Arts, Faculty of
Theatre and Film, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Sanau, Jasmine
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
This thesis explores the beach as a site of decoloniality, whose place in-between land and ocean complicates stable binaries of ownership and infuses a racially-Othered subjectivity in its materiality. In what I term littoral liminality, the possibility of a watery, fluid ontology defies the logic and structures of coloniality and the Anthroprocene in a powerfully subdued resistance. I analyze Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017) whose beach is not simply the film’s setting, but also the instigator to the white colonial protagonist who desperately seeks his escape, and Annemarie Jacir’s Salt of this Sea (2008), which confronts the ownership of Palestinian beaches through a fluid embodiment to resist the hard lines and borders of the Israeli occupation. This paper is a careful mediation between two different spaces, time, and subjectivities through the shared site of the beach.
LITTORAL LIMINALITY: THE COLONIAL BEACHES OF ZAMA AND SALT OF THIS SEA by Jasmine Sanau B.A., The University of British Columbia, 2023 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Cinema and Media Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) May 2025 © Jasmine Sanau, 2025 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: Littoral Liminality: The Colonial Beaches of Zama and Salt of this Sea submitted by Jasmine Sanau in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Cinema and Media Studies Examining Committee: Dr. Mila Zuo, Associate Professor, Dept. of Theatre and Film The University of British Columbia Supervisor Dr. Alessandra Santos, Associate Professor, Dept. of Theatre and Film The University of British Columbia Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract This thesis explores the beach as a site of decoloniality, whose place in-between land and ocean complicates stable binaries of ownership and infuses a racially-Othered subjectivity in its materiality. In what I term littoral liminality, the possibility of a watery, fluid ontology defies the logic and structures of coloniality and the Anthroprocene in a powerfully subdued resistance. I analyze Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017) whose beach is not simply the film’s setting, but also the instigator to the white colonial protagonist who desperately seeks his escape, and Annemarie Jacir’s Salt of this Sea (2008), which confronts the ownership of Palestinian beaches through a fluid embodiment to resist the hard lines and borders of the Israeli occupation. This paper is a careful mediation between two different spaces, time, and subjectivities through the shared site of the beach. iv Lay Summary This thesis examines two cinematic beaches in colonial Argentina and present-day Palestine to argue that the beach’s in-betweenness can represent the escape to the concrete material logic of the West. It is, as such, a paper which is both post-colonial and global in its critique of colonialism and the Anthroprocene. v Preface This thesis is an original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Jasmine Sanau. Generative artificial intelligence was not used for any aspects of the work. vi Table of Contents Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ........................................................................................................................... iv Preface ........................................................................................................................................ v Table of Contents ..................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. vii Chapter 1: Wet Beginnings, Ships, and Shores ...................................................................... 1 Chapter 2: Zama, Dirty Water, and Fishy Endings ............................................................. 16 Chapter 3: Salt of this Sea, Hard Lines, and Fluid Bodies .................................................. 32 Conclusion: Right to Littoral Liminality .............................................................................. 53 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................. 56 vii Acknowledgements I am first and foremost in tremendous gratitude for my supervisor, Mila Zuo, whose brilliance struck me as extraordinary on my first day of undergrad and kindness has been endlessly extended towards me since. I also want to graciously thank Alessandra Santos, my second reader, for her immense insights, openness, and generosity throughout the whole process of my thesis. This paper is also in debt to the altruism of William Brown and Alex Dick who have lent me an ear and believed in my vision. I also want to give a deep thank you to the professors who have significantly shaped my scholarly being during my time at UBC, namely Christine Evans for her lively wit and wisdom, Lisa Coulthard for her inspiring sage and warmth support, and Renren Yang for granting me the opportunity to work under his remarkable pedagogy. Moreover, the possibility and privilege of completing my degree does not exist without the generous funding of the Faculty of Arts Graduate Award, the International Tuition Award, and the Cordula and Gunter Paetzold Fellowship, as well as the Learning Labs team under Jamie Stockdale and Jasmine Orton, whose financial and emotional support over four years and two degrees cannot be expressed with enough gratitude. I have been fruitfully blessed with love and friendship throughout my life. I want to give a special thank you to Fernando Vargas Garcia, Pranidhi Bisht, Jessica Fraser, and Amelia Rushworth for their companionship in the program. Across the ocean, my family are constant rocks and sources of comfort, especially my mother, stepfather, my brother Kamiyar, my sister-in-law Assel, and my two proxy-children: my niece Safiya and my nephew Tamir. I also dedicate everything I do to my father’s memory, whom I remember every time I watch Bruce Lee, eat kebab, or tell a really good joke. viii Lastly, in the time that I write this, the genocide on Palestine is still on-going, including the censorship, fear, and punishment of speaking out within academia. As I hope my paper makes clear, the violence on Palestine is the continuation of the violence of early settler-colonialism. It is therefore impossible to preach land acknowledgements while also being silent and complicit in a present-time genocide, as the institution of UBC does. In response, I assert my obligation studying on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) First Nation that my role and responsibility as a scholar is to unsettle and undo the neocolonial practices and pedagogy of academic institutions, particularly as there are currently no more universities left in Gaza. For every past, present, and future act of imperial violence, there is always a resistance; this is mine. 1 Chapter 1: Wet Beginnings, Ships, and Shores But today I recapture the islands' bright beaches: blue mist from the ocean rolling into the fishermen's houses. By these shores I was born: sound of the sea came in at my window, life heaved and breathed in me then with the strength of that turbulent soil. —Edward Kamau Braithwaite, South Flushed in green flora set against the calm tides of blue ocean, Lisa Reihana’s video panorama in Pursuit of Venus [infected] moves lethargically across the projected screen like an endless handscroll, perpetually furling and unfurling into itself. The installation reimagines Jean-Gabriel Charvet’s 19th century wallpaper titled Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (1804-05) through animated vignettes which depict the first encounters between British sailors and Indigenous coastal peoples, capturing moments of cultural transmission, disease, sex, and violence. In one scene, a group of men witness the ceremonial dance of the Haka, sitting in a circle of quiet curiosity; in the next, a native man is bound and whipped profusely, his winces of pain bringing amusement to the onlooking soldiers. The piece moves from this register of cohabitation to cruelty through a careful and tedious pace, disrupting the clean binary between colonizer/colonized through oscillating power lines and refractions. in Pursuit thus invites its spectators to behold the creation of the New World with new eyes by infusing the still figures of 2 Charvet’s painting with gestures of agency and refusal, thereby forcing us to rethink the coherency and linearity of time, space, and possession. Untangling the artwork’s title, we can locate the beach as the site of initial infection between colonizer and native, representing the unique rupture of history just on the cusp of imperialism and right before the world was forever marked by the death of the non-white Other. The vernacular of infection works both literally and metaphorically, embodying the plague which ravaged Indigenous populations as well as the ‘plagued’ white subjectivity which practices its selfhood through violence and occupation, producing “a civilization which justifies colonization…is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased,”1 as Aimé Césaire had famously written. Consequently, it was not only the land that was seized by the colonizer but the expanse of the ocean too. Like Frantz Fanon once wrote, “The settler's feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea, but there you're never close enough to see them.”2 Nonetheless, the beach remains a persistently “interstitial place,”3 in Reihana’s words, in-between the delineations of land and the open waters, dancing the line of arcane pleasures and fantasies, and finding frequent friction with comprehensible logic. Upon its sandy shores, a quiet liminality slowly rolls in with the waves. In this careful threshold between oppositional time and space, the beach invites a consistent emergence in the cinematic form. Its aesthetics of salty air, warm dunes, and the cooling sensation of the ocean water produces sublime affections which makes it a frequent place for narrative climaxes and revelations. Popular films like Point Break (1991), Moonlight (2016), 1 Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. 