A PLOT FOR OUR
TIME
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The film’s protagonist, Amin, is a highly successful and
assimilated Arab surgeon in a Tel Aviv hospital, well-loved by his Jewish
colleagues. Amin’s privileged world is shattered when a suicide bombing kills 17
children at a birthday party in a popular café. Horrifically, the bomber turns
out to be his own wife.
Once
released from police interrogation and the shock wears off, he decides to
discover the truth about this woman Sihem, with whom he had shared a loving
marriage—or so he thought—for 15 years. His quest is a classic heroic journey
plot that takes him away from the white buildings and orderly avenues of Tel
Aviv to the ancient, teeming village of Nablus on the West Bank. This quest is
archetypal and it may be re-enacted in our own lives when everything we had
assumed to be true is shattered and we must find a new ground in which to
locate ourselves.
Ever deeper and higher Amin climbs through the old stone
streets; through shocking conversations with his relatives, who express pride
in Sihem’s martyrdom; through being tossed out of a local mosque by men who are
enraged with this secular Arab’s violation of their sanctuary, until he ascends
the steps of a church where he confronts the radical Christian cleric who was
Sihem’s mentor.
Cold
and implacable as he lights candles for the evening service, the priest tells
Amin, “Your trip here is a waste of time. I have nothing to say to you. We have
nothing to discuss.” The cold refusal to explain or engage in any way with the
grief-stricken doctor speaks of a violence deeper even than actions and
words—the violence of complete disconnection, sociopathy and contempt for the
humanity of another—a violence that is all too familiar in our own daily
headlines.
“The Attack” is not a political film. It is an impassioned
but even-handed exploration of what happens when a population is locked away
from the resources necessary for life, left powerless, voiceless and in thrall
to an evil, charismatic leader who exploits their hatred for the oppressive
system.
Following this encounter, one truth after another emerges
as Amin discovers that not only was his own family part of the monstrous plot,
but that its Tel Aviv terror cell used his very own apartment for planning
sessions during the day while he was performing life-saving surgeries. At the
end of this heart-wrenching journey to the Arab village of his childhood, his
nephew hands him a video of his wife’s last moments.
Watching it, Amin sees that Sihem tried to call him
before she left on her mission. Unable to speak with him, she wept and called
his name. He is left not with a why, but with the knowledge that there was
humanity in this woman after all: she betrayed him and she loved him. Amin becomes a man in possession of a more
terrible truth: his unknowing complicity in this crime through his blind
self-absorption in his career. Tragically, he ends his quest as a divided soul,
belonging nowhere in his bifurcated world. We last see him in flashback,
standing at the bus station where he dropped Sihem off for what he thought was
an ordinary trip to see her grandfather. “Every time you leave, I die a
little,” he says. Amin’s entire life and identity has died.
The
film is built around everything that makes story a powerful vehicle of
self-expression and authentic healing in chaotic times: it holds the ambiguity
of reality, the both/and over the either/or lens on life, and it holds a
through-line to a transformed life.
Later,
after seeing this movie, I sat with a friend at a café across the street from
Lincoln Center, New York’s famed cultural complex in a neighborhood much like
the bombed-out Tel Aviv streets in the film. We pondered the questions the film
does not answer: How could Amin not have sensed that his wife was leading a
secret life? Was he therefore complicit? These are the questions we all ask
when confronted with a terrible truth about a partner, a child, a job, our
country. My friend and I ended our conversation hours later with our personal
memories of betrayal and debating our own complicity in our country’s warmongering[CF2] .
Yet, when I sat down on my multi-colored couch banked with
large, soft pillows and three equally large and soft cats to write in my
journal, and on impulse rewrote Amin’s meeting with the radical cleric, taking
the role of the priest, the language of hatred and contempt for the privileged
and unconscious visitor who violated my space flowed easily. Perhaps
it came from my resentment, anger and disgust with the U.S government for which
I had spent years writing propaganda to pay my bills, or perhaps from trying to
thrive as a member of the #MeToo generation and a woman in a male-dominated
journalism industry. Perhaps it was rooted in the ghosts of the nursery, or
from the forgotten adults who had dismissed me as a girl child—the layers and
layers of disgust that had piled up over a lifetime, yet remained suppressed by
my “nice girl, warm human being” persona. Whatever its roots, I was surprised
at the level of untapped rage I had buried within myself—even with the many
years of healing work, especially forgiveness, I had done on myself since my
depression in 1990. Succored by the gentle but insistent purring on my chest,
my legs and at my side, like refreshing rain, I knew that giving expression to
these disenfranchised feelings was important in both my life and my work.
