The Fiction of a Fixed Point: The Films of Rolla Tahir*

In 1990, Iraqi forces entered Kuwait and began a seven-month occupation that resulted in the first Gulf War. At the time, I was a child living in Muscat with my family. My mother, informed by a civil war, bought cases of bottled water and boxes of white tapered candles that remained stored under our staircase for years. New students with unfamiliar Arabic accents enrolled in our school. US and British navy personnel spent their shore leave at the malls and souks. 

Rolla Tahir’s 2018 experimental short documentary Sira (biography) is a re-telling of one family’s exodus from Kuwait at the time. A woman’s voice (Tahir’s mother) in Sudanese-accented Arabic recounts the family’s experiences “at the request of my youngest daughter… she wants me to tell her about the Iraqi invasion.” Arabic popular music is layered over home videos of families gathered in celebration, which then leads to archival footage: a couple playing backgammon, khaleeji folkloric performances, desert cityscapes, Ancient Egyptian paintings. In Part 1, the narrator glosses over the journey out of Kuwait that took them through Iraq. “Days passed us like years and what happened happened on the way. Anyway…” In Part 2, the family makes it back to Sudan, where there were different hardships, and they emigrate again, this time to Egypt. 

“you only leave home,” writes the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire, “when home won’t let you stay.” 

Born in Kuwait, Tahir is a Toronto-based filmmaker and co-founder of the Toronto Arab Film Festival. She attended the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Her documentary and fictional films are thoughtful considerations of what it means to be (from) somewhere else when saudade and loneliness collide. 

déraciné (uprooted), Tahir’s 2019 fictional short film, can be imagined as a story of immigrants displaced yet again, possibly of one of the families referred to in Sira. A father (played by jazz musician and composer Waleed Abdulhamid) and daughter live alone, together in a depressing basement flat somewhere in urban Canada when immigration officials further break down the family unit. Tahir explores displacement and alienation at the most personal of scales: her earlier film, Int’maa (belonging) (2018), focuses on memory and ritual as a daughter navigates her life alone in the West (full disclosure: I have a voiceover role in this film). 

Algerian folk singer Dahmane El Harrachi’s song “Ya Rayah” (the one who is gone) could be considered an anthem of sorts for Arabic-speaking immigrants. He directed the song’s cautionary lyrics to those that left their homelands, as El Harrachi himself did for France: “How much time have you wasted and how much do you have left to lose?” In the ‘90s, the song was covered by another Algerian émigré to France, Rachid Taha, who updated it with more contemporary instrumentation. Its message still resonates. 

These multiple geographies are inextricable from the narratives of Tahir’s characters. Immigrant stories can be reduced to East-meets-West moments, but Tahir more truthfully converts them into the points in time when new geographical threads are woven. In her films, different Arabic dialects interact with each other as well as with English, and references are made to pan-Arab and East and North African rituals and traditions. 

Tahir’s intimate examinations of immigrant narratives use language, tradition, and faith to weave together a wistful look at what it means to leave ______ behind. And underscoring them all is an intuitive understanding of the multiplicity of geographies that we carry with us, that our histories contain the memories and influences of so many different places that sometimes, the way we respond to “Where are you from?” depends solely on how much emotional and mental effort we are able to expend. 

There’s a scene in déraciné when, in parting from his daughter, the father says the first part of the shahada, or Muslim testimony. The daughter responds with the second half, a familiar exchange at moments of parting. Tahir’s narrative converges in this moment of separation that contains both a farewell and a degree of protection—and invites a consideration of all of the moments of separation that predicated this last remaining relationship of physical proximity. Rather than possibly risk manufacturing nostalgia, Tahir’s approach reveals the fictions of geography that dictate who we become when we leave where we come from behind. 

In her 2021 film A’hwa (coffee), Tahir again reveals her deft handling of how geography is crucial to identity and yet ideally should not restrict understandings of how a person can be in the world. A’hwa presents the types of conversations that can only be facilitated by coffee and hookahs—it’s a uniquely Toronto cultural artefact that is a wistful take after the shisha ban. Smokers from different cultural groupings discuss religion, history, immigration, and family in a disarming manner among clouds of shisha smoke. Tahir herself is one of the conversants in the film, where she discusses how she found community in shisha cafés after first moving to Toronto. 

In once there was once there wasn’t (2020), Tahir once again explores immigration and its dis/connections, this time while navigating her one-year-old daughter’s experiences through the pandemic. In the short film—commissioned by Greetings from Isolation—Tahir edits together moments from technologically mediated family calls with archival photographs and videos from her family in Kuwait and Sudan. Here, Tahir’s film invites a consideration of immigration as it relates to the second generation and their connections to other places through the global network of connections they already come into the world with through their parents. 

My own personal geographies and histories have led me to this particular moment. Tahir’s films allow us to understand the lived reality of immigration, separate from the sometimes-trauma of departure, and into the more mundane everyday moments and what it means to be from some particular place. At which moment do we come to belong to a fixed location, if ever? 

For more on Rolla Tahir’s work, see: https://www.smokingapples.ca 

Nehal El-Hadi is a writer, researcher, and editor whose work explores the relationships between the body (racialised, gendered), place (urban, virtual), and technology (internet, health). She lives in Toronto, where she is the Science+Technology Editor at The Conversation Canada and Editor-in-Chief of Studio Magazine. 

*The title of this essay was taken from an interview I conducted with cultural theorist Fred Moten for MICE Magazine in 2018. “Imagine,” he said to me over the phone from New York City, “if there could be a geography of displacement. A geography that’s not predicated on the fiction of a fixed point.” 

This article is published in issue 38.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue