benjaminteicher.com – freelance writer

‘I don’t read the news much, or not recent news anyway. But I did see a piece about a man from Birmingham who raped his child like 1000 times in three years.’ A pause. Which is like, what, three times a week.

I just thought, that’s wrong innit? Its disgusting. Because home is supposed to be a place of sanctuary.

So I wrote this poem from the perspective,’ he stopped and wet his lips, ‘of the little girl:

Morning, laying in my bed,

the sound of mum going to work, of car door close

and engine rev. Then the sound I dread:

Crrreeeek. Crrrreeek.

The door opening.

Crrreeeek.‘

At this point I could not absorb the description of the rape he gave, which was rather graphic, although mercifully not in rhyme. I had begun to shake with horrified laughter, a kind of irrepressible laugh of such force I have not experienced outside of a church or school assembly. I took great interest in the menu while my shoulders quaked.

He finished.

Silence.

For.

Effect.

‘Now I know that was a bit dark.’ Pensive look. ‘But, I mean, its not all roses is it?’

The thing that impacts you most about Chahine’s Bab el Hadid (Cairo Station) is not the stark and passionate cinematography, nor is it the brutality at the heart of the film and its main character, disabled newspaper seller Qinawi, played by Chahine.

What is really disturbing is how Chahine winds Qinawi’s violent lust into everyday sexuality.
Qinawi spends his days at Cairo’s Central Station, selling newspapers, but most of all watching the women that surround him, whether passing through on journey’s, pose in stockings for newspaper advertisements, or, like him, making their living at the station. Qinawi is in particular Hanuma (Hind Rostom), the drink seller, who is already engaged for Farid Chawki (played by the actor of the same name), and who laughs off all of Qinawi’s ineffectual advances. As the summer heat bears down on Central Station, Qinawi’s infatuation boils over into a dangerous obsession.

I’ve never seen a more genuine, nor sobering portrayal of lust. We watch Qinawi as he watches erotic dramas unfold that he will never be included in, as he paws over newspapers freshly saturated with erotic Western imagery and pastes them on the wooden walls of his pathetic shack. We also watch him watching others, station workers lusting after and gently harrassing women as they pass.

What makes the film unique, for its heritage anyway, is the occasional attention Chahine gives to the women who are the object of his and others’ lust, women who live their lives constantly buffeted by the desires of men which reach out initially from the watching eye.

Chahine takes this everyday activity, watching, desiring, lusting, and shows how easily this spills over into violence. We not only see the women he desires, but we see the intensity of his longing growing until it completely consumes him and he is only a violent hunger barely contained by a thin membrane of skin and basic sociability.

But it is not just looking which is the problem, rather it is the lack of reciprocity, the looking without looking back. When Qinawi’s fantasy – of marrying Hanuma, building her a house by the sea, giving her children – is about to be punctured forever as she readies herself for marriage he decides to murder her. This fantasy is doomed to failure because it is impervious to the desires of Hanuma. It exists in spite of what she desires, not because of it. Its failure only feeds anger into Qinawi’s succession of lascivious fantasies.

This eventually drives him mad and in the film’s conclusion he is straightjacketed and sent to an asylum moments before he would succeed in marrying Hanuma. But what is really disturbing is that Chahine sets his madness on a continuum that begins with the desires of ordinary men. For what sets him apart from the other men gathered at this nexus of human interaction? The men around him are able, ocassionaly at least, to satisfy their desire. Qinawi, with his broken body, pride and masculinity can not. Otherwise they are not that far apart.

Qinawi’s violence began in his desiring eye. Chahine ventures that looking, an activity at central to the way men express desire – all men, not just sadistic lunatics – in fact commingles with violence and hatred and for this reason, Bab el Hadid makes for uneasy viewing.

First of all, I was impressed by the levity of the show. I guess this was part a response to what I can avoid but call the image problem of contemporary feminism. I’m inclined to believe this is not so much to do with certain people who identify as ‘feminist’, but with the success of a subtle campaign waged by – who? – some collective subconscious mysogyny, the kind of thing that would be represented as a dark cloud in a whirlpool if depicted in a 1980s television movie for children. Anyway I don’t want to get absorbed in this question. The auditorium was filled with laughter, genuine laughter, not helpfully indulgent theatre laughter (the knowing chuckle one hears at performance of Shakespeare) but laughter that was very much the sound of tension being released.

Secondly, I was captivated by the presence of bodies. The end of the first part of the show involved approximately fifty women dancing naked. I heard people say that it was desexualising, I wouldn’t quite put it that way. I agree that it wasn’t arousing, or at least not in that particular way, because it was rousing, but I felt more that the layers of everyday pornography through which, speaking for myself, I feel conditioned to view women’s bodies was lifted away. What was it about the context that achieved this? I think it was the power of a collective of women dancing unashamedly while naked. The masculine gaze (yes, back to first year) just didn’t function in that context. It broke down and I was forced in its absence to look at woment’s bodies anew. It was beautiful.

Nic Green’s Trilogy is a show about women. That said, the other thing which was particularly resonant for me was the subtle address Green makes to the men in the audiience. The other cliche about feminist art is that it is ‘men hating’. This label is deployed as a way of circumventing any critique that a work of art might make against patriarchy and also those nasty things in your own life which are the reality of oppression, that you wish could pretend were the hallucinations of a bunch of women with an axe to grind.

I doubt that women members of the audience remember this as acutely as I do. The performance evoked the famous Town Hall meeting, where Germaine Greer and others joined a panel with Norman Mailer to debate Women’s Liberation. I say it was famous but then I can find next to nothing of detail on the internet, except this footage. Anyway, in the meeting, sections of which were played on a big screen, Mailer goes into one of his frothing fits, begins a torrent of abuse in which his hatred of women is revealed. The play then cuts to a new ensemble of dancers (ensemble, is that the word?) one of whom is a man, the only man in the play. He is dressed to resemble Mailer. And he says something like ‘The man in the video is not me. But my biggest enemy is thinking that he is not in me. That I have defeated him.’ And its true, this is a real danger for young progressive men, to look at the patriarchal archetype and think, fuck, I’m not like that, just because this person seems so plainly unlike oneself. This line was an arrow driven at the all-the-more sophisticated misogyny of young, progressive men; a welcome warning against complacency.

Finally, what was most effective in the performance was the way in which Green and her performers used silence. As my mate Andi pointed out, silence is dangerous in theatre, you have to have a lot of confidence that you’re not about to lose the audience. It was used to particular effect in one scene to utterly crush that kind of facile humour which takes the politics out of misogyny. If you can’t laugh, you take things too seriously. You shoould lighten up, submit to our laughter. Anyway. Green shows a placard held aloft by a man behind a campus rally of feminists which read ‘Iron My Shirts Bitch’. The audiences immediate response was nervous laughter. Green and the other leading performer broke the tempo of the show that had been established and settled into a deep contemplative silence. This silence was removed from the haste and shallowness of everyday chatter where someone make a joke of this nature and this allowed the kind violence and hatred underlying such a comment to emerge from the protective shell of its humour. It was quite disturbing.

Aside from this, it was superbly, expertly choreographed. I’m just not equipped to talk about that.