mother of the martyr, we are all your children
a record of my talk with Asma Laajimi, May Herbawe and Cindy Chehab after our screening of "Wild Flowers: Women of South Lebanon" (1987) on November 7th, 2024
In the summer of 1982, admist the Lebanese Civil War, Palestinian filmmaker Mai Masri returned to Beirut.
Having just finished her film studies in San Fransisco, she reunited with her lover, Lebanese filmmaker Jean Khalil Chamoun (1942–2017), and the two of them set off for a perilous journey through war-torn Lebanon, shooting copious footage of the war and its effect on the people.
They worked with cheap equipment and a skeleton crew, allowing them to shoot quickly, reflexively and freely. The couple, who married in 1986, ended up turning their footage into four feature documentaries: Under the Rubble (1983), Wild Flowers: Women of South Lebanon (1986), War Generation (1989) and Suspended Dreams (1992).
Come 2024, I found myself increasingly drawn to Masri’s work, gradually discovering it through Instagram and YouTube. There was something profoundly attractive about her grainy documentaries, accessible in their technical simplicity, centering the real voices of people on the ground.
Wild Flowers: Women of South Lebanon drew my particular attention. It focuses on women resisting the 1982 Israeli invasion of the Lebanese south, crafting a narrative of resistance, perseverance and a deep connection to the land.
The parallels to 2024 are unmistakable.
At the moment of writing, the south has once again become a battleground, with Israeli forces destroying everything in their path in their quest to root out Hezbollah. Ironically, Hezbollah was founded in the 1980s as a resistance movement against the first Israeli occupation.
After a string of e-mails with the Arab Film Institute, I was able to secure Wild Flowers for a screening in Cinema RITCS. Hoping to attract an engaged audience for the film, I reached out to the Tashattot Collective, which brings together Belgium-based artists from the SWANA1 region.
Together, we set up a panel discussion to follow after the film screening. Tashattot contacted three young filmmakers:
I knew Asma Laajimi (Tunisia, 1999) as the former roommate of my colleague Anabel from Beursschouwburg. A soft-spoken photographer and filmmaker, she is a graduate of LUCA, the school I’m currently enrolled in. Her films have been screened in festivals such as Cinemed Montpellier (FR), JCC Carthage Film Festival (TN) and Locarno Film Festival (CH). Her latest work is called A Dog, A Stone and centers on a sex worker in Tunis.
May Herbawe (Palestine, 1995) is currently my classmate at LUCA. A vivacious and outspoken artist, she is developing a short film about the last crocodile of Palestine. She once told me that on social media, she puts a lizard emoji next to her name because the Israeli administration misspelled her family name as herbaya, which in Arabic means “chameleon.”2 She was the winner of the Karimeh Abboud Award 2016 and has taken part in many group exhibitions.
A new face for me was Cindy Chehab, a Lebanese film curator, filmmaker, and video editor. A fellow master’s student at LUCA, her focus is on film preservation, archival research and European culture. A documentary filmmaker, her 2021 work “Seated Roots” won the Jury Prize at the Arab Short Festival in Beirut.
The following text is a condensed record of our conversation in Cinema RITCS afterwards. It has been edited for clarity.
If you want to watch the film before reading the text, you can find it on YouTube (in dismal quality, but still.)
[We watch the film. It opens on a pastoral scene in the southern Lebanese countryside. It then transitions to a scene where a woman is out picnicking with her husband, who just got out of an Israeli jail, and begins reading him the letters she wrote him when he was still incarcerated.
Throughout the film, many women tell horrific stories of abuse at the hands of Israeli soldiers, but they also describe their ways of resisting occupation: some organized, through aiding male fighters and bandaging the wounded, some menial and small, such as through threatening Israeli soldiers searching their houses.
The film ends the narration of a woman describing how she hugged the land, pressing her cheek to the dirt and feeling it brimming with life and soul.]
Flora Woudstra Hablé: A basic question to start us off: what do we take away from this film?
Asma Laajimi: At first glance, it’s a lesson about resistance. But on an emotional level, it’s hope. The film has very powerful imagery. It’s something inspiring, also in terms of film-making, in daring to let the camera be a witness.
Cindy Chehab: I did feel the hope, but I was also very angry and devastated, because it’s just a continuous struggle. This history is still our present. I feel a continuity between these images of the past and the images I’m seeing from filmmakers on the ground in southern Lebanon right now.
May Herbawe: It feels like I’m seeing a movie that was shot in Palestine. The way Palestinian women took a role in the resistance and still are. It’s amazing to see the similarities.