1st ed. London: Routledge, 2022, 39. 2 Fanon, Frantz. “Concerning Violence.” In The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington, 35–107. New York: Grove Press, 2002, 39. 3 In Pursuit of Venus [Infected]: A Conversation with Artist List Reihana | Remaking the Real, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIa-05FZP2k. 3 Beach Rats (2017), and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), for instance, explore the beach as a locale of homosexual desire, interpolating queer alterity with the space’s porosity. Other films reproduce its traces of violence through war, with the final battles of Dunkirk (2017) and Saving Private Ryan (1998) entrenched in turbulent waves and bloodied waters. Beaches are also haunting places, like Us (2019), and places of fantasy, like The Beach (2000), as well as bourgeois luxury, like the cinema of Eric Rohmer, or frustrated artistry, like Hong Sang-soo. Like the beach, cinema can resist non-linearity, opening possibilities of surrealism and disembodiment in deliberate opposition to the cleanliness of colonial logic. Through situating the beach as the beginning of Western imperialism, we can trace its roots as distinctly amphibious. Édouard Glissant writes in Poetics of Relation that the Voyage across the seas induced a nomadic lust for “self-definition…under the guise of personal adventure.” The colonizer’s imperious movement from land to sea to (new) land thus imbued a sense of importance which mattered on a grand historical scale. “Conquerors,” as Glissant explains, “are the moving, transient root of their people.” Consequently, those who are discovered, as opposed to those who discover, are less important, “motionless and silent”4 in the progression of history. Sylvia Wynter echoes a similar sentiment, writing “the European had his mission, his burden, his manifest destiny: he was chosen. The indigenous, the unchosen, was to be transformed from the human subject of his own culture into the inhuman object of the European culture.”5 The colonial impulse to demarcate and codify space into borders and territory thus cannot be sanitized through the seemingly neutral practices of science and 4 Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, 14. 5 Wynter, Sylvia. “Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World,” 1982, 10. 4 cartography. As Denise Cosgrove states, “To imagine the earth as a globe is essentially a visual act…Such a gaze is implicitly imperial, encompassing a geometric surface to be explored and mapped, inscribed with content, knowledge, and authority.”6 Moreover, if James Clifford states that “‘space’ is never ontologically given” but rather “discursively mapped and corporeally practiced,”7 then the natality of the New World is also the natality of the New Man8 who uses the praxis of rights, property, and ownership to purify the violence of his iteration. Yet, for this thought to be propagated, it must erode the amphibious movement of Indigenous peoples who had mastered ocean travel and management centuries before the arrival of Columbus to the Americas.9 Simultaneously, Indigenous knowledge systems of the ocean were exploited for mass hunting purposes. The Pacific “Great Hunt,” for instance, wiped out significant sea animal populations, leading to the near extinction of three species by the end of the 18th century. This indicated a change, not simply in a racial hierarchy, but also a human hierarchy, as “geography and species [shifted] according to market value, technological innovation, and remaining—yet killable—animal populations.”10 As a result, the Age of Discovery is deeply intertwined with the birth of the Anthropocene, an epoch which must be understood as racialized, gendered, and speciest whereby white masculinity is reconfigured (rather paradoxically) as both universal and superior to all other beings. 6 Cosgrove, Denis. Apollo’s Eye. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, 15-16. 7 Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997, 54. 8 Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337. 9 Forbes, Jack D. The American Discovery of Europe. Illustrated edition. Urbana Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2011. 10 Igler, David. The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush. Reprint edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 103. 5 Framed differently, modernity excludes the non-white and non-human Other despite being fundamentally built upon its labor and resources. Kathryn Yusoff’s essential work investigates this provocation through geology. She uses the term “White Geology” to illustrate how the practice has infused the logic of extraction into the ontology of the Black and brown body as well as the geographical matter, using the blurry categories of human and inhuman to “[recode] them as property, whereby extraordinary possibilities in relation to the earth were wiped out.”11 Consequently, geology cannot be understood as simply a tool of racism, whose problems lie inside of humanism and outside of science, nor as a “progressive narrative of collective accumulation or geologic commons in which ‘we’ all share.” Rather, it is a “technology of matter” which fundamentally reinscribes how we perceive value, territory, and objects. This is why Wynter writes, specifically in relation to slavery, “the systematic devaluation of the black as human went hand in hand with the systematic exploitation of his labor power,”12 and Rizvana Bradley argues of the irrepresentability of Blackness in the aesthetic regime which still “insatiably demands its labors and appearance.”13 Furthermore, the etymology of fungibility, as evoked by Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman, has been frequently used to describe the commodification and expendability of Black bodies birthed from the Transatlantic slave trade. Aptly, both Spillers and Hartman return to the ocean in their writings. For Spillers, Blackness goes through a process of cultural unmaking, described as “suspended in the 11 Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 12 Wynter, “Black Metamorphosis,” 12. 13 Bradley, Rizvana. Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form. 1st edition. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2023, 9. 6 “‘oceanic’… [when] removed from the indigenous land and culture, and not-yet ‘American.’”14 She also terms “oceanic ungendering,” which unmakes bodies from gendered flesh into cargo on slave ships, such that the Black female body is “quantifiable by the same rules of accounting as her male counterpart.” For Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, the ocean and its evocation of the Middle Passage posits the impossibility of tracing one’s roots and perpetuates the fantasy of the imagined homeland. In her own careful tracing of the slave route along the coast of Ghana, which presents a failure to find her lineage before the slave trade, Hartman emphatically states “I am a reminder that twelve million crossed the Atlantic Ocean and the past is not yet over. I am the progeny of the captives. I am the vestige of the dead. And history is how the secular world attends to the dead.”15 Inevitably, Blackness is frequently aestheticized through aquatic and naval metaphors by both academics and filmmakers. Perhaps the most influential written work is Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, which evokes the image of the ship as a symbol of Black diasporic identity, forged across ocean migration rather than a stable land. More recently, Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being masterfully interrogates the persistent antiblack structures of modern America that originated along the slave route, in which being “in the wake” becomes a double entendre of being “woke” to ongoing violence in the present and the future, as well as the “wake” of the ship, which leaves a physical trace on the water surface. In cinema, blackness has historically been represented through the monster, the most notable early example being Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) which mediates the threat of miscegenation through its 14 Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book (1987),” January 1, 1994, 72. 15 Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. First Edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, 18. 