For Sama (Für Sama)

Special, GB/SY 2019, 95 Min., arab. OV + engl. UT

Von: Waad Al-Kateab & Edward Watts

Vielleicht erscheint es ungewöhnlich, den Dokumentarfilm „For Sama“ von Waad Al-Kateab und Edward Watts im Programm des Pornfilmfestival Berlin zu entdecken. Es geht weder um Sexualität oder Pornografie, sondern die Regisseurin vermittelt mit ihren selbst gefilmten Aufnahmen ein realistisches Bild des grausamen Krieges in Aleppo. Angesichts einer zunehmend volatilen Weltlage war es mir ein Anliegen, den Film „For Sama“ ins Programm des PFFB 2022 einzuladen, um eine weitere Perspektive auf die heutige Welt zu präsentieren. Die syrische Regisseurin zeigt eindringlich aus ihrer persönlichen Perspektive, wie es im Inneren eines Krieges aussieht. Sie wendet sich mit dem Film an ihre Tochter, der sie ein Zeugnis hinterlassen will. Wir sollten weiter hinschauen, auch wenn der Fokus der Medien schon beim nächsten Konflikt liegt.

Ich habe Dahlia Damoiselle, eine queere trans Autorin, gebeten, sich den Film anzuschauen und einen Essay darüber zu schreiben, der länger und persönlicher als erwartet wurde. Der Text „There’s Always a Screen Between Us“ ist nur auf Englisch verfügbar. Ich würde mich freuen, ein interessiertes Publikum zur Vorführung begrüßen zu dürfen.

Jürgen Brüning

 

Zur Autor*in:

Dahlia Damoiselle ist eine queere, transgender Autorin, Bildungsvermittlerin, Sexarbeiterin und das Kind von Kriegsflüchtlingen vietnamesischer Herkunft. 2010 diente sie in der US Armee in Afghanistan, eine Erfahrung, die sie zur fanatischen Anti-Imperialistin radikalisiert hat.

Instagram: @expendablefemme

 

There’s Always a Screen Between Us

by Dahlia Damoiselle

Mankind, which was in the age of Homer an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is how it stands with the aestheticization of politics that fascism pursues.

– Walter Benjamin

When I’d been asked to write this offering to accompany the screening of For Sama for its inclusion in the Berlin Porn Film Festival, I hesitated. First, I wondered how the two could possibly be linked. Then, I thought that a Syrian should be the one to make this commentary, but Syrians aren’t really the audience. The subtitles are in dozens of languages other than Arabic. The BBC and PBS translated the documentary into dozens of languages for distribution for the West.

I’m also Western, in a sense, but not quite. There’s always a hyphen, a border wall, a screen between my country and my heritage. The love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice of the film, both directed and shot by Waad al-Kateab, is intimately familiar to me. Once upon a time, my Vietnamese-American mother was the dark unknowable other that al-Kateab and her host of war-flung refugees is today. I could write about how as artists, (or however you identify, be you smut-peddler, ass-auteur, professor of perversity, oil driller, or any other variety of fuckmonger) we should view texts widely – the best novelists write poetry, after all. I might bring an activist message about awareness or call you dear readers to action. I could tell you, as any good mother might, to sit your pretty little ass down and keep those beady eyes on the screen, like good little simps – that maybe if you’re especially good, I’ll give you a particularly juicy prize. But I won’t.

Something more complicated rattles in my mind, a discomfort or uneasiness I can’t quite shake. This isn’t a film review, either. I won’t tell you you must watch the film, even if I believe you should. Nor will I attempt to do any better at describing the text (as a porn starlet in professor’s clothing are wont to call most media) for you than al-Kateab herself has. This essay can only be a modest offering.

#

I had to call my mother after watching “For Sama”. I saw her in every scene, in every one of Waad’s voiceovers:

“A Lesson: To try and live a normal life in this place is to stand against the regime.” I hear my mother use “America” in place of “regime”.

I hear her again through Waad’s voice, amidst the destruction of her city, Aleppo: “Sama, I know you understand what’s happening. I can see it in your eyes. You never cry like a normal baby would. That’s what breaks my heart.”

My mother is telling this to her cousin returning broken from fighting Americans – substitute teenager for baby. She’d tell this to me, the week I come home. To my brother, a year later. This breaks my heart as well. I feel something unique, a kind of abjection I don’t mind – I appreciate my helplessness at the looming threat of meaning breaking down as a result of, as Bulgarian philosopher Julia Kristeva claims, the loss of distinction between subject and object; between self and other. Given Kristeva’s definition, perhaps I’ve become far too accustomed to the presence of horror in my life. I suspect, in some small way, you have as well, but maybe not in regarding the pain of war.

