Opening up

Recently I wrote about noticing people having unmet needs for talking:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2024/03/shortcuts-in-speech.html 

I have a lot of sympathy for that, but there was something else recently that gave me some trepidation:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15307068/ 

The Mother of All Lies is a 2023 Moroccan film that recently played at the Cascade Festival of African Films. 

The film is not linear.  

In 1981, heavy price increases for basic food supplies led to the Casablanca Bread Riots, which inspired a heavy government crackdown. The official government death toll was 66, but the opposition reported 637, which seems more likely.

To protect that lie, bodies were taken and dumped in a mass grave, buried over and locked away. 

One thing that aided the government's ability to tell their lie is that there is only one known photograph, and it doesn't show much.

The movie starts with a much simpler lie. When she was a child, director and narrator Asmae ElMoudir wondered why there were no pictures of her. Her mother said there was and brought her a photo, but it was a photo of three strangers.

Later it turns out that her mother stole that photo from the school, so her daughter would have something. There were no photos because grandmother (Asmae's mother's mother-in-law) forbade them. 

One early segment of the film reenacts young Asmae sneaking out and getting a photo taken and hiding it, the only photo of her when young.

From what we know at that point, Grandma is an old bag -- that is made clear early on -- and there is a nasty scene of her calling Asmae's mother a thief and a liar. The mother doesn't even deny those words, just repeating that it's her daughter and she will tell her what she wants. When her mother sees the picture Asmae took all those years ago, she commends her. "Good for you."

Still later we learn that the grandmother was married when she was twelve and gave birth to twins, who died shortly after having their photo taken.

Some rules about idolatry can seem to forbid photos of humans, but most people don't interpret them that way, perhaps unless the worst happens.

For Asmae, at the time she felt like with no photos you have no history. One can see how she got into film. 

As we go over national and family history, the re-enactments are done with little clay figures in a small replica of the neighborhood. Asmae's trip to the photographer happened there, but so did the Bread Riots, the subsequent arrests, and the disappearances.

Being in the space away from home (at home the walls have ears) and having those visual reminders -- to jog the memory but also to provide some distance -- is how Asmae gets her family members and two of their neighbors to talk about what happened. 

You would hope that over forty years later there would be no fear in talking about it, but even with a memorial, there are still protesters trying to get more information. They wave photos of their dead. One woman cannot get her sister declared dead unless she affirms that she died of natural causes. 

Using toys or drawings or other ways to get at trauma is not unknown, but the area where I started to get nervous was as people did start talking about the events, and how much it hurt them. One wished he were dead. 

They were struggling as they faced these memories, and I worried for them; were they gong to be okay?

There is so much more in the movie than that, but that was when I was most alarmed. Could they bear up under facing that past and speaking their pain?

I remember a period in my life when I felt so fragile that a kind word would have shattered me into a million pieces. I was just trying to hold it together.

And yet, in that non-linear film, it did seem that everyone was a bit lighter after they came out on the other side, including Grandma.

It can be okay, but it can be a messy process getting there. 

There can be a lot of drama that does not result in healing, but sometimes the only way to healing is through mess.

We need to be able to make space for that.