Unhomely Homes and Displacement Cinema
A reflection on life between two cities, reminisced through verbal and visual tales. Written by Noor Ul Ain.
I remember growing up—in the salt-speckled breeze of Karachi then in the sudden, violent rains after migrating to Lahore—I was told stories by my family. My grandfather, a multilingual poet who had gathered volumes of his writing throughout his life, was the chief storyteller. His stories would weave through the murky streets of Jalandhar, molding fear and suspense into bite-sized epics that transported my siblings and I to places we had never been.
My father, on occasions when he was in Pakistan, would tell phantasmagorical tales of his encounters with the ravenous sea or treacherous pirates that kept him away from home on his job as a mariner. My mother’s stories were mostly morality tales: clear dividers of good and bad, of pious and the profane.
Her parables helped her raise four children and brave an intercity migration that bifurcated my childhood into a Lahore home and a Karachi home. Met with the prodigious loneliness of my first big move, I soon discovered that the home I left and the one I moved to both felt alien. Karachi was marred by the inability to return and Lahore by the inability to belong.
Inevitably, stories became fundamental to the way I began to understand my place in the small, unassuming world my siblings and I inhabited. Our time in this world was punctuated by the arrivals and departures of a parent and the private knowledge that movement away from these homes and these worlds was an unspoken ritual we must all practice. Simultaneously, my affinity for storytelling was a fire being stroked by the proliferation of the arts in my family. Through the poetry recitations at our dinner table, films every weekend night, and the song and dance on every Eid, I began to think that all of life was an elaborate performance of ‘togetherness’, a precise affectation curated for others. The truth was far lonelier.
Growing up with these experiences, I suppose it was serendipitous that my years in high school coincided with a wave of new Pakistani cinema that I noticed built around migration as a recurrent theme. These works were all injected with unrest, violence, longing, displacement, and identity conflicts. Not surprisingly, much of the writing and research in my interdisciplinary work began borrowing from these ideas. I began to see “displacement film” as a genre within migrant cinema that offered a medium of storytelling for the displaced in the absence of a comprehensive language of pain.
This exploration fed my ravenous appetite for Pakistani stories in film. Each film I watched grappled with the crisis I had spuriously correlated as personal: that the homes we leave and the ones we wish to inhabit are equally ‘unhomely’. Zinda Bhaag/Run for Your Life (dirs. Meenu Gaur and Farjad Nabi), a Pakistani film from 2013, constructs its story entirely around the premise of illegal migrations. In the film, three young men negotiate and navigate the underbelly of Lahore in an attempt to make a better living for themselves or leave the country altogether. There is no certainty of whether their lives will improve once they flee or if they will even reach their destinations. Still, I found the “romantic appeal” (a term borrowed from economist Ali Nobil) of migration is not only motivated by economic factors but also by desires of a certain perceived lifestyle and status. Hence, I believe the migrant becomes their family's nexus of social and economic mobility. In such a case, displacement seems to be welcomed if the conceivable goal is some form of prosperity.
This notion of an ‘inherited’ displacement, like a familial rite performed with cyclical imminence, also found its way to films like Moor/Mother (dir. Jami, 2015). This film starts with the death of a mother—the matriarch of a family based in Khost, a small village in the Balochistan province of Pakistan. In flashbacks, Jami reveals that Palwasha is why her son, Ehsaanullah Khan, moves from Khost to the bustling megacity of Karachi in Sindh. Ehsaanuallah hopes to make a life for himself when their village has no viable options for young men. However, the film asserts that city life is fraught with fraud and moral conflicts as Ehsanuallah goes into the business of making counterfeit documents to facilitate illegal migrations out of Pakistan.
These documents, the highly sought-after pieces of paper in Zinda Bhaag, which include a fake passport circulating among aspiring migrants when the holder fails to reach their destination, morph into a death certificate for the bearer. I found that at the core of these movements, necessarily, is violence—in Moor it often functions as a spectacle that mars the migrant’s bodies, their possessions, and their sense of identity. Similarly, the migrant body, once representing an entire family’s hopes and future prosperity in Zinda Bhaag, comes home to the call of prayers.
I noticed a large portion of these displacement stories were about or from the perspective of only a certain demographic. It was not true that migration is only and entirely the ambit of working-class men; then how is it that these stories are only representative of this section of society? For example, in Moor, on the day of the Mother’s death, while the focus is on Ehsanullah traveling back to Khost, there is also the quiet return of his sister Sarah, who has also seemingly traveled from elsewhere to attend the funeral.
However, she is accompanied by her husband and hence, the film states a culturally grounded reality about the gendered experience of leaving: all women are bound to depart from their family homes by the tenets of patrilocality. This movement is such a regular occurrence in the patriarchal social and familial structures of Pakistan that the film does not even need to acknowledge its praxis. Women leaving their family homes to relocate and readjust to a new family, home, and, often, new land is a generationally repeated practice. But the way Ehsaanuallah and Sarah’s departure are treated on screen is vastly different.
The women of a certain class are often able to migrate on the pretext of education, but the place of the working-class women in these narratives appears more as an anchor for the migrant men rather than in transit themselves. However, I thought that a 2018 film called Pinky Memesaab (dir. Shazia Ali Khan) offered a subversive narrative of a working-class woman traveling from Pakistan to the Middle East to serve as a maid for a wealthy family. In her encounters with other such migrant women living in the metropolis, she discovers the options given to them are limited. These women are either employed as house help or as workers in the adult entertainment industry. Perhaps, prompted by this discovery and her own aching need to belong, Pinky’s subversion takes the form of mimicry as she transforms herself into the memesaab she works for.
Mimicry becomes intrinsically tied to the question of identity in these films. If, arguably, displacement cinema makes a case for a “necessity of movement” concerning class mobility, then a question also arises about the way this movement and displacement informs the creation of individual identities. Recently, I have begun to wonder, can the performance of belonging eventually result in assimilation for these individuals? Similarly, to take an introspective look, did the performance of familial ‘togetherness’ in my case actually result in a complete family? I wonder if I desire something long enough and yearn for it hard enough– be it stability, belonging, familiarity– can I command it into existence? Can I and the characters in the genre I call ‘displacement cinema’ find the homes they leave their homes for?
Your writing is deeply insightful and beautifully crafted, blending personal experiences with thoughtful analysis of migration and identity. Looking forward to reading more!