A language I can call my own / Their meaning lost and still, unknown. The playful, whimsical portrayal of puppetry in Farah Al Qasimi’s Everybody was Invited to a Party (2018) contrasts with a felt sense of frustration and melancholy in an inability to communicate or convey specific thoughts and feelings.
The puppets are constricted to the translated words in beginner level language textbooks: formal, rigid, often lacking in depth and nuance. Words get mispronounced, translations are confused, and Arabic and English captions slip over one another. Ultimately, it is song and music that crosses the border, granting us access into the true emotions of the puppets (and their puppeteer).
Inspired by ‘Iftah Ya Simsim’, a 1980’s Arabic version of Sesame Street, Al Qasimi’s film explores the potential — and limitations — of puppets as mouthpieces. During the interplay of language exchange between the pink and green monsters, it becomes apparent that their stiff, felt mouths, unable to move in any intricate manner, restrict them from forming fluent Arabic and English words and sentences, respectively. ‘A mouth that’s just a fold…that’s all that you see’ the puppets lament.
Later, a translations book mutates into a soft creature of its own. This book is made to help the puppeteer ‘say the right things’. It spits out formal, short phrases, in quick succession, in an attempt to create new links and meanings from what it knows. The puppeteer —a humanoid/puppet figure — has a cloth smile that cannot move. They can communicate through gesture, puppets and props alone. Near the end of the film, they lay out Arabic letters, sounding them out individually: Eye…Wa…Wah…Nt…T. Together: I want.
Artworks, like words, go through a precarious process of translation themselves when they enter a new space. Liverpool is a port city that contains multitudes — of people, of cultures, and of experiences. We find methods of sharing our stories, passing on bits of ourselves, bits of our homes, our ancestry, to each other. We fuse our food and our fashions, our songs and our art, creating new languages of our own. We mustn’t forget the difficulties, the vulnerabilities, in those first fragile steps towards our collective need: connection.
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Farah Al Qasimi’s ‘Everybody was Invited to a Party (2018)’ will be showing from Tuesday 11 to Sunday 23rd of Februrary. This film is part of a larger programme focused on poetry, fiction, experimental writing and speech, ‘But Does it Speak?’
Words, Phoebe Thomas