7 creature whose “over-size lips are meant to be fish-like, but they also match the racist stereotype of African American physiognomy.”16 Earlier films like Buster Keaton’s The Navigator (1924) have been read to reckon with the threat of Black encroachment into white society through the octopus which, like Blackness, exists as an otherness and “outside the human.”17 Keaton’s killing of the octopus in the film’s underwater scene is thus the extermination of the non-white, non-human being to comfort the white subject’s anxiety. Within contemporary Hollywood, previously mentioned titles like Us and Moonlight have aestheticized Blackness through the ocean, including blockbuster Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) and its imagining of a decolonial alterity which can exist only beneath the surface. On the other side of the spectrum, Mati Diop’s independent films, including her feature Atlantics (2019) and its shorter predecessor Atlantiques (2009), imbue the ocean with a haunting of both the Middle Passage and the current conditions of Senegalese migrant workers who attempt to traverse its violent waves in hopes of a better life abroad. Towards the end of Atlantiques, two friends talk over a crackling fire. Poor and hopeless, they accept their fate before they embark on a sea voyage which would likely take their lives. One affirms to the other “I wouldn't let your body sink and rot in the ocean. I'd rather die with you.” Yet with its representation of death and desolation, the ship and the ocean also offer captive survivance and persistence. As Hartman says, “For those chained in the lower decks of a slave ship, race was both a death sentence and the language of solidarity.”18 Turning towards a queer feminine ontology, Riley Snorton considers Spillers’ “oceanic ungendering” as a “a critical 16 Starosielski, Nicole. “Beyond Fluidity: A Cultural History of Cinema under Water.” In Ecocinema Theory and Practice, 161–80. Routledge, 2012, 158. 17 Brown, William. Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene. Zero Books, 2023, 82. 18 Hartman. Lose Your Mother, 6. 8 modality of political and cultural maneuvering within figurations of blackness,”19 in which “to suppose that one can identify fugitive moments in the hollow of fungibility’s embrace is to focus on modes of escape, of wander, of flight that exist within violent conditions of exchange.”20 Fungibility, a ruthless process of dehumanization, is thus also a means of fugitivity in escaping the white Anthropocentric logic of colonialism through alternative flesh and locale. This is perhaps why many freed slaves “recorded their own places of birth as ‘At Sea,’” as “claiming the sea as place of birth might have…freed fugitive slaves from their own relation to property too.”21 To the same effect, Alexis Pauline Gumbs poetically reflects on what marine animals can teach us through Black feminist practices of listening, breathing, and remembering, evincing the semblance between the Racial Other and non-human beings who have both been subjected to violence, theft, and exploitation.22 Thinking through water, as Astrida Gundega Neimanis puts it, is then “not only an experiment in human embodiment, but also a feminist commitment to following the flows of marginalization and injustice.”23 However, I approach this methodology with caution, as overdetermining Blackness through the sea and the ship poses its own problems. As Hartman astutely observes, “the value of blackness resides in its metaphorical aptitude,”24 illuminating it as a literary praxis that can begin 19 Snorton, C. Riley. “Trans Capable: Fungibility, Fugitivity, and the Matter of Being.” In Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, by C. Riley Snorton, 0. University of Minnesota Press, 2017, 56. 20 Riley. “Trans Capable,” 57. 21 Guerin, Ayasha. “Underground and at Sea: Oysters and Black Marine Entanglements in New York’s Zone-A.” Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 13 (September 26, 2019), 36. 22 Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. Chico, CA Edinburgh: AK Press, 2020. 23 Neimanis, Astrida Gundega. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, 6. 24 Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 9 to abstract the very real and persisting consequences of racist colonial structures. Metaphorizing Blackness through water can also emphasize a sense of rootlessness which dismisses the nuance of Black identity that is forged not simply through its travels across sea, but also its landing. This is what Glissant means when he says, “experience of the abyss lies inside and outside the abyss.” The violence of captive life continues after the voyage in its “the panic of the new land, the haunting of the former land, finally the alliance with the imposed land, suffered and redeemed.”25 Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley offers a critique of Gilroy, whom she argues stays too metaphorical in his exploration of the ocean and race, writing “Gilroy’s ghost ships and dark waters traverse five memorable pages of his introduction, then slip into nowhereness.”26 Rather than metaphors, Tinsley urges to emphasize history and embodied experiences, which would reveal the Black body as gender fluid through oceanic ungendering, allowing for a hybrid subjectivity which resists hegemonic notions of race, gender, and sex. Philip Steinberg problematizes Gilroy in a similar fashion, this time for oversimplifying the ocean through human activity. He writes, “one never gets wet” when “venturing into Gilroy’s Black Atlantic,”27 as “a story that begins and ends with human ‘crossings’ or ‘uses’ of the sea will always be incomplete.”28 25 Glissant. Poetics of Relation, 7. 26 Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha. “BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, no. 2–3 (June 1, 2008), 192. 27 Steinberg, Philip E. “Of Other Seas: Metaphors and Materialities in Maritime Regions.” Atlantic Studies 10, no. 2 (June 1, 2013): 156–69, 158. 28 Steinberg, 159. 10 Conversely, Indigeneity29 has been overdetermined through metaphors of land, and thus excluded from both maritime scholarship and sea governance, the latter of which poses the continuation of colonial practices of oceanic overhunting, pollution, and militarization. This has less to do with either land or water being ‘more’ significant to an Indigenous identity, and more to do with the imposed, mutually exclusive binaries of water/land by Western thought. Indigenous dispossession worked largely through these binaries which affirmed both terra nullius (nobody’s land) to justify its colonization, as well as mare nullius (nobody’s sea) to declare white European ships its governor. Indigenous epistemology and semiotics instead believe that “While the two can often be seen to merge, one element (land) or related set of terms and metaphors (roots, house, situated identity, life force) does not exclude, oppose, sit in a hierarchical relationship with, or collapse into the other (water, canoe, fluidity, voyage, transformation, renewal).”30 As such, the beach becomes integral in decolonizing the binaries between land and sea in Indigenous art and cinema. For instance, Deborah Walker-Morrison considers the waka (canoe) in a Māori context, analogous to Gilroy’s Atlantic ship, to “reference the historical voyages of Māori ancestors across the Pacific to Aotearoa and contemporary voyages within and around the land”31 and analyze the significance of the coastline in films like Once Were Warriors (1994), Whale Rider (2002), and the ‘first Fourth Cinema film’ Ngāti (1987). Vernon Ah Kee’s art installation Cantchant further asserts Indigenous presence on beaches by illustrating the hypocrisy of white Australian entitlement during the Cronolla Riots, where white protesters 29 I use the term of ‘Indigeneity’ to acknowledge the multitude of Indigenous groups across the world while speaking to the shared experience and history of belonging to place before settler-colonialism. 30 Walker-Morrison, Deborah. “A PLACE TO STAND: LAND AND WATER IN MĀORI FILM.” Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies 5, no. 1 (April 28, 2014): 25–47, 27. 31 Walker-Morrison, 26. 11 chanted “We grew here, you flew here.”32 Across the ocean, Ever Deadly (2022) follows Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq’s expression of love and anger through music, a poetic documentary which takes predominant place by the rocky coastlines of British Columbia. In one scene, Tanya’s mother sits down to watch the NFB’s Land of the Long Day (1952), a documentary about Inuit life on Baffin Island. She reminisces, with melancholy, “I thought that was the only world. That was my life from the day I was born until twelve. That was way before we were relocated.” Similarly, Steinberg points towards a collapse of sea/land binaries as a solution to aquatic overdetermination of Black subjectivities, as asserting “the apparent binary division of the planet’s surface into two fundamental surfaces land and water has been used to justify a complex and widely accepted political cosmology that complements state territory with external spaces of exception.”33 Tinsley seems to agree when she writes that we must trace “as carefully as possible the particular, specific, always marked contours, the contested beachscapes of African diaspora histories of gender and sexuality.”34 To ponder both Blackness and Indigeneity through the beach therefore requires a reconceptualization of race, water, and land: not in separate categories but as spaces, temporalities, and ontologies deeply enmeshed in each other. I look towards what I term as littoral liminality, or in other words, the porosity which emerges upon the shore. This conceptualization finds similarity with Tiffany Lethabo King’s writings of the shoal, the shallow sandbank in a body of water. 32 Brisbane, Institute of Modern Art. “Vernon Ah Kee.” Institute of Modern Art. Accessed May 1, 2025. https://www.ima.org.au/exhibitions/vernon-ah-kee-cantchant/. 33 Steinberg. “Of Other Seas,” 163. 