I wanted to tell my mother on this phone call that I understood her better now. I wanted to say that I could forgive her body, absent of a present tense, her unwanted warmth, and her rage, no matter what had passed between us, I could forgive her rage. My mother said that she understood this part of me, my soldier’s heart, but truth be told, that wasn’t at all what I wanted from her. I spoke the word “Syria” like “Viet Nam”, “Aleppo” like “Hai Phong”, “I see you”, as in “I see you so clearly that it’s impossible to not cry”.

She knows I killed a man, maybe she also knows about the other three, but I’m unashamed of this most grievous of sins. I wonder if she knows that I’m a porn actress. In my roles, I’ve never killed a soul, never abandoned a nation to its fate, never burned a village with my filthy, pliant, gaping, hungry nude form. Performing in queer porn has brought me so much joy and delight and affirmation of my body, so why am I too ashamed to tell my own mother? Simply put, I want her to continue to have this fantasy of her daughter as a scholar, an intellectual, a woman capable of being loved by mothers. Maybe I’m very wrong in making myself the subject of a fantasy that carries such disastrous consequences.

#

I won’t pretend to have a thesis or lesson for you. In truth, I don’t know who should write this essay linking war to pornography. I’ve never been to Syria, I have no doctorate in an appropriate field, and I did not have to flee as my mother had. My instinct would be to tell you to listen to Syrians themselves, to listen to Afghans, Iraqis, Bosnians, Rwandans, Uyghurs, Rohingya, and too many peoples to do justice here, but the truth is – by and large – Westerners don’t listen, and who am I to cart out the dark, unknown other and ask them to entertain you with war porn?

I’m sorry, dear reader, but I’m not the right person to explain this to you. I doubt anyone could be. Though the connective threads between war and pornography might be tangled, they are connective nonetheless. What are blockbuster films starring muscled gun-bearing heroes and hyper-realistic first-person-shooters and snuff-films passed off as news coverage if they are not pornography? And our cultural narratives and myths give us the material from which our violent delights might spring forth and give us yet more material with which to entice pleasure and even self-flagellate.

For example: The same year that boys in soldier drag roleplay as 21st century Freikorps charging up the US Capitol steps, Afghans fleeing the Taliban fall from a C-17 transport as it lifts off from Bagram’s tarmac. They meet the same fates as jumpers from the World Trade Center towers, another event immortalized in pixels and resurrected for us to watch ad infinitum. Play the jumpers on repeat, and two decades later, the war has spread to Nigeria, Yemen, Central African Republic, and too many places to list here. It spreads into the Western heart as a twisted form of nationalistic revenge porn. It spreads into the mind by way of the image’s manipulation and commodification, spliced and augmented and put forth as resolute truths – “Always remember, Never forget”, and the natural conclusion “Make America Great Again”.

Many of these boys hail from states with laws designating sex workers as human traffickers, where Magnus Hirschfeld would be jailed as a groomer for his work, where trans folx like me are being legislated out of existence. These states’ most popular category of internet porn happens to star transgender workers. In 2021, at least fifty-seven transgender people died by violent means in the US. More than half of the worldwide 375 reported victims of murder are sex workers. The majority of the victims are mostly trans-feminine, mostly BIPOC, and altogether “other”. Another disturbing trend in internet porn searches during America’s so-called War on Terror includes hijab porn, whose popularity more than doubled in some European nations in the years concurrent with the height of the ongoing refugee crisis. We watch this porn and the porn that inspired it on repeat, and if we do not watch, the images have a nasty habit of making themselves unavoidable. The line between sex and war blurs, and I must ask why it isn’t enough to simply kill, displace, and conquer someone—why is it necessary to fuck them as well?

To an audience, there’s a problem of reality when it comes to screens. No matter how filthy or gore-drenched an image might be, the screen always mediates its reality. French Sociologist Jean Baudrillard once asserted that the Gulf War did not take place—but what about the lives lost, homes destroyed, and landscape polluted and irradiated by war? Baudrillard says these images of war are mediated by pundits and politicians and experts who interpret for us, package this construction, this ideal of war for prime time, and what we get isn’t the reality of war, but a virtual reality that takes its place. Furthermore, any image, be it a photograph, written description, or helmet cam footage from a grunt in Kandahar Province, is always incomplete. So much more happens around the frame that it can never capture, and what’s omitted is often as important as what’s present.

