Western Representations of the Muslim woman (Part Five)

The Representation of Muslim Women in the Western Documentary Films 2/6

Hafidh Shamseddine
Anisa Saeed

However, this way of portraying Saudi women reflects the failure of the interpretation rather than of the articulation. In fact, these Saudi women ‘speak,’ but since their views do not conform to the Orientalist ideology of the documentary, they are not heard by the documentarist who, then, tries to undermine their speech with her perspective.  In effect, these women are made to be “subaltern”. As Spivak argues in the case of female as subaltern,

It is not so much that subaltern women did not speak, but rather that others did not know how to listen, how to enter into a transaction between speaker and listener. The subaltern cannot speak because their words cannot be properly interpreted. Hence, the silence of the female as subaltern is the result of a failure of interpretation and not a failure of articulation.^[23]

In the light of this view, we can say that the documentary shows the documentarist’s failure to interpret and understand these Muslim women. The documentarist does not picture them objectively; her effort to “subalternize” them is noticeable. It is clearly seen how when they represent themselves, the voice of the documentarist is superimposed to be ‘louder,’ or to put it otherwise, more influential, so as to supersede the Saudi women’s voices. However, the voices of these women can be retrieved and their agency relocated by a critical reading of the documentary that reveals the limits of the documentarist’s perspective, bringing forth another image of Saudi women— one that goes against the grain of the filmmaker’s intentions. This point will be made clear in the second section of the paper.

Although the film pictures Saudi women occupying jobs in public spaces, working as journalists, physicians, TV announcers, photographers, and pilots, it (by imposing the documentarist’s perspective) tries to place them in a subservient position.  Saudi working women seem to appear in a position that Foucault identifies as “heterotopia of deviation;” a position in which individuals whose behavior appears deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed. [24] Yet, heterotopia, Foucault stresses, is not a space of deviation that lacks any sign of power, it can be a space invested with the complexities of power and knowledge. Thus, heteretopia can be a space of resistance, a space that “exerts a sort of counteraction.” [25] In the film, a clear case of this is seen in the film’s portrayal of the veiled women: given the filmmaker’s Dutch culture where the revealing or displaying of the female body is a norm, these women’s practice of veiling appears as a deviation. However, this is not to say that the women placed in this position are not able to counteract the filmmaker’s vision.

Despite the presence of the panoptic power, the possibility of tracing resistance to the panoptic power from within the space of “heterotopia” has not been overridden.  In its attempts to show the inaccessibility of Saudi women, the film simultaneously shows that Saudi women’s resistance to the Western camera limits its power. The film’s director is frustrated very early when she starts filming. She points that she has failed to fix a single appointment for interviewing Saudi veiled women because “they” have refused to be filmed, suspecting the film’s intention for they have a lot of bad experiences with western media. This means that they intentionally aim at suppressing the Western gaze of the camera and preventing its panoptic vision. Through this voice-over narration Saudi women are represented as controlling the situation, and, hence, some of the film’s visuals and narrative structure.

In another scene, the documentarist is permitted to enter a gathering of Saudi business women without the film’s male crew and cameras. However, she enters with her own camera. Yet, she is frustrated again because her camera is limited and hence turns out to be useless; it is the women’s refusal, and not some mechanical failure of the camera that prevents her from filming. That is to say, these veiled women are the agents behind this failure. The documentarist’s failure of filming and hence controlling and exoticizing these women shows how these veiled Muslim women play a role in controlling the process of filming. “No single woman agrees to appear on film,” the documentarist says in a frustrated tone. By disallowing her to film them, Saudi women appear to have agency, denying her the power to capture them. Therefore, it could be said that, the documentarist is no longer the sovereign subject who has all the right and power to determine what is to be filmed or photographed and what is not.

In the process, another face of the veil can be detected undermining the documentarist’s view that Muslim women in this country are oppressed by an imposed veil. This can be exemplified by the scene that shows Suzzan at her home. Because she is on video, Suzzan deliberately covers herself at home. When the documentarist asks her why she is veiled though she is at home, Suzzan responds that “I am on video and do not want to be exposed to the world.” Clearly, then, Suzzan ‘chooses’ to wear the veil; she is no longer the oppressed victim whose veil is imposed on her; if the veil is imposed on her by the religious police, she will not keep wearing it as long as this force is absent. Rather, she willingly wears the veil to ‘protect’ herself from the Western gaze/camera. It is useful to evoke here Trinh Minh-ha’s thought-provoking words that “if the act of unveiling has a liberating potential, so does the act of veiling.”^[26] Indeed, in this scene Suzzan’s act of choosing to be veiled liberates her from the negative construction created in the film’s opening scene that shows her as subjugated by the practice of veiling. In other words, her act of veiling proves her resistance to the “epistemic violence” exerted by the film’s opening scene’s representation of her as oppressed, rather than her subjugation of the practice of veiling.

 Further, seeing but not seen, Suzzan is a suggestive of the impenetrability and forbiddance that frustrate the documentarist. Indeed, this Saudi veiled woman reminds us of the Algerian woman whose veil, as Malik Allula explains, indirectly conveys  a “refusal” to the intruding gaze of the western eye/camera.[27] Though Suzzan accepts to appear in the film at her home, she is still wearing the veil. Thus, turned back upon herself, upon her own impotence in the situation, the documentarist “undergoes an initial experience of disappointment and rejection,” to use Malik Allula’s words.[28]

To be continued HERE

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[23] John Mcleod, Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 195.

[24] Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” p.5, accessed April 25, 2014, http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf

[25] Ibid., p. 4.

[26] Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Not You/Like You: Postcolonial Women and the Identity and Difference,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 416.

[27] See Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

[28] Ibid., p. 7. Emphasis is original.

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