| Light
Breaks the Darkness: An Interview with Rania Matar, Part 1 / 2010
January 21 by Sariah Choucair-Joseph
Rania
Matar’s photographs illuminate and surprise us with joy. Exploring
themes of feminity, defiance, family and metamorphoses, her photographs
capture the cataclysmic moments when insecurity becomes defiance,
and destruction becomes rebirth; when past lives recede and futures
are grasped. Focusing on women and children, she reminds us of the
common, treasured moments that make lives but never headlines. Her
first monograph, Ordinary Lives, was published in September 2009
and is available for purchase here. It is with great pleasure that
I bring you the following interview, in two parts.
Could
you tell us how you began the series of photos in Lebanon? They
convey the reality of the war in a very real, even relatable, way.
I wondered, looking at them, if they helped you deal with the reality
of Lebanon’s destruction during the wars – the shock of leaving
Lebanon as a student in the eighties and returning to more suffering
and destruction.
I grew up during
the civil war in Lebanon. When I was twenty I moved to the US to
continue my architecture and art studies at Cornell. The mind has
the power of selective memory, and I made myself forget all I had
lived through during the war. I avoided anything political in college
and focused on enjoying college life, graduating, working as an
architect, getting married and having kids (4 of them!).
While pregnant
with my 4th child, I took photography workshops and instantly fell
in love with the medium. Eventually, I think as a reaction to the
constant, negative news about the Middle East in the West, especially
after September 11, I wanted to tell a different story about the
Middle East. Things seemed to fall into place for me in 2002 when
I went to a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. I saw beautiful
women and children living in terrible conditions and I was humbled
by their dignity, their resilience, and the beautiful moments one
can find even in less than ideal conditions. I started photographing
the beautiful moments of daily life in the Middle East. Telling
human stories through photography became my passion and, eventually,
my career.
In 2006, I was stuck in another war. This time I was a mother myself
and had my children with me. All my forgotten memories of the war
came back to me, all the horrors of it. At that point my priority
was getting my kids out of the country so we left via Damascus.
At the Lebanese/Syrian border we saw trucks loaded with women and
children. It was surreal, and a wake-up call: every single person
living this war (or any war for that matter) has a story to tell.
I instantly decided to return to Lebanon as soon as the war ended
to document and photograph the war’s aftermath, the time when the
world forgets about the war and moves on to other big news, but
a very real time for the people who suffered the war. It is the
moment they have to come to terms with all they have lost and rebuild
their lives all over again.
War and its effect on people is very real to me and now, in some
ways, I am dealing with it. Living in the US, I watch, like everyone
else, news and wars from the comfort of my living room – almost
like watching a movie. We hear of the destruction of far away places
we don’t relate to and of the death (collateral damage) of people
we don’t know. It is so abstract. I wanted to show that war (again
any war) affects normal people like you and I and is very real.
Something
that really strikes me about your photos of the Middle East is their
lack of politics. We are so used to seeing the destruction and suffering
of war and of the Palestinian crisis in terms of the politics of
the region – there always seems to be an implicit slogan or call
to arms. The absence of propaganda makes your photos more effective.
Do you take the photographs with the intent to de-politicize the
situation or is this a natural product of your method?
I am glad you
asked me this and that you get the feeling from my work that it
is not political. I very consciously stay away from causes people
to dehumanize their opponents, to look at one another as friend
or enemy, similar to us or different. I think it is by looking through
political lens that we stop looking at people as human beings but
as friends or enemies, as similar to us or different.
When we put politics aside we can look at people’s faces and eyes
and see the person behind the politics, a person who is just like
us. We can see a person’s humanity. What drove me to this work was
that I was sick of the politics of this whole area, sick of politicians
and their slogans, and sick of the lumping of people into one category
or another.
Some
of my favourite photos are of the women in the Middle East, particularly
the project named “The Veil: Modesty, Fashion, Devotion or Statement.”
What I particularly like is that they never explicitly state the
women’s religion. A viewer would have to be familiar with the religious
melting pot in Lebanon to appreciate the differences. Could you
speak a bit about the interest veiling holds for you?
Located between
the West and the Arab World, Lebanon is a melting pot of religions
and cultural influences. People from different religious and cultural
backgrounds interact on a regular basis. As a result, there are
many different concepts of female fashion. Women in Lebanon do not
have to wear a veil. When I grew up in Lebanon, very few women wore
the hijab. It is a pretty recent phenomenon.
In the West
people tend to associate the veil with oppression and a lack of
education thus giving the veil a rather negative connotation. I
became very interested in learning about the veil and the reasons
some Muslim women choose to wear it. I found that here is just a
different story to be told. I was trying to portray the woman behind
the veil. For me the emphasis was not on her religion, even though
it is implied, but on the girl, the young woman, the mother.
The project started when I was photographing a girl in a refugee
camp. She was 9 years old and spent about an hour finding the perfect
veil to match her clothes. She was braiding it, layering it, changing
colors, etc. It reminded me of my daughter, who was the same age,
who spent about the same amount of time fixing her hair in the morning.
I was fascinated to discover that the veil had a fashion aspect
to it among young women, and I became interested in understanding
the reasons behind its comeback, and the different meanings it carries.
Photographing women and the veil became another aspect of chronicling
womanhood in Lebanon.
|
