‘The very worst things’: violence and vulnerability in Djamila Sahraoui’s Yema (2012)

ABSTRACT

This article explores the connections between vulnerability, gender and terrorist violence in relation to Algerian filmmaker Djamila Sahraoui’s Yema (2012). The film is situated in relation to Sahraoui’s oeuvre, and within wider debates around the changing nature of political violence and its representation in Maghrebi and Hollywood cinema. This comparison underlines Yema’s innovatory formal and thematic focus on slow narrative time, sparse aesthetics and fragile, intimate images. The article then examines the concept of vulnerability in relation to terrorism, in particular linking Sahraoui’s choice of formal techniques to the film’s thematic staging of various modes of physical and psychical vulnerability. The allegorical and mythological motifs used in Yema are considered in relation to the gendering of the figures of victim and agent in the film. Through a feminist reconfiguration of the myth of Medea, the article suggests that in the film’s dramatisation of a mother who inflicts suffering, larger questions are raised about personal and political responses to the feelings of exposure that terrorist violence engenders.

KEYWORDS:

• Yema
• violence
• Algerian Civil War
• Algerian film
• gender
• vulnerability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Benkhaled argues that in many Western academic readings of Algerian film, ‘films become transcripts of the nation’s session on the psychoanalyst’s couch’ (2016, 95). Although I have eschewed trauma theory in my reading of the film, in the final sections I do point to national parallels between the film and political events in Algeria. Yema is constructed as a national allegory, and therefore I draw on political theory and sociology to inform my analysis of this theme.

2. The central premise of Cavarero’s argument is that twenty-first-century terrorist violence has shifted from the realms of physical terror into the aesthetic sphere of horror. Because of this contemporary focus, most of the examples she draws on arise from the context of Islamist violence and the ideology of Salafism, although she does trace a history of terrorism using examples drawn from the French Revolution onwards. While Islamist terrorism is pertinent to the context of Algeria, the arguments I seek to set forth here regarding the feelings of vulnerability evoked by terrorist violence are relevant beyond the Islamist context, as suggested by the general quotation from Charles Townshend, a renowned historian of terrorism in Northern Ireland.

3. ‘In the constituent elements of the film, I avoided prosaic facts, to allow primordial elements like water, fire, earth, and air to express themselves.’ All translations from French to English are mine.

4. ‘I had to find a way to film these body-to-body moments […] the physical confrontations […] the intensity of the gestures.’

5. ‘You sow death.’

6. ‘I have always been affected by the question of Algerian women in history. From my earliest age, she seemed to me to be primordial. All I have lived, everything I have done until today has had my mother as its primary source. In the end, my mother has made me what I am. I think that this is true for most men […] concerning language, the awakening of my consciousness, it is the mother who makes the child speak its first words, she is the person who constructs his world.’

7. ‘A woman facing the madness of men.’ ‘Only this feminine conscience can break the vicious circle of endlessly renewed violence.’

8. ‘Yema is the Mother […] the biological mother and the motherland, Algeria.’

9. ‘The violence of Algeria lives in me […] Traditionally, in all cultures, women don’t take up arms. If my heroine is violent, she is violent in another way […] The Civil War appears in the confrontation between the two brothers. Their mother, Algeria, is horrible to them. She has raised them in a climate of violence. Without loving them in the same way.’

10. ‘Greece, the cradle of ancient tragedies that I have read and reread since my childhood.’

11. ‘The mother, the old woman, stays alive while the young people are dead. That’s what violence leads to! To this monstrous inversion of the course of things.’

12. ‘My mother has made me who I am.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria Flood

Maria Flood is a lecturer in film studies at Keele University. She previously worked as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society for the Humanities in Cornell University and at the École normale supérieure in Lyon. She has published in Modern and Contemporary France, French Cultural Studies, Nottingham French Studies and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies. Her monograph, France, Algeria and the Moving Image: Screening Histories of Violence, is based on a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and was published with Legenda, Oxford, in 2017.