34 Tinsley. “BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEER ATLANTIC,” 211. 12 King’s shoal offers a form of disruption as a space that is neither entirely land or water, nor the shore which might neatly mediate the two binaries but rather slightly “before the shore or offshore.”35 As a result, “the shoal is liminal, indeterminate, and hard to map.”36 This liminality extends itself to Black and Indigenous being, which similarly finds a logic that defies and exists outside of white Western epistemology. With its unstable boundaries, the shoal becomes a space which continuously transforms and shifts the definition of human, as well as reverses the geological extractive practices of property and resources. I use King’s thoughtful differentiation of Black and Indigenous embodied experiences which, while both subjected to imperial terror and persistent racial regimes, materializes differently in water and land respectively. The shoal, or the merging of water, sand, and rocks, therefore liberates the over-determinization of the “Black oceanic (chaotic space)” and the “wild abyss of empty Native space (anaspace),”37 as well as charge its non-human properties with an agency otherwise suspended from colonial extraction. I expand this littoral liminality as a practice towards the beach more generally which also represents historical and ongoing struggles of possession, national pride, and quotidian life. However, as the ambiguity of “littoral” implies, my conceptualization of the “beach” extends towards other forms of nearshore bodies of water, such as rivers and lakes. In beginning this decolonization of the beach, we must briefly return to its origins. As in Pursuit languidly demonstrates, the space was frequently the first ‘territory’ that was conferred to the European settlers, and thus the first site of arbitrary colonial delineation. As Lena Lenček and Gideon Bosker write, “before it could be transformed into a theater of pleasure,” the coast 35 King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Duke University Press, 2019, 2. 36 King, 3. 37 King, 77. 13 “had to be discovered, claimed, and invented.”38 Without somebody to take from, there is no territory to win. This is why Greg Dening says that the colonizers “won what was culturally valuable in their own terms—status, power, dominance—by merely crossing the beach.” In another way, “they needed the savage in personal, social and cultural terms more than the savage needed them,”39 asserting the beach as a locus point where power and agency become deeply troubled. For Aileen Moreton-Robinson, the discovery, claim, and invention of the beach reproduces itself in the contemporary colonial nation and pride, which imbue the white subject with “a sense of belonging and ownership”40 through the performativity of possession. This performativity occurs somatically and voyeuristically in the presence of white bodies on beaches, creating (white) beach cultures exerted through tanning, surfing, and other leisurely activities. By consequence, “the only subjects who determined which bodies mattered on the beach were almost exclusively white males.”41 Moreover, if the beach is where the white male body prevails, then Glissant’s marooned beach is where black and brown bodies disappear down into where “depths of the volcano circulate.”42 Here, he evokes the materiality of rocks, rather than just water, to express the non-white being. Yet, even if the beach is asserted as a stable colonial possession, its unique fissure between modernity and the past makes it intrinsically unstable and 38 Lencek, Lena, and Gideon Bosker. The Beach: The History of Paradise of Earth. New York, N.Y: Viking Adult, 1998, xx. 39 Dening, Greg. Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Times, Cultures, and Self. First Edition. Philadelphia, Pa: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, 269. 40 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “Bodies That Matter: Performing White Possession on the Beach.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 35, no. 4 (September 1, 2011), 3. 41 Moreton-Robinson, 5. 42 Glissant. Poetics of Relation, 205. 14 alternative. For Michael Taussig, the beach has an essence of play which carefully balances these binaries, becoming “the ultimate fantasy space where nature and carnival blend as prehistory in the dialectical image of modernity.”43 To then embody the beach is thus to be fluid. Michael Pearson’s words ring its truest in tandem: “If the littoral is permeable, then our description must be amphibious, moving easily between land and sea.”44 In my research, I evoke the beach through a liminality which historically and contemporarily complicates imperial possession in its rupturing of binaries between colonizer/colonized, past/future, and land/ocean. As both a deeply atemporal place of fantasy and danger, and a specific fissure in colonial time and space, the beach invites non-Western epistemologies and ontologies, even as it is repeatedly seized under the Western logic and practices of territory. Because of this, the beach posits an intersection of geology and race that exemplifies the peril of the Anthropocene which becomes more pressing every day. This paper is in debt of numerous Black, Indigenous, queer, and feminist scholars to further destabilize Western masculine knowledge, an undertaking which simultaneously must be careful not to make synonymous Black and Indigenous struggle but instead comprehend them as material and alternate experiences. And of course, I turn towards the cinematic medium which allows us to return to the past and postulate new futures made possible through littoral liminality. For my second chapter, I implore into the past with Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017), which uses the landscape of the beach and river to destabilize the colonizer figure and metamorphize him through the figure of the fish, a final turn towards the film’s decolonization of the Anthropocene. In addition to thinking through littoral liminality in content, Zama’s form is 43 Taussig, Michael. “The Beach (A Fantasy).” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (2000): 249–78, 258. 44 Pearson, Michael N. “Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problems.” Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (2006): 353–73, 359. 15 also watery, often incoherent and inconsequential in events, characters, and time. The only place of continuity is the shore, which completely undoes Zama’s colonial status and dreams, turning him both Native and fish by the very end of the film. And while taking place during the 16th century, Zama is as much about the present as it is about the past. Working alongside a comparison of Martel’s other films, Zama encapsulates the ongoing racist structures in Argentina, a nation which continues to erase and undermine the Indigenous figure in its predominately white European racial makeup. My third chapter implores into the beaches of Palestine as part of the larger structure of dispossession and extermination of Palestinians by the Israeli state. I argue that white somatic possession of the beach refuses Palestinian presence and enjoyment through cartographic anxiety, desperately erecting borders to contain the Arab Other. For my cinematic example, I chose Annemarie Jacir’s Salt of this Sea (2008) which explores Palestinian identity and ownership through the beach. I argue that the narrative contact with the beach fundamentally reorients the characters’ ontology towards littoral liminality, expressed through an anarchic citizenship and racial slippage. In embodying a watery, fluid Palestinian identity, the characters thus move both with and against Israeli colonial logic which is as arbitrary as it is hard and all-encompassing. By placing these two films and contexts in conversation through the beach, I intend to show is that Indigenous dispossession during the Age of Discovery and the Transatlantic slave trade are not disconnected from what is happening in present-day Argentina and Palestine. Instead, the strife of coloniality is a global struggle which is deeply embedded throughout history and enmeshed in the present, like a shoreline which runs down the length of its land. Standing in the sand and facing the ocean, on the beach, we become free. 16 Chapter 2: Zama, Dirty Water, and Fishy Endings The prayers are repeated on the rocky walls of the sky and the warriors awaken and come, now they come Ooh! Like little fishes shining from the Land Above they come, the transparent and lofty condors of the sun. —Elicura Chihuailaf, I Pray On the Rocky Walls of the Sky The water of Lucrecia Martel’s fourth feature film, Zama, is dirty. Set on an island in Latin America reconfigured as a 16th century Spanish outpost, the film is surrounded by bodies of cloudy freshwater which are not only backdrops to the titular character Diego don Zama’s (Daniel Giménez Cacho) deterioration, but also its instigators. The film thus encapsulates a littoral liminality which continually threatens and unravels the figure of the colonizer through process of becoming-Native and becoming-fish. In doing so, his privilege of amphibious movement is terminated, forced to remain forever still by the shores. Though the film happens entirely through Zama’s narcissistic subjectivity rather than its Black or Indigenous characters, 17 this also works to drive him into powerlessness and delusion. As writer Sam George Jackson puts it, “Each shot, each utterance, is a reflection of his inner torment.”45 This is made clear by the title sequence, which occurs a few minutes