“They fight us in every way they can, but in this one thing they can’t beat us: our memory.”
Uttered in the course of a very short conversation in Carol Mansour’s 2023 documentary Aida Returns — produced by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) — this phrase is all the more powerful for being casual.
Aida Returns features the artist’s mother, Aida Mansour, during her last days, together with some scenes from an earlier recording made when she was younger, in which she talks about how she left Palestine.
Born Aida Abboud in Jaffa in 1948, Aida was forced out of her home when Tel Aviv launched a full-scale attack on Jaffa in April, heading in a boat to Beirut. She took only a bag of belongings, thinking she would be back in two weeks’ time at the most.
Elaborating on her displacement, she describes how — together with the majority of Palestinians in Beirut — she first stayed at a hotel, having to move to a smaller hotel when the tourists flocked in summer. Her workplace continued to pay her through Barclays bank, and that was how she survived.
In the course of this story, Mansour adds some scenes of her mother in a hospital in Canada, connected to several medical machines. These are her last days, and she is always joking, “I’ll die now.” But one time she says, “Now there is no Jaffa.”
While Aida tells her own story at two different points in her life, Mansour displays family photos and archives: Michel, her father, and her two brothers. While in the hospital, Aida focuses on her memories of Jaffa. She remembers the names of her neighbours, the streets, her house. She describes all kinds of tiny details about her house with its back garden, the nearby church, and daily walks by the sea. She also remembers her British neighbour who wore his tuxedo every night to dinner. Mansour uses both professional and phone cameras in a seamless flow.
The 75-minute documentary resolves into a powerful moment when we see Mansour holding a container during a family dinner, looking confused and hesitant before asking for two plastic bags. A few minutes later, we find out the container holds her mother’s ashes. Mansour splits the ashes into two separate bags, and the scene shifts to Jordan where we see two of Mansour’s friends driving a car into occupied Palestine, passing Israeli checkpoints as they are heading to Jaffa with the ashes. At one point they buckle the seatbelt over the plastic bag in the back to hold it in place.
The northwest coast of Jaffa is now part of Tel Aviv, and Mansour is not allowed there unlike her friends who happen to have different papers. But the aim is for Aida’s ashes to reach her hometown by the sea.
All the while Mansour is on a video call with her friends instructing them what to do with the ashes. She describes the location of the house and, just before they get there, Aida’s neighbour passes away, as a text from Mansour informs them. This helps them reach the house after a long search.
It is just as Mansour described it, with the little stairs and back garden. Mansour’s friend Raeda, a playwright, finds a spot next to an old tree to bury some of the ashes.
They also reach a Christian cemetery where they bury some more at a spot Mansour is particularly keen on. Raeda covers it with flowers. The last stop is the sea, where Raeda scatters the rest of the ashes at sunset. And the film comes to an end.
It is interesting that Aida says “There is no Jaffa” even though the city is mixed, and the Arab population includes some of her own neighbours who help Mansour’s friends find the house still standing with an Arab family living in it. Perhaps what she meant was that there was no Jaffa for her.
Heartbreaking as it is to witness such determination to bring a displaced woman back to her home to rest, it is clearly significant for Palestinians in a practical, almost material way.
Another remarkable thing is the resilience of Palestinians and their ability to support each other through unthinkable difficulties, but also the understanding they have of what others may perceive as sentimental or unnecessary. The real fight, they seem to have understood, is over memory. And they will not be defeated on that front.
This is a powerful, poignant documentary. Once the mission is accomplished, the viewer leaves with a heavy heart and a strange species of relief. The film highlights how ordinary events, like the death of an elderly woman, take on mythical proportions when people have been pushed out of their homes.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 11 July, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: