What is left and what follows after displacement

Responding to Yuluu by Fatima Kried

Almost exactly one year ago, I was writing my first Response for Fringe of Colour Films – on Orientalism and being Iranian in an overwhelmingly white society. It was, I remember, a particularly fraught period in an already miserable year. A few days before, Beirut had exploded in an accident of hyper-capitalist trade and state neglect, leaving at least 207 dead, hundreds of thousands homeless or injured, and the city in tatters. Closer to home, in the waters surrounding our own shores, refugees were sinking in the Channel while the British media leaned out of their own robust boats, shouting questions, and cheerfully waving.

I was deeply angry and felt, more than ever before in the three decades of my life, acutely displaced. It was a sensation that had been mounting since Trump’s aggressions towards Iran in the very first days of 2020, when the prospect of all-out war in a homeland I had never even seen felt suddenly, sickeningly possible. With each new spectacle of catastrophe entering the news, I was reminded of all the violence that had come before and, implicitly, why I came to be here and not there. This feeling of liminality, of unbelonging, is not a particularly unique one amongst first - and second - generation immigrants. But in those few months, what struck heavily was not so much a sense of unbelonging, but the sense of having almost belonged, the sheer loss of a place and a life that had slipped through my grasp.

Fatima Kried’s haunting animation Yuluu feels almost uncanny in the way it echoes my current, lost state of mind. It is a short piece; barely two and a half minutes long, but every second, every frame, feels dense with this same state of bewildered exile, of loss made manifest. An account of a young woman visiting Lebanon with her family as a child and being forced to flee on the brink of the 2006 Lebanon War, Yuluu is the chronicle of a tipping point, not just in the country’s socio-political history, but in one person’s sense of security and placement.

Short as it is, the film lingers on the fringes of conflict: the principal armies of Hezbollah and Israel are not even mentioned. Instead, the narrator’s idyllic summer is punctured by the sounds of rockets and her family rushing to escape. Kried guides the audience through the affective experience of exile, of having a home slowly prised from your hands. In a hellish political discourse obsessed with the act of arrival – refugees arriving in boats, immigrants arriving in close-by houses and jobs – Yuluu reminds us of what is actually traumatic: the moment where everything is left behind.

Kried’s visual style is markedly fluid, as memories and scenarios dissolve into something more unsettling, more precarious. The film’s initial shot – a peaceful image of clustered chairs, percolating coffee, and children running to the sound of laughter – fragments within seconds into sharp, geometric shapes that collide and pierce, as the narrator explains, “Suddenly we heard shouting and gunshots: nobody was expecting it.” The scene collapses again: a cup of tea nervously clutched and a cosy living space bow and bend into a panorama of rubble. Again and again, Kried shows how the idea of home – its beauty and its safety – can be overwritten by something ugly and relentless.

“I remember our last goodbye,” Yuluu’s narrator says of her Lebanese family. “I felt like we were abandoning them.” Yet, when the experience of home is mediated through violence, either way – staying or leaving – becomes an act of dislocation. In perhaps Yuluu’s most heart-wrenching moment, a map materialises on screen and a car melts across the border as the narrator explains, “We drove to Syria; it was safe back then.” Four years later, Syria would become yet another place from which to flee, a land defined by unfathomable displacement. 13.5 million people forced to abandon their homes. My family, meanwhile, has not returned to Iran in over 30 years. The seemingly cyclical nature of dispossession and grief in the Middle East feels, at times, unbearable.

A few weeks ago, I went to watch Lin Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights at the multiplex at the bottom of my road. I sat there, a paper sack of popcorn on my lap and my friend’s shoulder brushing against mine as they laughed. Not much of it has stayed with me, apart from one line refrained throughout the opening song, “I hang my flag up on display,” the whole of Washington Heights erupts, “It reminds me that I came from miles away”.

Yuluu reminds me that I also, even before I came into this world, came from miles away. That somewhere there is a city, a street, a life, that was almost mine. A place of dark brewed tea and colourful textiles and family running through the frame, people I have never met or perhaps never even existed. A place where, as Kried recalls, “Everyone was happy, and we spent the whole time playing.”

But we left, much as Yuluu’s narrator did, in our cars and our planes and our parents’ imaginations, through the rivers and between the mountains and over the borders sketched out on our maps. And now, as the tracks we left in our wake begin to dissolve and fade, we have come to understand that we can, perhaps, never go back.