into the film. As his first demonstration of power, Zama attends to a captured Native, whom will be set free from his crimes once he gives an official statement. The man stands in the room of surrounding Spanish officers, his face obscured from the camera and his body purple from rope burn. When his hands are released from its cuffs, he unexpectedly runs and rams his head into a wall, a violent and curious action which happens just off screen. Zama and the other men stand over him, their breaths baited for a statement, but the words the Native utters seem only to taunt them and their bureaucracy: There’s a fish that spends its time swimming to and fro. Fighting water that seeks to cast it upon dry land. Because the water rejects it. The water doesn’t want it. These long-suffering fish, so attached to the element that repels them, devote all their energies to remaining in place. You’ll never find them in the central part of the river, but always near the banks. The off-screen monologue turns to a voice-over, accompanied by a mellow guitar string soundtrack by Indigenous duo Los Indios Tabajaras as the camera is plunged underwater. The scene is tinted with a muted yellow hue, barely making visible the erratic movement of scurrying fish and the floating particles of vegetation and sediment. The spectator is left to make sense of a claustrophobic and muddy sensorium, overwhelmed and drowning. As the man’s monologue comes to an inconclusive end, we return to the surface, staring at the back of Zama’s head who contemplates the waters ahead. 45 George, Sam George. “A Miserable Miracle: Lucrecia Martel’s ‘Zama.’” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 19, 2017. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-miserable-miracle. 18 This sequence mimics Martel’s short film Pescados [The Fish] (2010), which superimposes shots of koi fish with choir-like singing and speaking, progressively becoming more layered and incomprehensible. Through its sense of delirium by way of anthropomorphization and sound, this modest addition to Martel’s oeuvre expresses the director’s frequent thematic turns to water in her feature films. In La Ciénaga [The Swamp] (2001), the bourgeois family’s wealth is metaphorized through their swamp-like pool, whose dirty waters indicate their sick morality and incestual contamination in contrast to their Indigenous housekeepers. The Holy Girl (2004) similarly utilizes a swimming pool, this time in a dilapidated hotel, to blur the lines of the taboo and the socially acceptable as a young girl grapples with her burgeoning sexuality and her fervent Catholicism. Martel’s third feature The Headless Woman (2008) is arguably her most narrative-driven story yet, following the upper-class protagonist Vero (María Onetto) after a car accident who spends much of the movie dazed and confused, unsure if she hit a dog or an Indigenous boy. Despite her growing guilt and paranoia, the film’s ending allows her to both absolve herself and forget the incident all together. Nonetheless, a storm, which materializes right after the accident, continues to follow her around. The water of Martel’s films is thus deeply intertwined with their class and race consciousness, with somatic privilege and visibility expressed through access to water and recreational swimming. As Martel says, “in Argentina, there are not many public swimming pools, so I think that the idea of having a cube of water just for a few people is like having a slave—to think that all of this water belongs to you as your property.”46 This quote references La Ciénaga, in which Mecha (Graciela Borges), the supine matriarch of the family, insistently demands her housemaids to refill her glass with ice despite the house’s sweltering heat, 46 Wisniewski, Chris. “Lucrecia Martel.” Reverse Shot. Accessed May 1, 2025. https://reverseshot.org/interviews/entry/938/interview_lucrecia_martel. 19 producing a Sisyphean task which justifies her cruelty. Yet Martel also seems to suggest that the water granted to the bourgeois becomes dirty as a result. This dirty water extends beyond the swimming pools but also moves through sewage systems and into bodies of lakes, contaminating wildlife and perspiring on skin. In La Ciénaga, for instance, Joaquín (Diego Baenas) is given a fish by Perro (Fabio Villafane), the young housemaid Isabel’s (Andrea López) boyfriend, which he discards on the side of the road, snidely commenting “It’s all mud. Indians will eat any shit.” In another, Verónica (Leonora Balcarce) asks Perro to try on a shirt in the store, seemingly to embarrass Isabel, before throwing the shirt to her sister in disgust. Both incidents find irony when Joaquín unknowingly consumes the fish for dinner and Verónica’s limbs get intertwined with her brother’s as she showers, blurring lines of the dirty body through ingestion and incest. Here, Aimé Césaire’s words of sickness comes to the surface again as Martel’s water resists the purification of the white upper class, instead leaking, staining, and drowning. This is exemplified in The Headless Woman, when Vero walks up to a (non-white) worker in her dental clinic, plainly stating “There’s no water.” This, we later learn, is caused by an Indigenous boy’s body stuck in a water canal nearby where Vero hit her car, making the probability that the accident was a homicide the more likely. However, the erasure of the incident, both in official records and in Vero’s memory, indicates that the loss of Indigenous life is merely the inconvenience of the white upper class. Within Latin America, Argentina has the highest white populations in comparison to non-whites, with about 80% of the population descending from European ancestry.47 Many European immigrants fled to Argentina in the 19th and 20th century to escape post-war conditions, quickly 47 Datosmacro. “Argentina - Población 2023 | Datosmacro.com.” Accessed May 1, 2025. https://datosmacro.expansion.com/demografia/poblacion/argentina. 20 changing the country’s racial makeup and cultural landscape. Notably, the mestizo [mixed-race] population stayed relatively low, comprising of only 10% of the population.48 As Anibal Quijano and Michael Ennis write, these white immigrants “did not immediately enforce the national identity, instead preferring their own European cultural differences, while at the same time explicitly rejecting the identity associated with Latin America’s heritage and, in particular, any relationship with the indigenous population.”49 Consequently, unlike in countries like Mexico or Brazil, the mestizo in Argentina lacks any cultural power, rendering prominent works like Robert Stam’s Tropical Multiculturalism and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands which spotlight the mestizo figure placeless in Argentina and Argentinian cinema. In the Foucauldian sense, Argentina’s nation-state building is a deliberate systematic attempt to erase and silence its Native population through somatic and cultural invisibility. Gastón Gordillo and Silvia Hirsch describe how el desierto (the desert) was “the term then widely used to refer to the territories of the Pampas, Patagonia, and the Gran Chaco inhabited by indigenous groups,”50 evoking settler notions of terra nullius and Tiffany King’s “Native anaspace.” The persistent rendering of the Indigenous as non-existent and no-longer in Argentina encapsulates what King terms as “conquistador humanism,” which constructs “the Native and Black Other as a space of death” and his selfhood in his contrasting liveliness.51 This came to a 48 Lizcano, Francisco. “Composición Étnica de Las Tres Áreas Culturales Del Continente Americano al Comienzo Del Siglo XXI / Ethnic Composition of the Three Cultural Areas of the American Continent at the Beginning of the 21st Century -Francisco Lizcano.” Convergencia 38 (August 1, 2005). 49 Quijano, Anibal, and Michael Ennis. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–80, 562-563. 50 Gordillo, Gaston, and Silvia Hirsch. “Indigenous Struggles and Contested Identities in Argentina Histories of Invisibilization and Reemergence.” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8 (September 1, 2003): 4–30, 4. 51 King. Black Shoals, 16. 21 particularly harrowing fruition amidst the late 19th century Argentinian civil war, in which a violent military campaign destroyed much of the Indigenous resistance across the countryside, asserting that “Argentina had finally become a European nation emerging…from the purifying violence of the state.”52 Yet, if Indigenous land is the “desert to be made to bloom,”53 as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam put it, then the ‘flood’ of white Europeans brings waters of deep infestation. The white imperial subjectivity of Martel’s films thus works to crack open its ugly interior and turn it inside out, distorting its apparatus into spells of madness, rage, and lust for the Other to witness. Arguably, there is no character in Martel’s feature films who exemplifies this better than Zama, whose persistent failures in every facet of his life undermines his colonial power and completely undoes him by the film’s end. This unravelling is made possible through, and would not exist without, the film’s littoral liminality. As Lucy Bollington demonstrates, Zama is abundant with aquatic and shore references, both metaphorically through the anthropomorphization of Zama to the shore-dwelling fish and literally through his entrapment on the island. “If the privileged characters of Martel’s La Ciénaga and [The Headless Woman] are trapped in claustrophobic fish bowls of repetitive domesticity and amnesia,” she writes, “Zama is caught in the frenzied ‘currents’ of colonial endeavour replete with their ambivalent and highly problematic desires and productions of power.”54 As a careful reading of the film will demonstrate, these “currents” entirely threaten the rule and prestige of the Spanish conquistador, evincing the mortality of the colonizer upon land that is not his. 52 Gaston and Hirsch. “Indigenous Struggles,” 10-11. 