KA. When the piece ran on television, the piece had
polarizing reactions. My American friends thought it was a great story about
our school. But the Arabs here who watched it were aghast at the same
stereotypes trotted out (yes, the blinding sand of the desert, the camels, the
Bedouins, the mysterious music, the thrill of co-education, the exotic-ness of
the students, etc.)
But stereotypes are easy, aren’t they? They may even
be comforting! They mean that we don’t have to work too hard to figure someone
out…they make complicated understandings unnecessary. Want to make a good joke?
Looking for a villain? Instead of writing witty jokes or interesting narrative
arcs, we all know what the bumbling sheikh or Arab terrorist looks like. It
makes us feel better to see ourselves as superior to someone else. Think of the
groups we are no longer “allowed” to feel superior over—but there are those
wretched Arabs!
If one did project Arabs or Arab-Americans as
regular folk, well, then they might be labeled as “pro-Arab,” and of course
pro-Arab must mean anti-Israeli, and you know what even a whiff of that
means. And the stereotyped movies make
money! Producers exploit the stereotype for profit. Moreover, where is the
criticism? Discrimination is a hot topic, but we should challenge all hateful stereotypes—even the
caricatures of Arabs and “poor white trash.” [Um, witness the popularity of
this Honeybooboo person and her family!] I remember when I heard Elie Wiesel
speak—wow, way back in 1995—he said that no human race is superior, no
religious faith is inferior; every nation has its share of bad people and good
people. The denigration of one people, one religion, is the denigration of all
people, all religions.
Oh
my…whatta rant! I almost lost sight of Lawrence!
The film’s real-life hero, T. E. Lawrence was a
flamboyant British officer whose assaults on the Turkish occupiers,
helped pave the way for the Ottoman Empire's downfall.
In the process, he came to see himself as a demigod, destined to unite the Arab
people and “give” them freedom — an illusion crushed by big-power politics and
the Arabs’ own tribal rivalries: a mix that has thwarted dreams for the region
ever since, from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabism to George W. Bush’s cakewalk
for democracy in Iraq.
Lawrence figured in the debate over our own
recent tangles with insurgents, in Afghanistan and Iraq. His memoir, Seven Pillars of
Wisdom, was tapped both by the United States Army’s
counterinsurgency strategists and by skeptics, who quoted Lawrence’s warning
about wars against rebellions as “messy
and slow, like eating soup with a knife” — though the enthusiasts took the
pronouncement as a challenge.
In thinking about it for another day, I have
come to see that the film is not quite so biased in the second half. Maybe
there is a sly derision cast at the westerners, at Lawrence himself. In Part
Two we meet Jackson Bentley, based on the real-life media mogul Lowell Thomas
who exploited Lawrence’s fame and wrote about his friendship with the
charismatic Lawrence. Bentley reveals his intentions to Prince Faisal, the
political leader of the Arab Revolt: he is in search of a romantic figure that
will persuade the American public to join the war effort in the Middle East.
Faisal cynically responds, “Then Lawrence
is your man.” For the rest of the movie Lawrence seems more of a hollow
man—or am I reading what fellow Jordanians now would say about the man?? Am I
able to watch this movie any more as just a cool, great film??? I noticed the
gradual soiling, bloodying and rending of the white robes Lawrence had donned
earlier in the story and wondered if this is actually a questioning of the
white hero?
So
here I am at the end of the movie, at the end of my rant, wondering about how I
view this film now, after six years in Jordan, on Jordanian Independence Day. I
think about an Arab-American named Alex
Odeh, who dedicated his life to working against discrimination against Arabs in
his native United States. He was shot and killed in 1985, but here are some of
his words that still grip us:
Lies are like the dead ashes; when
the wind of truth blows,
the
lies are dispersed like dust…and
disappear. 
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