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 family’s 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. Rabab’s 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, Rabab’s 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 Rabab’s hand performs a conversation with her father’s, 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 emotions——tracing, 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 don’t appear as given or inherited. Rabab’s hand moves rather hypnotically: not entirely feminine, assertive, or contained. Her father’s 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, Rabab’s 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 viewers’s levels of cultural awareness. There is no easy resolution for the viewer’s 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 encounters——linguistic, cultural, generational, and those of gender——but 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.