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Gcunt Meetingstrippeddevi Adult Meeting Es 1 Meeting Stripped Devi Seeing Feminism in Exile; The Imaginary Maps of Mona Hatoum

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Raw, violent, confrontational, Hatoum's early work reveals a need of the exiled to prostrate herself before the brute laws of exile's symbolic order. And yet, even the symbolic order of exile is not sealed into completion; it has its cracks and fissures, interstitial, imaginary spaces that Hatoum works generatively within. In Imagining Desire, conceptual artist Mary Kelley calls attention to the ways in which symbolic formations such as gender identity and nation can reveal, in their most virulent displays, their potential for failure: "The nation, like gender, has a psychic border, and a 'display' of nationalism can also fail to cover the frame of a shield that has lost not only its economic metal but also its diplomatic sheen." [54] In The Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan argues that desire is a product of gaps in the symbolic order. Describing the "interval intersecting the signifiers," Lacan writes: "It is there that what we call desire crawls, slips, escapes, like the ferret." [55]

Hatoum's 1988 video piece Measures of Distance (figure 5) draws upon exile's configuration of proximity and distance to open up a space in which it is possible to expose the cracks and fissures in the patriarchal symbolic order—displayed to extremity in times of war—and to represent an imaginary relation that allows for a nuanced depiction of the mother's desire. It is in the intersection between the signifiers of war and those of patriarchal authority that the specificity of feminine desire emerges into visibility. In this fifteen-minute video Hatoum intersperses film footage and photographs of her mother taking a shower, as well Hatoum's voice translating her mother's letters into English, recorded phone conversations between mother and daughter in Arabic, and the Arabic script of her mother's letters moving across the screen. At one point, the mother discusses the possessive anger the photographs provoked in Hatoum's father. Since he considers her his property, future collaborations must be kept secret.

The materialized letters on the screen are an important choice; they suggest Measures of Distance is a reflective step back from the earlier pieces' insistent separation of the body and language. Measures of Distance marks a transition from the demand to represent herself as an exiled, isolated, fundamentally physical other to the desire to represent the complex material and linguistic relation to another's exile—her mother's—across multiple impediments and mediations. The harsh and compelling addresses to the viewer in the earlier pieces have been tempered into tender responses to the mother's loving address. Hatoum compels viewers to watch but does not demand that they witness. With its eloquent beauty remarkably untainted by sentimentality, Hatoum witnesses the patterns of distance and returns within her family's and country's multiple losses by rendering them. The Arabic script of her mother's letters moves across the screen and is both a visual barrier to and a visual means of seeing the maternal body as a signifier of home and security. Lynn Zelevansky writes that "[t]he handwriting looks like barbed wire, acting as a fence or a divider, signifying remoteness." [56] But the Arabic letters are also the means through which to see, hear, and communicate with her mother. The script's proximity to the representations of the mother's body reveals that despite exile's cruel impediments the language of the mother tongue isn't irrevocably distanced.

These letters, as English speakers will know from the translated voiceovers, address a particular reader — "My Dear Mona." The multiple ways Hatoum represents the letters — aurally, materially, and in two languages — signifies multiple means of expression, despite or because of exile's impediments. And the way the film foregrounds, rather than hides, Hatoum's presence through the cuts and splices of the visual and aural scenes gives ground to the possibility of response. The desire to represent her mother desiring her through multiple representations of communication juxtaposed with her mother's private desires, signified by the photographs of her in the bath, lovingly fills in the absences and gaps of the film. Hatoum asks her viewers to see, read, and hear her mother's presence and absence in her life through the gaps and fissures exile and patriarchy have imposed, underscoring Caruth's point that trauma "denies our facile empathy and rush to comprehension, and demands a different kind of listening and a different speaking." [57]

The different kind of understanding the trauma of exile requires opens up new ways of seeing and representing the mother's sexuality. While Hatoum represents the continual loss and retrieval of the mother, and aesthetically plays with representations of her presence and absence, there isn't a repression of the phallic signifier—the signifier of the mother's desire—as there in the child's "fort da" game as analyzed by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Hatoum represents her desire to represent her mother's desire while simultaneously representing the difficulties of that negotiation. An innovative imaginary has shifted into emergence. In Renee Beart's words, "the figure [Hatoum] presents is likewise a desiring subject, a desiring mother." [58]

When discussing Measures of Distance, Ella Shoat and Robert Stam write of the intimacy exile can offer: "Paradoxically, the exile's distance from the Middle East authorizes the exposure of intimacy...mother and daughter are together again in the space of the text." [59] Perhaps because exile enforces a reticence to represent with certainty, Hatoum manages to represent the mother outside of normally repressive symbolizations. Baert remarks on the video's original contribution to the feminist imaginary:

While the earlier pieces represent the displacement and separation of exile as uncrossable physical boundaries that violently impedes expression, in Measures of Distance Hatoum focuses on the displacements and separations of time and language. By aesthetically directing subjective experiences of them, Hatoum employs impasses as partial means to expression and connection. While the earlier pieces render the exiled self as a primarily physical other, Measures of Distance reveals the way that otherness provides access to another's subjectivity as it appears within and through the intersections of history and language. This access to another asserts the possibility of "recreating identity in the liminal zone of exile." [61]

Measures of Distance represents what the early pieces work toward: ethical singularity. As Zelevansky writes,

Both mother and daughter express a desire for responsive, responsible, caring, and particular experience within "something like normality," a key component of ethical singularity, according to Spivak. [63] Furthermore, her mother's wish to make videotapes and take photographs together expresses a desire to "reveal and reveal, concealing nothing." [64] Attending to the "body" of Hatoum's work, I think viewers are asked to desire the links between a feminist imaginary and ethics Measures of Distance—its complicated and lyrical tissue of desire and its impediments, its historical and personal particularity—offers, because the other pieces distance us so far from it.

IV. Exile: A Light Sentence?

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