53 Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. 1st edition. London: Routledge, 1994, 143. 54 Bollington, Lucy. “Martel’s Aquatic Zoopoetics.” The Cine-Files, no. 14 (2019), 12. 22 Zama’s first shot is a striking image. Like a Renaissance painting, the titular character stands on the shores of a beach, embellished in a scarlet red uniform and a sword cocked in his hand. Gazing into the horizon, his stance staggers slightly and his head turns timidly towards the Native women in the background, their distant laughter concurrent with the gentle waves of the water. As the women walk further away along the shore, Zama follows with hesitance before stopping and turning back. The next shot moves from the shores to the rocky dunes nearby, the landscape almost swallowing Zama as he erratically searches for the women again. They are eventually found by the waters, bathing in mud as Zama listens just out of sight. One woman, later revealed to be the visiting elite Luciana Piñares de Luenga (Lola Dueñas), learns some of the Indigenous language: “Ñandú means…spider. And kava means…wasp.”55 Rather than sight, it is the sound of this scene that allures Zama, satiated with just hearing the women from a distance. His slight movement in the grass alerts the women, prompting one to playfully chase him through the dunes, taunting “Voyeur!” as she does. This ends when Zama delivers a slap across her face once she gets close enough, quickly cutting away to mask the repercussions of this violent act. The woman is revealed to be Luciana’s Black maid Malemba (Mariana Nunes) who remains “mute by choice” for the rest of the film. This opening scene almost immediately undermines Zama’s authority. His difficulty and awkwardness in traversing the shores destabilize his rule over the land, particularly in opposition to his official role as corregidor [corrector], responsible for the expanse of the outpost. Instead, he stands out easily against the backdrop and the covertness of his voyeuristic desires exposed almost right away. The off-screen laughter and chatter of the women also highlight the power of 55 Luciana references the spider-wasp again later in the film as a mysterious creature which bit her husband’s neck. The spider-wasp can be read as an anti-Anthropocentric force which destabilizes the narrative’s coherency, or more literally as threatening the white colonizer through its precipitous danger. 23 the acousmatic which repeatedly exerts itself throughout the film. Off-screen sound is frequently utilized in Martel’s films as foreboding a presence that is refused or refuses to be seen. Nonetheless, it is a sound which lures and overpowers the white characters, such as in the end of La Ciénaga where Luciano (Sebastián Montagna) falls to his death when he tries to get a look at the neighbor’s barking dog.56 In Zama, these sounds are often the female voices of the Indigenous or Black Other, and even as we do not see them, their voice commands the screen, interrupting Zama or making his words frivolous. As Kaja Silverman writes, sound challenges the ocular-centricity of masculine film, opening pathways to a more feminine (and therefore a more watery) epistemology.57 The listening of the Indigenous women, rather than the looking, posits Zama as subject to this porosity by denying him the exercise of his masculine fantasies. Malemba’s refusal to speak, rather than her inability, pushes this even further, depriving Zama of acknowledgement and answers even when he demands it: “Malemba, will you not announce me?” For the colonizer figure, the female Other is desirable because her race denotes both sexual and colonial domination which produces “narratives of Western penetration of inviting virginal landscapes and of resisting libidinal nature.”58 This is accentuated through how “Colonized people are projected as body rather than mind,”59 and Latin American women are often sexually associated through “epithets evoking tropical heat, violence, passion, and spice.” 56 The dog has significance in La Ciénaga through the ‘African dog’ myth, frequently read as an allegory of xenophobia. This becomes more pertinent through the family’s constant animalization of the Indigenous characters, especially Perro whose name translates to dog in Spanish. 57 Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Indiana University Press, 1988. 58 Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism, 141. 59 Shohat and Stam, 138. 24 However, the film denies Zama’s exertion of this pleasure, not only undermining his sexual and imperial authority, but also threatening his human subjectivity through the fish. This comes saliently with the introduction of Emilia (María Etelvina Peredez), one of the Indigenous women living on the island who is later revealed to have birthed a child with Zama. In one scene, Zama approaches the local women sitting by the shore, gilling fish and talking amongst themselves as if he was not there. As he timidly inspects a young boy, Emilia tersely says, without sparing him a glance, “That’s not him. It’s that one,” before the camera cuts to another (much younger) boy creeping on the floor amongst the dead fish. Concerned, Zama asks “Can’t he walk?” to which Emilia says nothing. The boy’s inability to walk represents the move from humanistic bipedalism and towards aquaticism, thereby questioning what it means to be “human” in the exclusive Anthroprocene. The scene’s abundance of dead fish, as well as the act of gilling, further emphasizes the Indigenous women’s power over Zama who, like his son, will become fish-like by the film’s end. Zama’s initiation of “becoming-animal,”60 in the Deleuzian sense, is thus not only a process of making him fluid in identity, but also deterritorialized in the evolution of humanity. Rather than forward into the land, as the colonial endeavor wants to be, Zama moves backward, retreating into the seas in a reverse process of evolution. As the title sequence makes clear, Zama is further anthropomorphized through the “long suffering” fish as his transfer back to Lerma (interestingly, a landlocked city) meets persistent frustration, negligence, and delays, thereby indeterminately remaining in place by the shores and dissolving his amphibious privilege as the Western New Man. Moreover, the presence of fish, as well as other animals,61 help to destabilize 60 Deleuze, Gilles. A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 61 One pertinent animalistic scene (though not fishy) is the introduction of the mestizo granddaughter, who is first shown overlayed with the face of a dog. Her quiet yet steady demeanor resists and rejects Zama’s lascivious gaze. 25 Zama’s coherent reality, entering abruptly into scenes and lingering in the background not unlike the Black slaves whose disobedient gazes remain just out of focus of the screen. Bollington reads the ominous presence of fish as “[producing] an unhinging that is simultaneously a questioning of coloniality and its professed repudiations and a probing of the human.”62 Liliana Galindo Orrego comes to a similar analysis, writing how the film’s animals demonstrate the “artificiality and senselessness of the manners (such as cleaning one’s shoes before entering a room) and rules of the film’s social world.”63 This all becomes pertinent when we consider how the animal is often embodied through the Black and Indigenous subject who is “denoted [through] barbarity, different categories of alterity, and the ‘failure’ of civilization.’”64 As Fanon put it eloquently, “When the settler seeks to describe the native fully in exact terms, he constantly refers to the bestiary.”65 By instead representing the animal through the white male protagonist, Martel exposes this inherent contradiction in which savagery and barbarism is not signified in the colonized, but rather the colonizer. Zama’s slow deterioration also takes form through the film’s tedious pace and existential narrative in what Astrida Neimanis would call a latent temporality, described as “a more ominous temporality hovering on a threshold between ‘maybe not’ and ‘just wait.’”66 The delay of the moment is not simply the absence of something, but also “the unfolding of possibility.”67 62 Bollington. “Martel’s Aquatic Zoopoetics,” 13. 63 Orrego, Liliana Galindo. “Immersive Critique in Lucrecia Martel’s Zama.” Hispanic Review 91, no. 2 (2023): 157–78, 167. 64 Bollington. “Martel’s Aquatic Zoopoetics,” 1. 65 Fanon. “Concerning Violence,” 42. 66 Neimanis. Bodies of Water, 37. 67 Neimanis, 36. 