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In one of her early pieces entitled Under Siege (1982, figure 2), Hatoum placed herself in a transparent glass box full of mud. For seven hours, the naked Hatoum struggled to stand up, only to continue to slip and fall. Low temperatures in the glass box required her to keep moving. As a result of her continual, repeated struggling, Hatoum's hands left large splattered prints of mud on the glass, indexical traces of her struggle that eventually made the glass walls opaque. Not only is this piece a dramatic representation of the physical helplessness and isolation military aggression enforces, Under Siege also has a complex relationship to the political situation that informed it and its traumatic repetitions in time. When asked to comment on this piece, Hatoum remarked that "Under Siege happened before the Israeli invasion and siege of Beirut; it was almost like a premonition." [50] Because trauma cannot be comprehended in its immediacy, it upsets linear representations of time. Therefore, it is difficult to know whether a representation of trauma reaches into the past or foretells of past's inscription into the future.

As Under Siege attests, even though she is distanced by exile, Hatoum's views herself as embedded within the aggressive politics of the Middle East. The way the mud and box covers, encloses, and continually defeats her becomes an expression of the way that once someone becomes an exile, she is forever tied to that displacement. Hatoum may have survived threats of the Israeli invasion, but Under Siege suggests she has just barely done so. Her body, made increasingly fragile and worn because of the freezing mud, is placed in direct conflict with the viewer's inability to "rescue" her. And because the masochistic performance took place in galleries and museums in London, Under Siege is a metonymic link to Hatoum's own powerlessness to rescue her family. The photographs of this performance piece show viewers bewildered and solemn, reluctant to get close to the glass box, but staring nonetheless. A particularly dramatic close-up photograph of Under Siege (figure 3) renders Hatoum almost unrecognizable; she has become a gesture of survival. It is unclear whether she is vanishing into formlessness or coming into the materiality of being and form.

In The Negotiating Table (1983, figure 4), Hatoum posits the flesh as the traumatic excess of political rhetoric. On a table in a performance hall, Hatoum's head was strapped to a table; her body was covered with plastic; bloody bandages cover her eyes; entrails were spilled all over her. Tracked above this flesh are various political speeches addressing peace. In The Negotiating Table, the body folds in on itself into a dense materiality, and the political discourse mapping imaginary spaces above it emphasizes the body's muteness. The only "voice" the body has is its pattern of breathing, echoed by slight movements in the plastic. What can the voices in their insistence on peace do for the body if they can't see it? What can viewers do even though they can see this spectacle yet can also clearly see that the piece is a performative representation? Do the viewers identify with the repressive idealism of the voices or the body on the table? Even the title negates the body's presence; the voices do not negotiate across the body, but across a table. What do the voices negotiate and exchange across this body besides words, "good" political intentions, and continual repressions? Do mirroring enunciations of peace repress the third material term between them? What does the body on the table understand? And perhaps most importantly, what can a body (in exile) do?

In The Negotiating Table the body bears the burden of responsibility and solitude, violently and gruesomely. In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Felman emphasizes solitude as an ethical dimension of witnessing: "To bear witness if to bear the solitude of a responsibility and to bear the responsibility precisely, of that solitude" (original emphasis). [51] Caruth's analysis of Alain Resnais' and Marguerite Duras' film Hiroshima Mon Amour is pertinent to the ethical responsibility The Negotiating Table displays. In Hiroshima Mon Amour, a French woman loses her lover—a German officer—to death on the day of France's liberation from Germany. In order not to betray her lover's death by celebrating freedom, she goes mad. Her madness and the subsequent punishment of isolation "...maintain the event of death against the understanding of liberation." [52] She becomes "the faithful monument to death" by refusing "sight and understanding...in relation to her own body." [53] Again, Caruth does not call attention to the gendered dimension of this gesture, the ease with which women use their bodies as signs of the ethical imperative to witness. In The Negotiating Table Hatoum makes an analogous gesture in order not to betray the trauma her country and family suffer. The flesh in The Negotiating Table isn't necessarily gendered, and isn't obviously a victim of gendered violence, but the piece provokes us to ask if victimized flesh is perceived as feminine because of women's internalization of the ethical imperative.

Like The Negotiating Table, the five-minute video entitled So Much I Want to Say (1983) represents and comments upon the impediments exile imposes upon one's sight, agency, and voice. There is no mistaking the gendered dimensions of this restraint: a man's hands cover her mouth over and over again while her voice, detached from her mouth, repeats the title obsessively as though never heard. Hatoum places her struggling face in the intermediary place between the faceless agents of repression and the helplessly witnessing viewer, forcing the viewer to experience the exile's failure. In So Much I Want to Say Hatoum actively subjects herself and her viewers to the traumatic repetitions of failure the distance and proximity exile enforces. She is close to the screen, made visible by the screen, but also restrained by the metonymic hands of physical repression behind her as well as the screen of representation in front of her.

