I feel the ground under my feet and the earth pulling me towards it. I see the street beneath me and the sky above. I can orient myself towards the ground and I know how to stand. I am convinced my home awaits my return when I leave it and I can go about my life outside feeling grounded. In times of urgency, such as war, this sense of grounding can be violently shattered, leaving us with a feeling that the world is throwing us around at its mercy. We experience sensorial overload. However, in times of chronic crisis, or when crisis does not demand our urgent engagement, we might feel that rather than being overwhelmed by the world, we are disconnected from it. We lose our grounding, not from being thrown around at the mercy of the world, but because our sensory inputs do not correspond. Unable to orient ourselves in the world, we are unable to establish our place in it as we might see the ground in one place yet concurrently feel it in another. The world is out of our reach. We are out of sync and may experience at once a speeding up and slowing down of time, unsettling our relation with our surroundings. This disconnection leaves us in need of carefully, deliberately, contemplating our every move. Here, I wish to engage with this ‘slow’, disorienting form of vertigo by considering how images can play a role not only in inducing vertigo, but also in providing a space for healing and re-grounding. To do so, I will interrogate the work and reflections of Syrian filmmaker, Afraa Batous, through the lens of bell hooks’ deliberations on disorientation and healing. I argue that healing from the sort of disorientation produced by violence is about re-grounding and show how Batous aims to enable this through her films.

bell hooks (1952-2021) was a feminist theorist, cultural critic and poet. While her work spans feminism, racism, belonging, capitalist devastation of natural environments and more, arguably her most important contribution throughout her writings is on healing. In her deeply personal and insightful work, she placed hurt and trauma profoundly in the political and theoretical, establishing an intimate connection between pain, politics, and theory. hooks found in theory a place for imagining possible futures, somewhere life could be lived differently. Theory can be a healing place (1991), a common language, inclusionary rather than exclusionary (2015). Drawing on her own life experience, hooks connected violence with ‘an extreme sense of dislocation’ and a loss of sense of grounding (hooks, 2007: 262). Healing from the sort of disorientation produced by violence, then, is about re-grounding, about regaining a sense of belonging and re-establishing one’s place in the world, creating foundation, firm ground to stand on (2008: 2). Discussing the racism and endangerment that black US Americans experience in many spaces dominated by white, racist aggression, hooks (2014) developed the notion of the homeplace as a site where one can heal wounds and become whole, that is, regain foundation. In the homeplace, one can freely confront issues of (de)humanisation and strive to be a subject, not an object. A homeplace, then, is a site where people can return to themselves and recover wholeness. A site of re-grounding.

I meet Batous in a quiet coffee shop in Berlin, over 3000 kilometres from her native Syria, where both war and Bashar Al-Assad still prevail. She is likeable, outgoing, and friendly, yet mixed with her sociability is a reservedness – or vulnerability, perhaps – that strikes me in many Syrians I meet, from photographers and filmmakers to parents striving to get a foothold in a new country. I get a sense that they are older than their age, that their lives have been lived at an incomprehensible speed and that now, in exile, life has slowed down. This pace of life, however, can be equally disorienting and incapacitating. And images of violence can intensify this. Batous’s first documentary, Skin, premiered in 2015. She has taken a break from working on the postproduction of her second film, All Roads (2022), to meet me. We speak about images of the violence that has become an intimate everyday part of Syrian lives, both inside and outside of Syria. Unlike many other Syrian documentarists, Batous does not use images of violence in her films. Watching such images after she had left Syria had made her feel helpless, hopeless, unable to act. She does not want to pass this feeling of apathy over to other people and make them feel that ‘there is no solution’. Batous finds her most important audience to be people who ‘went through the same experience’. Her forthcoming film, All Roads, explores the dangerous journeys into exile taken by so many Syrians, as she and a group of women return to places they have passed through on their voyage. She is hoping that other Syrians who have made such journeys will see the film and recognise ‘the powerful points that they are gaining from being an immigrant and a refugee’. As she insists, ‘surviving it is powerful’. Avoiding the apathy-inducing images, she is shunning the all-encompassing presence of death, banishing it to a place where it can only peek through the cracks of life. In doing so, she is not silencing the violence and trauma that has become part of every Syrian’s narrative. Rather, she is insisting that violence and trauma is not the only Syrian story. In this focus on life and survival lies a potential for re-grounding. I see in Batous’ filmmaking an attempt to enable sites of ‘the other than the violence’ where people can return to themselves and recover wholeness. This may not be exactly the homeplace hooks proposed, but it resembles it in important ways. By putting survival, rather than death, at the centre of her films and by emphasising images and stories of life, Batous is producing sites for humanisation where the power of survival is in focus. These are sites, however fragile and tenuous, of care and resistance, where the dignity of human beings can be restored. In such sites, wounds can be healed and grounding can be re-established.

References

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