26 By way of this, Zama’s latency in his delayed transfer demonstrates the impossibility of delineating water and its shores, even as its land is conquered. Thus, what destroys Zama is the littoral, the unique space which cannot be mapped nor escaped. Consequently, the film’s narrative moves like a fluid stream of consciousness as characters appear and disappear unceremoniously, and the passage of time is unclear and unmarked. This, as Luciana points out, manifests on the island: Bring me the little glasses. No, the smaller ones. How beautiful. There were twelve of them. Only eight arrived. They came in a box, well protected but not all of them wrapped…They were wrapped in newspapers from Buenos Aires. And curiously enough, sent with that flotilla68 were newspapers dated back further than the newspapers wrapped around my glasses. My glasses carried more recent news than the papers distributed here. Isn’t that charming? And sad? It doesn’t weigh on you, don Diego, because you’ll be transferred any day now, I hear. As Luciana’s words hint, the film’s only tangible narrative thread is Zama’s persistent requests for a transfer letter, though this too deliriously moves in circles. For instance, after Zama’s assistant Ventura (Juan Minujín) challenges his decision to grant Spanish settlers an encomienda (“Taking away freedom requires more than a paper with Irala's name on it”), they engage in a brawl which is rebuked by the Governor (Gustavo Böhm) shortly after. It is here where Zama learns that as punishment, it is Ventura who will leave the island, and he has mockingly chosen Lerma. Following this, Zama seemingly loses grip on reality, particularly when in contact with water, such as when he is getting bathed and starts hearing a female voice (presumably his wife) whispering to him: “Diego, what have they done to you? When will you 68 A small fleet of ships used by the Spanish army. 27 return? Your children are growing.” Zama responds aloud, “They’re growing tired, and so am I. I’ll be there soon, Marta. A ship is coming, with Royal Mail.” This anticipation of a transfer letter and news from across the ocean come to taunt him, such as in one instance where Zama excitedly asks the Governor “Royal Mail? When did it arrive? Any news for me?” which is responded with a curt “No, not yet.” This reaches a particular limit when Manuel (Nahuel Cano), Zama’s new assistant, is found to be writing a book outside of his duties to the King. The new Governor (Daniel Veronese) furiously demands Zama to report this, a reprimand which yet again threatens his transfer. Weakly, Zama says “Governor, my transfer has suffered more delays than those tolerable.” He replies, “Here’s what I think: You want to leave? Write the report.” When Zama spends all night writing the report, this dialogue ensues: ZAMA: “Could your excellency write that letter you offered me?” GOVERNOR: “What letter?” ZAMA: “Letter to the King, requesting my transfer.” GOVERNOR: “Of course, you’re a father now69…The first letter is very important.” ZAMA: “What do you mean, the first letter?” GOVERNOR: “In a year or two, we’ll send the second one. His Majesty doesn’t consider these matters until the second time.” The film’s narrative, determined by the latent markers of ‘just-wait’ and ‘maybe not,’ therefore disintegrates Zama’s stability in his continual expectation and disappointment. His presence on the beach thus consistently reminds him that the open expanse of the ocean, representing his return to Lerma, is forever out of reach and the land behind him will never be his. This 69 Zama tries to legitimize his family with Emilia to increase his chances of a transfer letter. 28 consequently also diminishes his loyalty to the state and law, a structure which completely evaporates by the film’s final act. Consequently, it is then when Zama becomes entirely reoriented from colonial cohesion into littoral liminality, like a rock slowly eroding with each roll of a wave. As a final attempt to receive his transfer letter from the king, Zama volunteers on a mission to find and kill Vicuña70 Porto, a Portuguese enemy of the state who lurks somewhere on the island. Though Vicuña is already pronounced dead, he seemingly returns to life when one of the Governor’s daughters claims to have been raped by him and several items go missing in the outpost’s residences. In this third act, Zama and a crew of men briefly move from the beachy shores into the wet swampy jungles. However, the jungle proves itself to be a new arena of wildness, laden with traps, dead bodies, and a horde of blind Natives who take all the men’s possessions during the night. Amidst the weeds and hidden in the darkness, one of the men (Matheus Nachtergaele) confesses to Zama: “I am Vicuña Porto…Don’t say my name and you’ll live.” Later, after returning to the shore, he confesses this: “I’ve committed sins. But not all those…They blame it on Vicuña Porto. Understand? The Vicuña Porto they talk about doesn’t exist. It’s not me. It’s no one. It’s a name. A name. Understand? My name is Gaspar Toledo.” In other words, Vicuña is not a tangible person, but a spectral evocation which deters and washes away the guilt and culpability from colonial acts of crime and violence. This reveal questions the legitimacy and fidelity of the Spanish rule who had sent Zama on an existential death mission, searching for somebody who does not exist, yet another fold in his inability to return. 70 Vicuña is the name of a small, camel-like animal native to the Andes, representing the character’s defiance of colonial humanity. 29 Embodying this subversion to authority, the man who goes by the name ‘Vicuña’ acts entirely outside of the law, performing a tyrannical surge of power which triggers a third act whose tone almost entirely diverges from the previous acts’ slowness. The film’s violence, which had previously been shimmering just below the surface, is now in full force under the reign of Vicuña and his men. And if the narrative had been cumbersome to follow before, it was now entirely erratic and unpredictable, shifting between locations and rushing through time as if drifting through a rapid. Aptly, rivers and shores remain central to the frame, a setting Vicuña goes back and fro to in his taunting of Zama and Captain Parrilla (Rafael Spregelburd), the only two living men from the mission. As such, this final act represents the total descent into delirium as brought by the film’s littoral liminality, which also comes to represent Zama’s acceptance of his fluid and anthropomorphized identity. This transformation begins first when the men are captured by a group of Indigenous hunters, initiating the process of ‘becoming-Native.’ By having all their equipment taken by the hunters, the men’s colonial status entirely diminishes, now powerless in the wilderness of the jungle and at the will of the thriving Indigenous community. Moreover, when the men are smudged with red powder during a ritual, they also become Native through the racial allusion to ‘red skins.’ The return to the shores, where the outpost once was, reminds Zama of his utter loss of power, particularly as Vicuña strings them along his volatile machinations. Parrilla suffers a fate of littoral liminality after his hand is amputated and he enters the state of hysteria, confusing the sounds of waves with singing like being lured by a siren. When he is drowned the next day, his process of becoming-fish signifies the death and danger for the white settler among the shores, thereby asserting its non-human refusal to be demarcated and dominated. 30 Zama’s becoming-fish, however, ends somewhat differently, exerting one act of brave defiance when he refuses to show Vicuña the island’s coconuts, an epithet for large round gemstones. In contrast to his usual demeanor of cowardice, Zama stares back at Vicuña with determination, simply stating “I do for you what no one did for me. I say no to your hopes,” before the men pin him down and amputate his hands. Much like how a gilled fish loses its ability to breath, Zama thus loses his ability to write, signifying his fate to remain forever on the island with the possibility of a transfer letter forever dissipated. This amputation also acts as a castration anxiety, mediating Zama’s emasculation into a total revocation of being human. The ultimate scene seals this by abruptly cutting to Zama lying on a small canoe and drifting alongside a jungle river, his limbs dark and smothered in an algae paste. Martel ellipses his escape from Vicuña entirely, yet it is safe to assume that he was rescued by Natives, a man and a boy, who now led him to safety towards the heart of the jungle. The boy (perhaps his son?) stares at him with a fixed expression, asking “Do you want to live?” Though Zama is too weak to answer, the last shot seems to answer this itself, imbuing the expanse of the screen with the fluorescent greens and blue skies of the jungle, the boat sailing forward and into the unknown. Despite his colonial crimes and strict adherence to rule, Zama’s refusal to help Vicuña earns him one final act of grace and mercy by the Natives, finally decolonizing him, even as he likely dies on that boat. The film thus closes the circle by beginning and ending with the littoral, fulfilling the prophecy of the “long suffering fish” who “devote all their energies to remaining in place.” The more Zama longed for the land, the more it rejected him, compelling him instead into the shores and banks which he spent the remainder of his life within. In doing so, the film questions the legitimacy of law under colonialism while also profusely denying Zama from white masculine 31 pleasures, triumphs, and progression. In other words, Zama’s fate to dwell by the shore unwillingly reconceives him towards a liminal ontology marked by feminine, Indigenous, and anti-Anthropocentric ways of being. Despite a return to the colonial age, Martel’s film is more poignant than ever, infusing its landscapes, animals, and racialized characters with an agency which fiercely challenges its colonial ownership. This, within an Argentinian context, dismantles the myth of el desierto and the invisibility of its Indigenous population. Zama’s littoral liminality is thus not simply about the deterioration of the colonial figure, but also its possibilities of coexistence and reconciliation. Upon the beach, then, power and ontology perpetually blend into each other, and everything becomes increasingly unclear and muddled, like dirty water. 