In “Timbuktu,” the cattle herder Kidane (center, played by Ibrahim Ahmed) and his family live in a tent in the mountains near Timbuktu.
The past few days I’ve been thinking about some kind of “best of 2015” post, and I have to say I didn’t get very far. Whatever I wanted to say about the year I think I said here already.
One of the things I love about this time of year is finding everyone’s Top 10 Films of the Year lists. Scanning these lists, I realized there are two stories, told from a different perspective– from the “inside”– that I want to mention.
It’s the story of what it is like to live in the warring areas of the world– Afghanistan or Mali– neither of which can be called the Middle East in the way we’ve flattened the whole warring world– and experience the arrival of fundamentalist Islamists.
The first of these accounts is the film Timbuktu (available on Netflix), by Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako. Everyone should see this film. It is a simply and beautifully told story of a village taken over by Islamist jihadists. The village is traditional, with a kindly imam at its center who mediates local conflict and for a while is able to mediate between the villagers and the fundamentalists. How can a woman sell smelly fish while wearing gloves? He helps negotiate accommodations to keep the society functioning. The soldiers themselves sneak a cigarette and discuss European soccer.
Perhaps the most moving depiction in the film is a group of children playing soccer. Their ball is confiscated by the military, and yet they continue to play, a beautiful ballet on a dusty pitch that captures the irrepressible energy and play of children and, perhaps more importantly, their unity in play, an operating society writ small in the architecture of a game of soccer.
Eventually, however, the world of the militants takes over. The unflinching violence and harsh judgment plays out and the imam’s voice is silenced. And still, even as tragedy unfolds, the film is infused with such beauty and dignity– such strength and stability if I dare say it– that one can remain hopeful there will be a future after this has passed.
The second account is from my new favorite podcast: Snap Judgment. On our way to Chicago for Christmas, we streamed an episode that contained a story that is likely to stay with me for the rest of my life. A story so vivid and moving that it should be a film. Really. Please. Someone make a film of this story.
The episode was called “The Fall Guy.” The segment is “Extremist Makeover.” It tells the story of a couple of teenagers in Kabul, Afghanistan, and their relationship with a local Taliban thug. As narrator Qais Akhbar Omar says, life in modern Afghanistan was just going along, when all of a sudden these guys arrived, broad-shouldered with long hair, “as if they walked out of the bible,” and started running the country.
Their neighborhood Talib, who called himself Mullah Qafar (sp?) and stood on the roundabout with a whip in his hand and kohl on his eyes making sure women were properly covered, falls in love with one of their neighbors. And he seeks the help of the two teens to help him woo “a city girl.” How the boys transform this man, and the effects on him of his introduction to modernity, is astonishing. Listen to it, because it will tell you more about the underlying cultural conflicts than any media story about ISIS. Not the whole story, which can never be told, but a story you are not likely to hear anywhere else.
It could easily be called, “How a Mujahideen is completely undone by Rambo 3.”
In 2016, I will be reading Qais Akhbar Omar’s memoir, A Fort of Nine Towers.
I taught English composition to college students in 2001-2005, and one of my greatest tasks was trying to keep my students clear on the difference between the Taliban and al-Qaeda (a difference important to understanding why the war in Iraq was not against the same enemy as the war in Afghanistan) and between Islam and fundamentalist Islam. The response to Syrian refugees– the little boy drowned on the shore in Western clothes vs. the specter of a terrorist in Paris who snuck through as a refugee– shows just how quickly we can confuse the victims of the wars and the warring factions. Or just put them all in the same category. Canada has probably done the most in presenting the refugees they’ve welcomed– showing us the families who no one could confuse with terrorists.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Georgina Zires, centre, 16 month-old Madeleine Jamkossian, second right, and her father Kevork Jamkossian, refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war, as they arrive at Pearson International airport, in Toronto, on Friday, Dec. 11, 2015. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette
And while you’re listening to that episode of Snap Judgment, you might want to stay tuned in for the next story, Peter Aguero’s lovely and lyric “Nellie’s Pond.”