Ana Ajnubi - I Am a Foreigner

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• published: 01 Jun 2014
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This short film, entitled "Ana Ajnubi", or "I Am a Foreigner", is an exercise in the framing of the Palestinian Pastoral. Defined by occupation, hierarchy and the religious fervor that serves to justify them, I found my place as a foreigner to be inextricable from the processes of domination that oppress and subjugate the Palestinian people. Acknowledging from the start that I do not hold any claim to the contested status of autochthony, I attempt to play with my place in this pastoral landscape, and thus question the role of the foreigner in the Occupied Territories. The film begins with a shot that introduces almost all of my footage- my face juxtaposed against a pastoral backdrop as I begin to film. This was a constraint of using a GoPro camera, but in the process of editing, it became clear that this was an essential part of acknowledging the problems of documentary film. Films I crafted throughout the semester purposefully edited these images out in my quest for authentic representation. Thinking about the pastoral framework as one that distances, and calls attention to this representation, though, made it clear that their inclusion in this short film would ultimately be more complex. What does it mean for me to participate in this movement through the Palestinian pastoral? What is my relationship to the subjects of my film? How does my representation of the land reflect my own prejudices and desires of what Palestine is and should be? The caption "Another white American travels to Palestine" serves to situate the film in a belated timeframe. My entrance into this space is an entrance that has been repeated again and again, by and for various peoples and reasons. I question the relationship of the foreign national to the settler, the implication of language in a contested space, and the desire to live a normal life in a place of extreme violence. The concatenation of landscape images filmed out the window of the bus on the way back and forth from school with images of the urban refugee camp, a movie theater, and religious spaces begs the question of what exactly the Palestinian pastoral is. The Islamic call to prayer is compounded upon images of Israelis in prayer at the Wailing Wall, bringing up questions of autochthony and the worship of a physical place for what it once was. The destroyed temple is one of the major justifications for the occupation of the Old City and the government's attempts to uproot the populations there. In Palestine, this fervor over what once was has culminated in the Jerusalem Syndrome, in which visitors to the place often experience a kind of psychosis upon beholding the physical place of Jerusalem. This desire to 'kiss the ground' comes from a desire for rootedness in a place. The preponderance of relics, physical artifacts of a forgotten past, serve as a sight for much of this frenzy. From the throngs of worshippers kowtowing in the airport to those kissing the slab of rock where Jesus was lain after crucifixion, there is a sense of sacredness that carries from the point of origin into modern times. This too places the Palestinian pastoral both in the present and in the past. Rather than merely the ancient space of Jerusalem's Old City, the Palestinian pastoral is defined just as much by the complete monopoly of movement as defined by walls and checkpoints. Haunting shadows of this can be seen in the physical scaring of the land, as apparent in the shot of what once was a grove of olive trees, now a dessert of barren stumps or those of the refugee camp, marked by graffitti and, in the background, a young boy on crutches who's leg has been damaged in clashes with the IDF. This oscillation, mirrored in the conversation between myself and a Palestinian man that I was seeing at the time, parallels that between Theocritus' pastoral Idylls and his urban mimes; both are defined by the other to create the pastoral landscape. The images of the snowball fight serve as aesthetic portrayals of the violence Palestinians experience on a daily basis. Venturing out of my house with my host-sister to play and film in the snow, we realized very quickly that we were playing with boys who's skills had been honed every day at the checkpoints while hurling rocks. The same motion served at once as innocent play and a reiteration of the violence that defines this landscape. The film ends with a petition that circulated around Al Quds Bard during my time there, calling for the administration to retract their policy of hiring an American professor to teach Arabic at the school. The mention of the imperialist imposition of Western education on Palestinian students reflects the arguments of Ebony and Ivy, which recall the establishment of universities, including Bard College, for the purposes of empire and control. How is Bard complicit in these origins through their educational satellite in Palestine? This film is my attempt to confront this complicity.