Writing within a story context enabled me to journey to the heart of darkness
in myself and, unlike Amin, to emerge whole.
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Writing out those walled off feelings opened the channel
to a wellspring of emotions and memories that I had erased from conscious
memory. Feeling the pain while writing in the buffering metaphor of a
terrorist, which I was unable to feel when writing biographically, was a
journey through pain to liberation into a deeper vulnerability and love for
myself and others. I felt emboldened by my writing, as I always do when I spill
the truths that only my writing voice knows and reveals through the metaphors
of character, place and plot of story. I subsequently became conscious of the
almost imperceptible hints of this shadow coldness in my daily life: the
aversion I felt so easily and the way I cut off people who I perceived had hurt
me, the subtle ways in which I tended to narrow my life to an aloof existence
up a long flight of stairs—as disconnected from visceral inner pain as from my
neighbors.
My point in sharing this experience with you is to assure
you that you are not alone in harboring unacceptable feelings that often become
exposed in the nakedness of grief and transition. Most of us tend to suppress
the unwanted figures in our psyche, much like the oppressor country in the film
locked up the displaced people in refugee camps outside its declared borders,
only to reap in one way or another the unhappy consequences of this denial. For
example, we might have a pattern of producing the opposite of our intentions.
The truth is, many of us—especially those with trauma or conflict in our
histories—cannot move forward wholeheartedly toward a happier future until we
make that hard journey to the place of shadows within.
WHAT
IS FIERCE PRACTICE?
I first heard the phrase “fierce practice” from
meditation teacher George Pitagorsky at the New York Insight Meditation Center
around the time I saw “The Attack.”[1]
George defined fierce practice in the Buddhist tradition as the courage to stay
on the meditation cushion no matter what arises, echoing mindfulness teacher Jon
Kabat-Zinn’s guide to “full catastrophe living.” [In
life, fierce practice means to face facts, carry on, make a leap of faith,
admit defeat, surrender, do things we have never done before done, go places we
have never been. Fierce practice is to maintain our unconditional commitment to
life, to truth, to a new vision and to persist to the end.
This
is what change demands of us. As you may be experiencing now, as I have, life
after traumatic experience, loss or in the undefined territory of transition,
is a jumble of non-coherent events, fears, hopes, broken dreams, haunting memories,
fragments of old stories and pieces of a fragile new reality appearing like
faint glimmers of starlight in a dark night. We are asked to pick up the pieces
and make a new life while we are feeling most vulnerable and alone.
Writing is my fierce practice,
especially writing within a story context, in the voice of characters who live
and struggle there—and more specifically, within the story plot of Quest,
referred to as “the hero’s journey” by Campbell, and later simplified for
writers by Christopher Vogler in A
Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers & Screenwriters.[2]
The
power of this story paradigm lies in the protagonist’s yearning for wholeness
in the deep stories of humanity that we all share and their struggle to win it
against all odds. This ancient story plot has been my foundation, my
through-line and my place of calm abiding through the many ups and downs in my
life. It
has given larger context to my own challenges and helped me, like Amin in The Attack, journey to the heart of
darkness in my own life. Unlike that of Amin, my journey leads to wholeness. It
is a story path that you can follow too.
What is a situation that deeply bothers you?
Whom do you hold responsible?
Who is or could be the hero who changes the story here?
Improvise a dialogue between these two characters.
What emerges for you?
2019, All rights reserved, Juliet Bruce, PhD -- from my book
[2]
Christopher Vogler, A Writer’s Journey:
Mythic Structure for Storytellers & Screenwriters. (Los Angeles:
Michael Weise Productions, 1992).
[3] Isabel
Allende, Paula: A Memoir. (New York:
HarperCollins Publishers, 1995).