Flora Woudstra Hablé: The film revolves around resistance to violence and tactics of survival, but it opens on a quaint scene showing women working the fields and milking cows. Why do you think the filmmakers made this choice?
May Herbawe: Earlier, we talked about how this film breaks the stereotypical image of Arab women in general. About how they’re always in the kitchen, doing nothing except taking care of their kids…
Cindy Chehab: Specifically, we discussed the archetypal image of women of war. They’re mostly portrayed as victims, you know. Always silenced or hidden. I’m not trying to invalidate what people are going through during war, but I think we should stop sharing and replicating these kinds of archetypal images online. Women, children, even men, full of blood or injured. I think this is very cruel and violent.
Flora Woudstra Hablé: Yes. It reinforces victimhood.
Cindy Chehab: I personally stopped sharing images of martyrs and wounded people. I would rather share texts explaining what is happening. You don’t know how the kid in the picture will feel when they grow up, seeing their image circulated online like that. This film breaks that stereotypical image of victimhood. It says that we are mothers, we are lovers, we wrote letters to our loved ones when they were in prison. Yeah, I think it’s beautiful.
Flora Woudstra Hablé: So you’re saying that, by showing the women in their normal village life, the film also humanizes them.
Flora Woudstra Hablé: The film depicted the women as very strong and resilient. It shows them standing up for themselves and only crying during the funeral of two young martyrs. How do you feel about this depiction of strength?
Asma Laajimi: These women are usually portrayed as people that we choose for. People that don’t have the agency to decide for themselves. But the way the director approached them and let them speak about themselves, it’s very strong and genuine. Such as the scene where a woman talks about hiding bombs in her dress and pretending to be pregnant to get past an Israeli checkpoint. All these little portraits bring back justice to these women.
Cindy Chehab: I may say something problematic, but I don’t like the word resilience. It’s been abused in the media so much. It comes with a bit of romanticizing. But if we look at the film and its women, I don’t think they are romanticized at all.
May Herbawe: Okay, interesting. Resistance is an idea, but we need resilience in order to exist. There’s a scene in the film where a woman is telling girls not to cry, not to show any sadness or frustration to the occupation soldiers. For me as a Palestinian, this is like a form of resilience that I needed. It’s part of my existence to be resilient.
Flora Woudstra Hablé: It felt like she was speaking directly to you.
May Herbawe: Exactly. The whole movie was like that for me. There was this scene in the beginning, where the woman reads the letters she wrote to her husband while he was in jail. It’s very recognizable as a Palestinian woman, this situation in which you’re waiting to know what’s happened to your partner and you want to let him know what’s going on on the outside.
You know, during the British Mandate era, Palestinian women used to sing songs to deliver messages to their husbands waiting in British jails.
There was this scene in the film where a woman goes to an Israeli jail and stands outside, calling out for her son Mohammad. She can’t find him at first, but then all the prisoners come outside, and she realizes that everyone in there is like her son. It’s like this Arabic saying, “mother of the martyr, we are all your children.”3
Flora Woudstra Hablé: To come back to resistance versus resilience, I think Cindy’s point was that “resilience” has become a bit of a buzzword, and it can come across as condescending.
Flora Woudstra Hablé: But I also fully understood May’s point about the embodiment of resilience. These women were very tough. There was a scene where a woman described being held at gunpoint by an Israeli soldier in her own house, being told to give up the location of her son. She said: “Shoot me, I don’t care!”
Their resistance was very practical in a way. Soldiers were coming, so they resisted. Simple as that. There was a beauty in it, but it’s not romanticized, perhaps because it’s also not aestheticized. The way Masri shot the footage, it’s very straightforward visually.
Asma Laajimi: It’s very impressive how the director managed to bring us closer to the people through framing. The film is mostly close-ups. I never felt like Masri wasn’t one of them. You feel such a short distance between her and the people.
Audience member: I had a question about the title. The women of South Lebanon are likened to “wild flowers”: why?
May Herbawe: Wild flowers just grow everywhere. They’re uncontrollable. You can compare it a bit to Palestine – the Israelis try to control weeds in Palestine, but the weeds keep growing. I think this is the same idea. These weeds are not planted, they just grow.
Flora Woudstra Hablé: Indigenous plants are hard to root out.
Asma Laajimi: Also, there is something in the film that is so much about the earth and how it’s so personal for them. There’s a scene at the beginning of the film where a woman describes seeing tanks rolling into her village, and she says: “It was as if my daughter was being raped in front of me.”
