Fantasies of Loss

Melancholia and Ethnicity in New Israeli-Mizrahi Cinema

Abstract

The migration experience of Mizrahim is based on a structure of mourning and melancholia. When a person leaves his country of birth he has a wide range of things for which to grieve, such as family, language, identity, position in the community and assets. In the Zionist national narrative, Mizrahi mourning over the lost Arab-Jewish identity was forbidden and invisible and led to an ethnic melancholia. Mizrahi melancholia is double: the Mizrahi subject was required to negate and eradicate his Arab identity, but was also forced to re-identify with that loss, because he or she was prevented from fully participating in the Ashkenazi national ideal. These layers of loss were censored, forbidden and silenced in Israeli culture. These losses have been recently afforded cultural visibility through feature films by second-generation Mizrahi directors. In this article, I shall focus on two films: Cinema Egypt (Rami Kimchi, 2002) and Desperado Square (Benny Toraty, 2001). These films are fantasies of loss through which the second-generation of Mizrahim attempts to “solve” the enigma of the origin of the melancholic identification and the identity of both their parents and themselves. Through the fantasy of cinema, the sons restage their parents’ loss, with which they identify, in order to search for a lost desire, to talk of a repressed love, and thus to try and redefine their Mizrahi identity.