IV. Measures of Distance: A Desiring Production

Raw, violent, confrontational, Hatoum's early work reveals a need of the exiled to prostrate herself before the brute laws of exile's symbolic order. And yet, even the symbolic order of exile is not sealed into completion; it has its cracks and fissures, interstitial, imaginary spaces that Hatoum works generatively within. In Imagining Desire, conceptual artist Mary Kelley calls attention to the ways in which symbolic formations such as gender identity and nation can reveal, in their most virulent displays, their potential for failure: "The nation, like gender, has a psychic border, and a 'display' of nationalism can also fail to cover the frame of a shield that has lost not only its economic metal but also its diplomatic sheen." [54] In The Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan argues that desire is a product of gaps in the symbolic order. Describing the "interval intersecting the signifiers," Lacan writes: "It is there that what we call desire crawls, slips, escapes, like the ferret." [55]

Hatoum's 1988 video piece Measures of Distance (figure 5) draws upon exile's configuration of proximity and distance to open up a space in which it is possible to expose the cracks and fissures in the patriarchal symbolic order—displayed to extremity in times of war—and to represent an imaginary relation that allows for a nuanced depiction of the mother's desire. It is in the intersection between the signifiers of war and those of patriarchal authority that the specificity of feminine desire emerges into visibility. In this fifteen-minute video Hatoum intersperses film footage and photographs of her mother taking a shower, as well Hatoum's voice translating her mother's letters into English, recorded phone conversations between mother and daughter in Arabic, and the Arabic script of her mother's letters moving across the screen. At one point, the mother discusses the possessive anger the photographs provoked in Hatoum's father. Since he considers her his property, future collaborations must be kept secret.

The materialized letters on the screen are an important choice; they suggest Measures of Distance is a reflective step back from the earlier pieces' insistent separation of the body and language. Measures of Distance marks a transition from the demand to represent herself as an exiled, isolated, fundamentally physical other to the desire to represent the complex material and linguistic relation to another's exile—her mother's—across multiple impediments and mediations. The harsh and compelling addresses to the viewer in the earlier pieces have been tempered into tender responses to the mother's loving address. Hatoum compels viewers to watch but does not demand that they witness. With its eloquent beauty remarkably untainted by sentimentality, Hatoum witnesses the patterns of distance and returns within her family's and country's multiple losses by rendering them. The Arabic script of her mother's letters moves across the screen and is both a visual barrier to and a visual means of seeing the maternal body as a signifier of home and security. Lynn Zelevansky writes that "[t]he handwriting looks like barbed wire, acting as a fence or a divider, signifying remoteness." [56] But the Arabic letters are also the means through which to see, hear, and communicate with her mother. The script's proximity to the representations of the mother's body reveals that despite exile's cruel impediments the language of the mother tongue isn't irrevocably distanced.

These letters, as English speakers will know from the translated voiceovers, address a particular reader — "My Dear Mona." The multiple ways Hatoum represents the letters — aurally, materially, and in two languages — signifies multiple means of expression, despite or because of exile's impediments. And the way the film foregrounds, rather than hides, Hatoum's presence through the cuts and splices of the visual and aural scenes gives ground to the possibility of response. The desire to represent her mother desiring her through multiple representations of communication juxtaposed with her mother's private desires, signified by the photographs of her in the bath, lovingly fills in the absences and gaps of the film. Hatoum asks her viewers to see, read, and hear her mother's presence and absence in her life through the gaps and fissures exile and patriarchy have imposed, underscoring Caruth's point that trauma "denies our facile empathy and rush to comprehension, and demands a different kind of listening and a different speaking." [57]

The different kind of understanding the trauma of exile requires opens up new ways of seeing and representing the mother's sexuality. While Hatoum represents the continual loss and retrieval of the mother, and aesthetically plays with representations of her presence and absence, there isn't a repression of the phallic signifier—the signifier of the mother's desire—as there in the child's "fort da" game as analyzed by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle cCunt Meetingstrippeddevi G Ever En Glee Meeting Stripped Devi Seeing Feminism in Exile; The Imaginary Maps of Mona Hatoumc Stripped Meeting dCunt Meetingstrippeddevi G Ever En Glee Meeting Stripped Devi Seeing Feminism in Exile; The Imaginary Maps of Mona Hatoump Www.kinkycore.com Vibrator