Sitt Marie Rose
By Etel Adnan
The following is an excerpt from Sitt Marie Rose, copyright 1982 The Post-Apollo Press (US Edition)
Mounir is on the phone. He is planning to make a film and wants me to write the scenario. He wants it to be about a young Syrian worker that his friends and he would convince, while on a hunting trip, to come to Lebanon. The next night Mounir shows a super-8 color film he shot in the Syrian desert and in Southeast Turkey. The film appears on the screen I see open expanses in the dust and wind. There is the color of swirling dust, and vast skies streaked with red fire. Then there is the Volkswagen jeep, driven by Pierre, with Mounir, Tony, and Fouad indside. The hunting rifles are clearly in view. We turn to a shot of birds crossing the sky in airplane formations.
Images from 1944 newsreels or from the war films which used them. The terrain is like Lybia's, and the hunters resmble the sunburned soldiers of the Afrika corps. There are some beautiful shots: a marsh the jeep crosses with gret splashes. The mud has an ochre color which satisfies. The birds return but it is darker now. The sunset is marvelously intense. The hunters aim their rifles toward the sky like missile launchers. They laugh. They show their teeth, thier vigor, their pleasure. Mounir comments in a liud voice. .
His wife, two sisters-in-law and one of their friends are seated on the floor. He has an audience of women in one of Bierut;s most beautiful houses. One of the girls present is Tony's cousin, and she takes it all with a rather spiteful air. The "men" refused to take her hunting in Turkey. They didn't want to be bothered. Suddely, we hear a Pink Floyd song. Staccato. To the rythym of this staccato music birds fall. The synchronization is perfect. Tony shoots. A bird falls. Pierre shoots. a bird falls. Mounir shoots. A bird falls. Fouad shoots. A bird falls. All their faces glow. Except Fouad's.
Fouad is the perfect killer. He suffers from never having killed enough. The bullet in the biody if the bird sinks into something soft. It lacks that hard, dry, satisfying contact. Fouad hunts as though obsessed. He prefers killing to kissing. He hates the expression "to make love" because you don't make anything, as he says. He prefers jeep-speed-desert-bird-bullet to girl-in-a-bed-and-fuck. Even orgies bore him because he finds no sport in beng shut in with a bunch of people, getitng high on hashish. He is always disgusted by promiscuity. Mounir, Tony, and Pierre like to do a little of everything. They dabble. Mounir's family is extremely rich, and he includes Tony and Pierre in his projects and distractions. Fouad is a part of the "group". None of them has ever found in a woman the same sensation of power he gets from a car. An auto rally is more significant than a conjugal night, and hunting is better still. There's a hierarchy even in the world of sport. In any case, hunting remains the most noble occupation. It's more wholesome. It's also more intellectual. One leaves Lebanon, and comes to know the nieghboring (and enemy) country of Syria
The Syrians are not as rich and well-equipped, and lack the proper style...to hnt as well. Before, it was the European with faces like the ones we saw on the screen, who went hunting in Syria and Iraq, and elsewhere. Now it's the Christian, modernized Lebanese who go wherever they like with their touristo-military gear. They bring their cameras to film their exploits, their puttees, their shoes, and their shorts, their buttons and zippers, their open shirts and their black hair showing. And these four are particularly pure. They never sleep together. The film ends with an image of the car filled with the bird feathers that cover the perforated, sagging bodies. In hunting like this, the Volkswagen has replaced the dog, serving all its functions. Mounir explains with a certain modesty, that he had problems with his film. Everyone reassures him. It's fine like that. It's a little masterpiece in any case. Those birds flying in formation, what truth in nature! It all hold together! "You didn't see anything, really," Mounir says, "I can't tell you what the desert is." You have to see it. Only, you women, you'll never see it. You have to strike out on your own, fondyour own trail with nothing but a map and a compass to really see it. You, you'll never be able to do that." It's true. "We women," we're happy with this little bit of imprefect, colored cinema, which gave, for twenty minutes, a kind of additional prestige to these men we see every day................ 1990 3rd Edition 105 pages $9.95 ISBN 0-942996-18-6