Abstract
In this review, I am going to focus on the human entanglements central to the Michele’s Lancione’s film A Inceput Ploaia (It Starting Raining); first on forced eviction as an intimate war of attrition; and the second on the theme of disposable homes. This dual lens emerges from my reading of the film as a feminist geographer who works on intimate geopolitics of forced eviction and women’s activism in contemporary Cambodia (Brickell, 2014; Brickell et al., 2017).
Rachel Pain’s (2015) seminal work on ‘intimate war’ positions domestic violence and international warfare as part of a ‘single complex’ of violence which is interlaced with ‘gendered, psychological, and emotion-laden foundations of power’. She writes that both are forms of violence ‘marked by a huge displacement of people from their homes’ (p. 65). The film, and my own research, also falls under the frame of ‘intimate war’, and I make the point in the monograph I am writing (Brickell, forthcoming) that forced eviction, can, more specifically be understood as an intimate war of attrition. In the study of war, traditionally defined, attrition warfare is a military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and material. The unmaking of Roma homes is pursued through this attritional warfare rendered painfully clear in the film. As I have previously written, home unmaking is ‘the precarious process by which material and/or imaginary components of home are unintentionally or deliberately, temporarily or permanently, divested, damaged or even destroyed’ (Baxter and Brickell, 2015: 134). There are three points in the film where this intimate war of attrition against home and its inhabitants can most keenly felt.
First is the material unravelling of the home, evictees witnessing of it, and the perpetual fear of their remaining belongings being stripped away by authorities intent on removing them from the kerbside and city. We watch a man incandescent ‘they broke the windows, they broke our windows’; builders driving away furniture and wood from their prior homes which could have been used to shore up their shacks, evictees incredulous; we hear of repeated attempts by the authorities to destroy their shacks; and a woman citing fear that they will even throw away their clothes. This attritional wounding is not unusual; in Boeung Kak Lake, Cambodia, those that accept poultry compensation for their illegal eviction after years of resistance against it are forced to destroy their own home before receiving compensation; an act described akin to self-harm (Brickell, 2014).
Second are the repeated ‘offers’ made in the film by the city major and police officers to move into homeless shelters – rules in which demand that men are separated from women and children. As a male evictee notes, ‘breaking us apart – that’s not helping’. In one exchange, a woman renders this tantamount to moving into a concentration camp. An elderly goes only remark that she has been together with her husband for 33 years – and says to the police officer, ‘and you want to separate us now?’. This is the part of the film that stuck in my throat the most. It is all too familiar. In my research in Cambodia, I found that marital breakdown was not just seen by government authorities as ‘collateral damage’ in their bulldozing of home in pursuit of profit, but rather it was deemed instrumental to undermine the ability of women to sustain their activism (Brickell, 2014). Suffering becomes a ‘political technology’, a form of intimate war, in which subjects are ‘kept alive but in a state of injury’ (Mbembe, 2003: 21). At the moment, I am divorced because I go out to protest a lot…I do not have time to take care of housework, like cooking, and my husband disagreed with my protest. He wanted to keep me at home, but I opposed him. Therefore, we divorced…everyday, the authority prays for us to have problems at home like this, so that we have less time to protest against them about the land dispute. The authority hates my activism, and it is good for them to see me having family problems, they want revenge on me. (Bo Chhorvy, divorced with children, early 40s, current Boeung Kak Lake resident, Cambodia) 271 days since eviction – 40 people on the street 640 days since eviction – 30 people on the street 670 days since eviction – 5 families divided and sent away to shelters
This third example provides a segway into the second focus of my review on what could be called disposable homes. Truncated lives, as James Tyner’s (2016) work discusses, are subject to ‘pervasive indifference’. At different points in the film families note that they are ‘chased everywhere on the street’, that ‘nobody cares about us’ as Roma. An interviewee notes that they are blamed for being ‘poor and insistent’. The opening sequence shows the bruises of state brutality. There is a sense in which the evictees feel they are superfluous to the needs of the state. The film again evokes Mbembe’s work on necropolitics and ‘topographies of cruelty’, in which populations of people are surveilled and incarcerated, neglected and abandoned, or left to die because they are not deemed value-producing.
Yet the sanitizing discourses surrounding ‘discardable’ people and places is countered in the film by the re-centring of the shack homes as critical terrains of lived and felt habitation, self-organization and politics. While the Roma families are being described in the audio as ‘delericts’ – the underlaying film footage shows children and adults holding hands and dancing in a circle on the street. In the opening sequence, we see a bath, bed mattresses, fans and pot plants; men clutching children. We see the feet of a child under the wet tarpaulin sellotaped down to escape the worst of the rain. A boy playing with the necklace of his mother sat on the kerbside. A mother and son reading. A woman cleaning the street while a woman behind her sits in her dressing gown on a sofa. A daughter stressing the importance of tidying their shack to keep it in order. A man describing his poor sleep and how to shower between two bathrooms on the street, an old shower curtain providing a modicum of privacy.
As Chris Harker’s work has demonstrated, resilience is shown in ‘getting by’ in situations of heightened precarity which might otherwise be seen as ‘unremarkable and unremarked upon because they are “ordinary”’ (Harker, 2012: 856). Lenette et al. (2012: 640) assert too that ‘everyday life-worlds are not just “stadiums” in which we might observe resilience in action, but that “everydayness” is itself an achievement and a potential aspect of resilience’. In this sense then, the film brings to the fore the intimate lives of the Roma families along a ‘life-death continuum’ in which ‘affirmative practices’ counter act the rhetoric of disposability they endure (Braidotti, 2013: 130).
While resistance ‘is always present in intimate war’ (Pain, 2015), the film does not fall into the trap of romanticizing everyday domestic resiliencies. As one woman bemoans ‘it’s terrible to replace my home with this wretched street’. In the critical geographies of home arena, home is cast as an ambiguous ‘space of belonging and alienation, intimacy and violence, desire and fear’ (Blunt and Varley, 2004: 3). The film, for me however, indicates the dangers of foreclosing ideals as resources for those deprived of home to draw on – including rights to housing. As Geraldine Pratt (1999: 157) poignantly asserts, ‘it is easier to criticize home from the position of having a secure one’. The human rights abuses and their infringements on everyday life underscored in the film show the importance of holding up home as an ideal and universally ordained right that has the capacity to broker political leverage.