{"id":10082,"date":"2022-09-15T11:27:46","date_gmt":"2022-09-15T09:27:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=10082"},"modified":"2022-12-25T11:22:25","modified_gmt":"2022-12-25T09:22:25","slug":"mohammad-shawky-hassans-ode-to-queer-love-in-berlin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/mohammad-shawky-hassans-ode-to-queer-love-in-berlin\/","title":{"rendered":"Mohammad Shawky Hassan’s Ode to Queer Love in Berlin"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Selim Mourad in Shall I Compare You to a Summer\u2019s Day?<\/em> (2022) by Mohammad Shawky Hassan (photo courtesy Aflam Wardeshan\/ Amerikafilm).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Queer possibilities for the impasse of narrative in Shall I Compare You to a Summer\u2019s Day?<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/h4>\n

Iskandar Abdalla<\/h4>\n

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From the very first moment, Mohammad Shawky Hassan’s film Bashtaalak Sa\u2019at <\/em>or Shall I Compare you to A Summer\u2019s Day?<\/a><\/em> (which had its premiere in the Forum section at the 2022 Berlinale Festival), seems to fall into conflict with its own possibilities of narration. How many stories can we tell about love? And if there is only one story to tell, how many versions can it have? And who shall tell which part? Shawky Hassan invokes Scheherazade (played here by Donia Massod), the mythical narrator and the greatest among all storytellers in One Thousand and One Nights, <\/em>\u00a0to weave a story or rather several stories of love that seem to elude the very act of \u201cproper\u201d telling. But Scheherazade\u2019s exquisite art of telling lies apparently here not in coming up with a storyline that would sort out the quandary of narration and enthrall the listeners\/viewers with the audacity of its perfection; it lies rather in questioning narratives; in entangling the tools and trajectories of their formation; in troubling their temporal dependencies and spatial framings.<\/p>\n

Scheherazade\u2019s storyline will soon be doubled and tripled. It frees itself from the alluring grip of its renowned teller to wander among the respective voices of all those who lived out the story(ies). The story becomes thus multivocal, multifaceted, embellished with intricately curved lines; an assemblage of memories and sensations of love that shift its owners \u2014 all nameless protagonists \u2014 that exchange positions, move between places, times, and bodies.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am struggling to understand where each story begins and ends\u2026 Do they even end? Or do new stories begin without us returning to the first one?<\/em>\u201d asks a nameless protagonist (Selim Mourad) his invisible counterpart, while lying naked under a flowery blanket and facing us \u2014 the viewers.<\/p>\n

We are then not alone in facing this puzzling conundrum. The protagonists themselves seem to get lost in the maze of a plot that weaves its stories around and through their bodies, that ties them together in times and sets them apart in other times, that seems to be ruled by a unique order of incidents. The incidents themselves can be recalled, nevertheless one can never be sure who told what first and why one keeps on telling the same stories one already knows. Is that what we can call a queer narrative<\/em>?<\/p>\n