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When I fuck for the screen, I have real orgasms, experience real joy, and perform real labor that goes into it, but there’s always the screen between myself and the audience. I need the screen and this virtual reality, it so strongly suggests for the fantasy to feel true.

In 2021, I shot a tender scene for AORTA films depicting two trans-femmes waking up in bed and making love. I’ve been told how compelling the scene was, how in love my scene partner, Dove, and I must be. These strangers are always disappointed to learn that the romance on the screen was just for show. They don’t know about the sweltering August heat with only short breaks in between takes for air-conditioning, the staging and re-staging of bodies and cameras and props, the repetition of acts by mouths and asses and lips and cunts and girl-cocks and holes from different angles, and the utter exhaustion of fucking and stopping and adjusting and repeating that went on for four hours.

Similarly, I thought I needed the screen to explain my distant war to a man I fooled myself into loving. I sent him my awkward, clumsy, chaotic home movies, depicting a murdered civilian’s village demanding answers, a field of oil tankers aflame, the results of an ambush: vehicle in the background shattered and smoking as bewildered soldiers scurry in search of the enemy. For me, they’re artifacts of my time as a gangster for capitalism, pursuing America’s longest military racket. They don’t show the men I murdered, the homes we destroyed, or the dead civilians left in our wake.

A screen helps when I try to reflect on the past. A screen helps me tell how my mother’s story is inextricable from mine. I watch “For Sama”, and see my mother in the teenagers, the children, the young activists and Waad as a mother. I see my uncles and grandfather in the men. I see America in the Russian jets and regime artillery barrages. For Sama and Waad and those like them, I can see their future in my mother’s past. I give enough of her story in my writing, so I won’t give it again here, except to say that even behind the most moving pieces of prose is the unavoidable sin of omission.

The screen or page you read this on hides the broken porcelain and dents in the drywall and visits to the hospital and visits from police and absences and silences and _____ that occur behind closed doors that even the mind seeks to conceal from bodies besieged by fathers’ hands behind closed doors and husbands’ fists that cannot forget the war. I know that for many of my readers, my writing can feel cathartic. But from behind the screen, how could you ever hope to carry the burden we characters, imaginary to you, alive and flawed and very real to me, carry after the story ends?

On the drive back from that porn shoot in August, 2021, Kabul was on the brink of falling. I spent the whole ride alternating between sobbing and calling people in the military, in government, in refugee agencies, anyone who could help my friends get their families out. No one could help. Behind the screen, this reality is invisible from the fantasy.

When I returned to the city, the man I fooled myself into loving refused to see me. He’d been jealous because of the job, which brought with it silence and distance. Dove, my scene partner and pretend love, hugged me, wished me well, and drove home. The audience of my films, my writing, or my clumsy home-videos of wartime violence never see the month that followed—not the friends I lost to neglect, not me weeping helplessly into my hands in front of my students, not me putting drugs into friends veins or my own as a way of stemming what felt like unending tide of sorrow. How weak I’d been when I tried to finally leave the man. How much I wanted to believe him when he told me that being friends wasn’t enough for him, that he loved me, that he wanted me to be his.

I listened, because fantasies about love are so intoxicating when all we know is hurt. Maybe I told myself I loved him because the fantasy alone was enough, even if it was only for show. Though I can’t be entirely certain, I wonder whether all I’d ever been to the man was a fantasy of a woman, before he’d had reason to be jealous, before he peeked behind the screen and its spectacle and saw my very flawed, very human complexity.

#

These dead are supremely uninterested in the living: in those who took their lives; in witnesses – or in us. Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to us? “We” – this “we” is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through – don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is (..). That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.

– Susan Sontag

I’m a decade older than I was when I returned home from Afghanistan, a period where shaky handled footage of wartime violence by American troops in combat was very much a novelty – a new kind of amateur war pornography, to accompany the high-production pornos shot by professionals embedded with the troops or Hollywood directors and their studios. But as I said before, there is so much missing from these texts. Manipulate the image, and they can fit any narrative. “Our soldiers are heroes. Our enemies are savages. Patriots stand for the flag and kneel only for Christ”. War is peace, but at the end of the film, the picture is always incomplete.

I’m a decade older, a woman now, and a worker. Not much has changed. Shaky amateur scenes of girls just like me fill message boards and the darker recesses of the internet, alongside the high production values of companies shooting trans women with rock hard cocks ploughing whatever orifice is up for offer. But even the work I’m most proud of, like that tender, caring, fervently/achingly/desperately in love scene with Dove, remains very much susceptible to this problem of distance, of malleability, of falling victim to the hateful desires of others.

