Written by Colleen Clemens.
Sophie Deraspe (click here to read an interview with her) wrote and directed this recently released documentary that moves the viewer through a large gamut of emotions. A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile begins as a love story, turns into a story of fearless resistance, collapses into terror, and then transforms into the investigation of a sure-to-be psychotic man who breaks strangers’ hearts. All in an hour and a half. The quick pace and the story left me with my mouth agape several times, even though I remember the story of the film’s eponymous blog–and the hoax that ensued.
The film begins as Amina Arraf in Syria and Sandra Bagaria in Canada begin an online relationship. They share stories of their studies, their sex drives, and quickly move to their concerns about the Arab Spring’s impact on Amina’s world. Amina decides to start a blog about being out in a dictatorship and she begins to write. “Gay Girl in Damascus” is born.
Amina and Sandra are unable to meet, so they share the details of their lives over messaging. Amina tells Sandra Skype is blocked in Syria. And then Amina goes unheard from for several days. Sandra gets a message telling her Amina has been kidnapped.
Through interviews with reporters, social activists, and personal friends, the story moves from Sandra’s heart breaking to realizing she has been the victim of a months-long hoax enacted by a dude living in Edinburgh at the time. I won’t give too much away about how they come to learn this information, but watching the story unfold is worth watching.
The part of most interest to me is when the activists discuss how this white male hijacked the story of Syria for an entire week. Instead of focusing on the cluster bombs and mass arrests being recorded by citizen journalists, the news chose to tell the stories of Tom MacMaster, a guy who thought it was fun to create a persona and see how far he could go with it. We watch how a white, Western, male coopts the story of a marginalized woman for his own jollies and takes away the voice of men and women dying in the streets of Syria. If white male privilege needs a metaphor, the story of MacMaster sure seems like the perfect fit.
Once the movie turns on its heels, the viewer watches Sandra come to terms with the humiliation this man has foisted upon her. She works to confront him, and the film climaxes with them in a room together. While the beginning of the film sets the viewer up to think the climax of the film will be Sandra and Amina meeting and climaxing, the end feels creepily analogous as this guy talks about how he uses Sandra. I won’t say too much more because their conversation is a lesson in what-the-fuckery.
So what feels like a film about the triumph of a young woman speaking truth to power morphs into a story of a white, Western male appropriating a marginalized voice for his own whims. Sigh. And sigh again. Watching the films feels like bearing witness to the sufferings of Syrians who want to be heard–and to the Western privilege that silences them.
See it. We all need to be vigilant about listening to those who are speaking. And those who are taking the mic for their own pleasure.
Colleen Lutz Clemens, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Non-Western Literatures at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. She earned her Ph.D. in Post-Colonial Literature at Lehigh University and is a Bitch Flicks staff writer.