In his book project,
A Stone in a Pond, Moroccan artist Mohssin Harraki examines the educational and pedagogical publications that shaped the collective memory of Morocco as a product of post-colonialism. A closer look at the academic curricula in the Arab East in the mid-twentieth century reveals that publications studied in Morocco were published by Dar al-Kashaf in Beirut, and were the same works distributed in Cairo. Until the late 1960s, the Jordanian curriculum was the same as the Syrian curriculum, but packaged between Jordanian book covers. Khalil al-Sakakini wrote books that were studied in schools in Baghdad and Amman. The Arab nation stretches from Mesopotamia to the western edge of North Africa, comprising peoples who are not Arabs and who are not using Arabic as their language of daily life. This program is situated on the borders of Arab-ness and its categorization and relies on an examination of displacement and alienation.
Arab nationalism began to gain currency as an elite call for freedom from Ottoman rule and later colonialism. In the 1960s many states adopted the discourse of Arab unity and cooperation spearheaded by Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. With politics exalting, and the economy stimulating, film production, Egypt dominated the film industry and pan-Arab distribution. Even to the present day Egyptian films remain the basic frame of reference for the Arab film industry and culture. Independent productions were not known, even in Egypt, beyond very narrow local bounds. Yet, the movement of Arab ideas across borders and local vernaculars stopped when it came to cinema in the Arab world. The film program A Lens on Syria, presented in Amman in collaboration with ArteEast in 2006, was eagerly attended by Jordanian audiences who had heard of Syrian films, but never seen any, despite the geographical proximity and the reception of Syrian television broadcasts in Amman. These films had not been, and are not, shown on satellite or terrestrial channels, nor in cinemas, and there are no copies of them available in the market. In many cases, they are banned, or have been in the past. It is also difficult to obtain clear copies of Iraqi films produced from the 1950s to the 1970s, except for those few copies saved on videotape by the actors.
In Oussama Mohammad’s
Step by Step (1979), a mass of people live their lives between the field and the school, listening to the words of the father, a man with little education and deep loyalty to the party. The village children learn to obey authority, and many join the army. The son may turn against his father: “If my father opposes my party, I’ll be forced to shoot him.” The film portrays how difficult conditions prompt young men to turn to the military, where roles and livelihoods are determined on the basis of rank. Mohammad contrasts captivating images of nature in Syria with the environment shaped by politics, showing how peaceful communities adopt violence or at least accept its presence on a daily basis.
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