Have you ever Killed a Bear or Becoming Jamila, 2013 - 2014
25 min 25 s, Fichier numérique (Fichier proRes 422 HQ), 16/ 9, couleur, son, arabe sous-titré français
In 2011, Marwa Arsanios began Al-Hilal, a multi-part project grounded in the rereading and reworking of formal and rhetorical elements drawn from the Egyptian cultural magazine of the same name. She focuses in particular on issues from the 1950s and 1960s, which promoted Gamal Abdel Nasser’s socialist and modernizing model of society [1]. Have You Ever Killed a Bear, or Becoming Jamila forms part of this project. It takes as its starting point the magazine’s extensive coverage of Algerian women soldiers during the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), especially the iconic figure Jamila Bouhired, a celebrated fighter with the National Liberation Front (FLN) [2].
In Have You Ever Killed a Bear, or Becoming Jamila, Arsanios seeks to uncover the mechanisms by which Bouhired became an icon of anti-colonial resistance. She meticulously deconstructs the iconography and language used in Al-Hilal: the number of times the word “woman” appears in article titles is counted and recited [3]; pages depicting women are held up by a young actress who holds them in front of her face, like masks [4], then points her finger like a gun directly at the camera, mimicking the gestures of female fighters shown on the magazine’s covers [5]. This young woman is an actress preparing to play Jamila Bouhired in a remake of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966); by confronting cinematic representations of the Algerian female fighter, Arsanios thus continues her investigation. The actress’s gestures and lines, filmed primarily in close-up, are interspersed with scenes from Pontecorvo’s film, whose soundtrack runs throughout the video. “Another one of those films,” the voiceover laments in literary Arabic [6], a reference to the flood of images and narratives about Djamila Bouhired that have contributed to replacing the historical figure with a fictionalized character [7]. By re-enacting Bouhired’s story and producing a new iteration of her image, Arsanios not only sheds light on the making of the icon but consciously contributes to its construction. This is especially evident given that the video Have You Ever Killed a Bear, or Becoming Jamila was originally conceived as a live performance, sometimes performed by Arsanios herself [8].
More than a portrait of Jamila Bouhired, the work is a reflection on performance—on role-playing and acting, but also on the continual reworking of historical facts and their interpretations. Through references, repetitions, and imitations, the video engages in re-enactment, an artistic strategy that interrogates both history and the present [9]. In this case, it especially seeks to reconsider the role of women in history. As feminist philosopher Geneviève Fraisse points out in a conversation with Arsanios [10], Algerian women were excluded from the official history of their country’s liberation despite being active participants in it. By attempting to bring together two versions of Jamila Bouhired—both as icon and as a historical actor—Have You Ever Killed a Bear, or Becoming Jamila tests and affirms the capacity of fiction and art to supplement, or even replace, the historical record. At the same time, it grapples with a fundamental contradiction, as Arsanios explains: “We always want to become Jamila, but that’s very problematic, very naïve, very nostalgic; it is all these things at once that we cannot allow ourselves” [11]. Indeed, it is no longer possible to revive past utopias such as Nasserism. Yet Have You Ever Killed a Bear, or Becoming Jamila, along with the broader Al-Hilal project, argues for the importance of reformulating these utopias through art in order to awaken the desire for utopian thinking in the present.
In addition to Pontecorvo’s film, the video draws on other references. Two static shots show the actress mimicking gestures from Hand Movie by Yvonne Rainer [12], also created in 1966, the same year as The Battle of Algiers. Hand Movie, a minimalist choreography, was performed using only one hand while Rainer was bedridden in the hospital, serving as an act of resistance against her inability to dance. Further adding to the narrative, the voiceover tells a more literal story of emancipation over handheld footage shot by flashlight moving through tall grass and bramble [13]. A woman recounts how, for the first time, she chose to disobey her male comrades at a military training camp and called for a bear to be killed —though in the dark, it was perhaps a fellow soldier. This anecdote, which gives the video its title, is drawn from an “amazon,” one of the close-knit bodyguards of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi [14]. The introduction of this new narrator further complicates the narrative: voiceover becomes, alternately and simultaneously, that of Bouhired, the artist, the actress rehearsing her part, and Gaddafi’s bodyguard. The intertwining of voices and multiplication of perspectives create distance from the character and confirm that, as Arsanios explains, she turns to Jamila primarily, “as a way to rethink political emancipation” [15].
Nadine Atallah
Translated by Laurie Hurwitz
[1] One of the key leaders of Egypt’s 1952 revolution, Nasser became prime minister in 1954 and president from 1956 until his death in 1970. His politics and ideology centered on the urgency of building a strong nation-state and on uniting the people around a common project in the aftermath of decolonization.
[2] See: Jurji Zaydan (ed.), Al-Jaza’iriyat al-basalat [The Brave Algerian Women], Al-Hilal, Cairo: Dar Al-Hilal, November 1957.
[3] See the video from 3:31 to 3:58.
[4] See the video from 3:31 to 5:06.
[5] See the video from 7:21 to 7:29.
[6] See the video at 5:40 and again at 23:05.
[7] Bouhired is cited in numerous anticolonial films and texts. The Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine dedicated a film to her, Jamila, the Algerian (1958), which is cited in Arsanios’s video (from 22:04 to 22:19; an image from the film appears from 22:33 to 22:37). Georges Arnaud, her trial lawyer alongside Jacques Vergès, wrote Pour Djamila Bouhired [For Jamila Bouhired] (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1957).
[8] The performance was notably presented at the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kyiv in 2012, where the artist received the Future Generation Art Prize, and at the Palazzo Contarini Polignac during the 54th Venice Biennale in 2013.
[9] Aline Caillet, “Le re-enactment: Refaire, rejouer ou répéter l’histoire ?” Marges, no. 17 (2013): pp. 66–73, https://marges.revues.org/153, accessed June 10, 2017.
[10] Marwa Arsanios and Geneviève Fraisse, “Conversation,” in Suspended Spaces #3, Inachever la modernité (Paris: Beaux-Arts de Paris Éditions, 2014), pp. 278–291.
[11] Ibid., p. 291.
[12] See the video from 17:17 to 17:55 and from 21:36 to 22:21.
[13] See the video from 8:10 to 13:46.
[14] The reference to Gaddafi’s bodyguard appears in the original script of the performance Have You Ever Killed a Bear, or Becoming Jamila, but was removed from the video. The origin of the anecdote was confirmed by Marwa Arsanios during an interview with the artist (Marwa Arsanios and Nadine Atallah, interview at the artist’s studio, Beirut, September 13, 2015, n.p.).
[15] Marwa Arsanios and Nadine Atallah, ibid., n.p.