May Herbawe: It’s our relationship with our land. Our right to exist. This is ours, you’re invading, you’re coming. You’re taking. You know?
Flora Woudstra Hablé: That’s why the opening scene was so significant. You saw these processes of taking care of the land and what grows there. It shows indigenous knowledge and practice. It’s a sharp contrast with the zionist army, whom we don’t directly see in the film, but whose presence looms large.
Cindy Chehab: Yeah, you never see them because the film was about the women. We didn’t see soldiers or fighters in action, just scenes of the women aiding the resistance. They weren’t an army at the end of the day, they were a bunch of women and mothers trying to protect their own land.
Flora Woudstra Hablé: What do you think changed about the film by the decision to only talk to women?
Asma Laajimi: First, the audience learns that resistance is not only male. Second, that women in the Middle-East are also called terrorists. It’s a question of representation, too. Female resistance is usually made invisible, especially for the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance.
Cindy Chehab: It was very interesting, but at the same time, this doesn’t mean men aren’t important in the film. In media reports, they usually focus on victims that are women and children, as if the men are expendable. In the film, we see the opposite. These women are always mentioning their husbands and sons. The men were still present in a way.
May Herbawe: The director highlighted all the things that women do in the background during a resistance. Also, it was interesting to me that at the end of the movie, she also lets them speak about their struggles as women.
There’s a scene where a woman recounts not being allowed to go to school, but her brother is. She goes to the classroom anyway, stands outside and learns the songs. She sings them to her brother and he hits her for that.
Asma Laajimi: There was also a scene where a woman mentioned how they got sick in prison because of the conditions of the toilet. I assumed that was actually about menstruation. Period poverty in wartime is not often discussed.
May Herbawe: There was also this element of sexual violence. In one scene, a woman describes being interrogated by Israeli soldiers. When she doesn’t want to tell them about the resistance, they begin threatening to rape her.
Cindy Chehab: Another thing that hasn’t changed. You see these rape threats all over Twitter now. Women’s bodies are always being weaponized against them.
Flora Woudstra Hablé: Even men’s bodies.
May Herbawe: Indeed. The dehumanization of our men. In the beginning of the film, there’s this scene where they describe how the Israelis arrested all the men in their village.
The woman recounting the story mentions that they took the oldest and most well-known ones first. It’s a cultural thing for us to be guided by these men, we see them like idols. By taking them and breaking them…
Flora Woudstra Hablé: It breaks their dignity. If I can add to that - towards the end of the film, there’s a scene where the men of the village come back and the women are so happy to see them. It was such a powerful moment. It forces you to realize that resistance fighters are not just numbers. Each of these men is so loved by the people around them, including these women and children.
Flora Woudstra Hablé: I think we have to go towards an end, so I wanted to ask you about your final thoughts. As activists in a world that renders us increasingly powerless, what kind of inspiration can this film give us?
May Herbawe: The film gave me an idea about why we resist in the first place. We resist because we want life. We resist for life.
Cindy Chehab: Speaking as a person that left their country almost four years ago, one way of resisting is to keep talking about it. I’m very firm about the values I have when I’m encountering people. Keep having dialogues. Even though we’re not as powerful as the people on the ground, we have privilege. We have access to so many things to get our message out there.
Asma Laajimi: Adding to that, we should collectively strive to stop the silencing. There’s efforts to silence us forever, to tire us and make us shut up. Film is one of the ways in which you can speak up. The war changed me a lot in terms of my own work. I wish that would happen for artists in other disciplines too. To challenge the narratives, keep the pressure, keep up the resistance, never be tired. That’s the only thing we can do.
Flora Woudstra Hablé: So maybe, we can direct this as a message to everybody to continue talking about what’s happening in Palestine and Lebanon. And to Cindy’s earlier point, to not focus so much on dehumanizing photographs of blood-splattered children and corpses, but to see us as humans.
The acronym S.W.A.N.A. stands for “South West Asia and North Africa” and has generally come to replace M.E.N.A. (“Middle East and North Africa”) as the term “Middle-East” is inherently orientalist, positing the region as to the orient of Europe.
Herbaya (“chameleon”): الحرباية. Herbawe (May’s last name): حرباوي. The misspelling is probably due to the letter و in Arabic meaning both “w” and “y.”
The saying goes: “Oh mother of the martyr, ululate for all the young men, your children.” (يا ام الشهيد زغردي كل الشباب ولادك)