Civil War and Narrative by Karine Deslandes Fabrice Mourlon & Bruno Tribout

Author:Karine Deslandes, Fabrice Mourlon & Bruno Tribout
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Hostage opens with an informational inter-title that credits 53 videotapes to Souheil Bachar, who has donated them to the Atlas Group and allowed only tapes #17 and #31 to be screened in North America and Western Europe. The amateurish-looking footage mimics the format of captives’ videotaped statements, including a taped up flag or piece of cloth on the back wall. At the start Bachar provides very precise instructions on how the tapes should be screened, dubbed and subtitled. He asks to be dubbed into English with a neutral-toned female voice, while his speech is constantly interrupted by editing and glitches due to the rudimentary technology. His testimony focuses especially on the time he spent together with the American hostages, culminating in a rather Orientalist account of the Americans’ anxiety over the guards’ sexuality, and the way they were both attracted to and repulsed by his body. The relationship with the Other is mostly lived through the filter of fear and the perceived threat of homoerotic desire.

The invention of the character of an Arab hostage permits the insertion of a subaltern voice into the historical narrative of the hostage crisis. As such, this fictional witness-character acts as a corrective to the official narrative, allowing in turn a deconstruction of the ways in which subaltern identities are represented in the media, as the scrupulous attention for the details of Bachar’s visual (self-)presentation makes clear. Although not dismissing this widely shared assumption, 22 art historian Vered Maimon has emphasised the way in which the fictional character of the testimony allows us to undo “clear identifications and divisions,” moving beyond conventional clashes of civilisation. 23 There is no attempt to make this fiction believable. Bachar is played by the well-known Lebanese actor Fabi Abi Samra, making his fictional status immediately apparent at least to a Lebanese audience. Rather than personifying the emblematical representative of an ethnically defined group and giving voice to a politically and historically marginalised subject, as Maimon notes, Bachar is a split character: difference is not projected only outwards, but is also mapped onto himself in the rift “between voice and body, speech and noise, actor and role, fictional figure and real event”. 24 These evident rifts open fissures and gaps in his portrayal and self-presentation, constantly frustrating identification and producing a sense of estrangement in the viewer. In Maimon’s words, the fact that Bachar is an imaginary character serves to “expose the fictional character of any collective form of belonging.” 25 If the internally split figure of Bachar challenges the logic of partisan, identitarian identification, its testimony is however incorporated within the equally imaginary collectivity of the Atlas Group. At a speculative level, as Osborne has suggested, the fictional collectivity of the Atlas Group “is a stand in for a missing political collectivity.” 26 Through the group-form and the global connotations implied by its name (Atlas), Raad portrays a speculative, albeit non-existent collectivity, offering the model for a post-national and post-identitarian collective subject.

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