I know the lines. Circular thinking always leads back to the same places. “The transgenderism trend is a harmful to impressionable youth. Children shouldn’t be forced to undergo mutilation. Homosexuals are child groomers/rapists/human traffickers. Schools are forcing their pedophile agendas down our children’s throats.” Ignorance is strength, but perhaps especially so when faced with your enemy’s undeniable humanity.

Ten years later, and amateur war porn has gone mainstream, much like porn featuring transgender people. My news feed is littered with clips from the ongoing War in Ukraine, a war that the West suddenly seems to care very much about. We cared about Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, yes—albeit in very different ways. In those wars, we were the Russian Federation, and both the objects of our national desires and crimes were almost indistinguishable from Putin’s.

As a veteran, I can’t help but watch these snippets of drone camera footage or the shaky handheld shots of combat. I watched anyway, knowing very well what happens outside the frame. The videos do not show the thousands of Ukrainian soldiers killed in battle. They cannot show the interiors of tanks as they’re struck by the lauded Western-supplied anti-tank weapons—how the pressure of penetration turns soft-tissues to jelly and the armor turns to a pressure cooker and shards of molten steel perforate the crews’ flesh and they panic and scream for their mothers. I wonder whether anyone would go on watching these clips if they had to wade in the gore. I wonder why I still do.

Nor is it any secret that sex workers face our own war here at home. See: the hundreds of reported murders of trans people (not to mention murders that have gone unreported) – most of whom were sex workers. See: “Anti-degeneracy” and “Anti-human-trafficking” and “Anti-sexual slavery” laws on the books and up for votes across the so-called civilized West. See: each and every right-wing politician or pundit or grifter who’s happy to indulge in the fruits of sex workers’ labor or commit real acts of degeneracy, trafficking, and sexual bondage that they allegedly oppose.

Maybe what I’m trying to do with my writing is to disabuse you of those fantasies that have hurt us all so deeply. Maybe I want to find some constructive means of problematizing the work we do so that the smut we make breaks rules and conventions to create new, lasting meanings. Maybe I just want you, dear reader, to see yourself in the other, so that you might find yourself in the details of Waad and Sama’s lives. While any of these points might be valid, I’m still troubled by the neatness of such conclusions. Maybe all of them are valid, maybe none of them.

I’m troubled because of the screen. Because of the simultaneity of abject horror and joy and cognitive dissonance that comes with viewing “For Sama”. Al-Kateab’s film both invites and repulses, affirms humanity and shows just how easily it might be stripped away. People whose clothes were ripped from them by shockwaves from barrel bombs lie dead, covered in dust and debris, on Aleppo’s streets, and a few of them are attractive, sexy even. Bodies like yours and mine adorn Western screens placed beside bottles of lotion or lube and some rag to wipe up cum. We make our bodies attractive, sexy in their movements and self-inflicted nudity. Like Schrodinger’s Cat, we may as well be both and neither alive and/nor dead. It matters not to the viewer, we (as French Philosopher Jaques Lacan might put it), the “objet petit a” of our viewers on the other side of the screen; we, the coordination of their desires. I find no such object-causes of desire when watching al-Kateab’s film. I find that slippery sense of the abject.

I wonder what might happen were I to make a porn film similar in form to “For Sama”. Unlike al-Kateab, I cannot and will never be able to bear children, though I want to so desperately. Who would the film be for, then? I still wonder what it would look like, to let the screen subsume us both. What fantasies of my life might be broken for the audience? Would you feel the fire in my eyes after the last soldier/aid worker/bureaucrat tells me: “No, there’s nothing anyone can do for one Afghan family?” Would you fool yourself into loving a man who did not love you the way you needed? And if you watched us fuck, would you believe in that screen-love as insistently as strangers who to tell me, “your love was so inspiring?” Where are the borders between the real and unreal if you watched me slip into nightly K-holes on my couch between fits of sobbing, drawing a razor across my skin, screaming on the phone with my mother who knows all too well there’s nothing she can say, my flashbacks coming like seizures electrocuting my limbs, and the students who don’t know what to say to console their teacher?

The month that comes next, you’d watch me meet a woman. Watch us dance and drink and smoke and fuck. Watch as fucking turned to love-making and back to fucking again. Watch the first time we each said I love you, and finally understand that this is what everyone means when they say the word love. I wish I had an answer, but I really don’t know. There’s always a screen between us.

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