For decades, we grew up looking at westerns where the Indians were presented as bloodthirsty savages, attacking peaceful white settlers without reason. They scalped, violated, killed, and we hate them. Why then? Because American films and series said it, and we had no other story to contradict this vision.
For years, the “bad guys” were the Russians. The ultimate enemy. They were cold, brutal, inhuman, still plotting against the free world. Again, why do we hate them? Because Hollywood, with formidable efficiency, imposed this image in the collective unconscious.
Then came the era where the “Arabic villain” became the essential figure of evil in blockbusters. A caricatural evil, dirty, fanatic, bearded, howler, carrier of bombs and destructive of everything that resembles a civilization. That too, we saw it on the screen, again and again, until it becomes, for many, a truth.
In all these stories, the Americans are always on the right side. Even when the danger comes from beyond the stars, they are still the ones who save the world. Are extraterrestrials attacking the earth? It is the American pilots who fly to the rescue, the White House that directs the response, the American president who gives the speech that galvanizes humanity. Even in the intergalactic imagination, it is always America that embodies order, justice and salvation. And it must be recognized that she knew, with consistency and talent, to build this reassuring image of herself, by investing massively in her cultural industry.
American cinema, in particular, has enabled the whole world to know America and its history, in its smallest detail: since the arrival of the first pioneers, including the Civil War, the Pearl Harbor catastrophe, the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the prohibition … by the power of its narrative, America has imposed its exploits, its inventions, which we spontaneously Compati, like the murder of Kennedy or the September 11 attacks. America has been able to go close, familiar, memorable. She knew how to make it become a reference, a figure known to all, almost intimate. She knew, by the strength of her story, to enter our collective imagination, in our emotions, in our ideal, sometimes even in our aspiration to look like her.
It is no coincidence. It is a construction. A strategy. A maturely maintained cultural choice. Because the narrative is not only to tell a story. It is imposing a vision of the world. It is broadcasting an imaginary which, by dint of being repeated, becomes a reference, then a truth.
And yet we, Arabs, also have our own story. We have our version and our reading of the world. We have our identity. Our own exploits. Our great figures, our struggles, our dreams, our injuries, our beautiful periods … but all this remains unknown, marginal, peripheral. Because we didn’t tell it, or not enough. Because we have let other peoples tell for us – sometimes against us.
This observation is neither resentment or complaint. There is no reproach to those who have been able to build their own story there and impose it on the world. There is only the lucidity to recognize that by dint of silence, forgetting or passivity, we left the others to populate our imagination for us. And that it is time to reverse the movement.
The peoples who do not master their own narrative, who do not tell their history and their stories themselves, which do not disseminate their vision of the world, find themselves trapped in the stories of others. And that’s what happened – and still happens – to the Arabs. Not only do we not control the image that others have of us, but we do not even produce it.
Because a powerful narrative cannot be built in a generation. It is based on continuity, massive and regular production, an ability to tell yourself, to impose itself in the world collective imagination. The Americans understood this very early, the Russians attempted it with more or less success, the Indians achieved more and more thanks to the Bollywood boom. But the Arab world, despite its cultural richness, still struggles to reclaim its own story.
However, cinema, television, literature, video games, theater itself: all these tools are contemporary battlefields. They are the ones forging the global imagination. They are the ones who determine who is “the good”, who is “the villain”, who is “modern”, “backward”, “civilized”, “dangerous”, “fascinating”, “exotic” …
It is time, therefore, not to cry on the narrative of others, but to build ours. To produce, to broadcast, to tell. To dare strong, multiple, complex accounts. To no longer always wait for the West to film us, describe us, caricature.
Because a people without story, or whose story is always dictated by others, is a people who disappears from the world imagination. And in the long term, of history.
Neïla Driss