32 Chapter 3: Salt of this Sea, Hard Lines, and Fluid Bodies Was it because there were no more graves in Gaza that you brought us to the beach to die? Was it because rubbling us in our houses, like our cousins, like our futures, like our gods, would be a bore? Was it because our cemeteries need cemeteries and our tombstones need homes? Was it because our fathers needed more grief? —Mohammed El-Kurd, No Moses in siege In February 2025, U.S. president Donald Trump uploaded a video to his social media, depicting an AI-generated destruction of Gaza, now a city of grey and brown rubble lined with vaguely Arab bodies scavenging the ground or aimlessly walking the desolate streets. Layered with large text that reads “What’s Next?” in patriotic red, blue, and white colors, a family emerges from the mouth of a cave into a beachy resort, now adorned with high-rises, palm trees, and a vibrant blue coastline. The words “Trump Gaza” is peppered throughout the city, from hotel signs to casinos to gift shops selling golden Trump trophies to match the newly erected Trump statue in the city square. In one scene, Elon Musk throws money by the seashore for Arab children to catch. In another, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu sip on margaritas in their 33 swimwear. Over the images, an AI voice sings “Donald Trump will set you free, bringing the life for all to see. No more tunnels, no more fear. Trump’s Gaza is finally here.”71 The original artist, Solo Avital, claims the piece was a “satire about this megalomaniac idea about putting statues [in Gaza]”72 which unexpectedly took flight through the president’s repost, now amassing over 60 million views on Instagram alone. However, the act of reposting indicates an implicit kernel of truth in its vision which can and already has started to manifest in American policy. Several weeks before he posted the video, Trump attended a press conference with Netanyahu during which he declared “The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too” and “Everybody I've spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land.”73 As such, through claims of satire, Avital grants Trump plausible deniability, using computer generated figures and absurdism to guise the violence and compliance of the U.S. administration in the Israeli warfare machine against real Palestinian bodies.74 Not only does the video forebode a dangerous future for Palestine, but it also paints a picture of beachside luxury and relaxation marked by white bodies, an image that has been exponentially reflected by material events and statements since October 7 2023. Like Farid Farid writes, “the beach’s territorial textures demonstrate how the policing of cultural geographies of whiteness are accentuated during morally uncertain times when the parasitic presence of the 71 @realdonaldtrump. “President Donald J. Trump on Instagram.” Instagram, February 27, 2025. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DGhfpgHsOg6/. 72 Hall, Rachel. “‘Trump Gaza’ AI Video Intended as Political Satire, Says Creator.” The Guardian, March 6, 2025, sec. Technology. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/06/trump-gaza-ai-video-intended-as-political-satire-says-creator. 73 Roll Call Factba.se. “Press Conference: Donald Trump Holds a Presser with Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel - February 4, 2025.” Accessed May 1, 2025. https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-press-conference-joint-benjamin-netanyahu-israel-february-4-2025. 74 While not central to this paper, it is interesting to note how AI has also been used as a tool to police and murder Palestinians, such as the ‘Lavender’ system which generated lists of suspects linked to Hamas and Jihad and marked them as military targets. 34 other becomes intolerable.”75 During the same conference, Trump described Gaza as the “Riviera of the Middle East,”76 evoking imagery of a coastal resort destination. In 2024, the BBC interviews Daniella Weiss, often referred to as the mother of the settler movement, who says that the coastline plots of Gaza have already been claimed ahead of the complete displacement of Palestinians: “I have friends in Tel Aviv so they say, ‘Don't forget to keep for me a plot near the coast in Gaza,’ because it's a beautiful, beautiful coast, beautiful golden sand.”77 Concurrently, a video circulating social media depicts the waterfront desolation of the Gaza Strip, the blue expanse of the ocean peaking behind the debris of buildings. The IDF soldier filming says, with sarcasm, “Good morning. Here we are. Gaza Strip. Beachfront view. Well kinda.”78 Such territorial claims and destruction of the coasts of Palestine are in deliberate acknowledgement that part of everyday life for the average Palestinian is (or was) going to the beach. As Laura Junka writes, “In contrast with Gaza’s otherwise tightly built and densely populated landscape of crammed and crowded refugee camps and towns, the blue sea and the soft, sandy beach is, for the 1.4 million Palestinians that inhabit Gaza, practically the only open space where one can spend time outdoors and escape the pressures of daily life.”79 Nonetheless, “Gaza Beach does not, however, stand outside the reach and reality of Israeli occupation,”80 as 75 Farid, Farid. “Terror at the Beach: Arab Bodies and the Somatic Violence of White Cartographic Anxiety in Australia and Palestine/Israel.” Social Semiotics 19, no. 1 (March 1, 2009): 59–78, 67. 76 Roll Call Factba.se. “Press Conference.” 77 Guerin, Orla. “Jewish Settlers Set Their Sights on Gaza Beachfront.” BBC, March 24, 2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68650815. 78 Tamer, رمات [@tamerqdh]. “‘صخش فلأ 40 هعباتي ىوتحم عناصو ريفك ءاول نم يليئارسإ يدنج ’.ام ًاعون ةديج ،رحبلا ئطاش ىلع ةللاطإ ةزغ لامش يف رامدلا مجحب ئزهتسيو ويديف قئاقد لبق رشن https://t.co/za0IjDJ6Rv.” Tweet. X, December 11, 2024. https://x.com/tamerqdh/status/1866884716697211387. 79 Junka, Laura. “Camping in the Third Space: Agency, Representation, and the Politics of Gaza Beach.” Public Culture 18, no. 2 (May 1, 2006): 348–59, 351-52. 80 Junka, 352. 35 roadblocks frequently prevent access to the beach and the sea is “blockaded by Israeli naval ships limiting movement up to 3–6 nautical miles (5–11 km).”81 Gaza’s fishing industry, for example, has suffered decades of boat destructions, mobility restrictions, and unwarranted detainments which deprive fishermen of their only source of income and inhabitants of food. Since October 2023 alone, the Israeli military has killed over 200 fishermen, forcing the remaining to “fish from the shore, where they are only able to catch small fish which are not big enough to provide sustenance for their families,” 82 a crisis further exasperated by Israeli settlements which dump 90% of its wastewater into the ocean.83 The occupation manifests in other watery ways, including control of rain collection, restriction of water infrastructure, and inaccessibility to the Jordan River and Gaza’s only fresh water source,84 resulting in the deliberate dehydration and starvation of Palestinians. On the other side of the wall, Israelis “can enjoy and capitalize on well-irrigated farmlands and swimming pools.” Being an ‘open-air prison’ which also borders the Mediterranean ocean means that “the sea denotes a paradoxical meaning for Palestinians in Gaza: it is a space of colonial control as much as an aide-mémoire of the bounds to freedom.”85 This of course meets tension with Israel’s neocolonial ownership of the ocean which has understood the Mediterranean as both a mare 81 Kosmatopoulos, Nikolas. “A People’s Sea: Palestine and Popular Thalassopolitics in the Mediterranean Sea.” Millennium 51, no. 3 (July 1, 2023): 739–57, 741. 82 Middle East Monitor. “200 Fishermen Killed in Gaza, Fishing Sector Suffers $20m Loss,” December 12, 2024. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241212-200-fishermen-killed-in-gaza-fishing-sector-suffers-20m-loss/. 83 Pengon. “Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network - Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics -PCBS- Issues a Press Release.” Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network - Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics -PCBS- Issues a Press Release. Accessed May 1, 2025. https://www.pengon.org/articles/view/40. 84 Amnesty International. “The Occupation of Water.” Amnesty International, November 29, 2017. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/11/the-occupation-of-water/. 85 Kosmatopoulos. “A People’s Sea,” 741. 36 nostrum and a mare nullius, “our sea and nobody’s sea.” Cetta Mainwaring and Daniela DeBono have argued that European criminalization of NGO activity at sea “allows the EU and its member states to avoid responsibility for [refugee] deaths at sea, while framing migration flows as an ahistorical ‘crisis’ and projecting an image of Europe as a coherent, unified body with an altruistic, civilized core and a hard border.” As such, the sea becomes “vast, lawless and ungovernable,”86 yet also under European law. Zionism operates in this same way and does not hide it. In an article titled “Going Down to the Sea,” author Björn Siegel chronicles and praises early maritime settlement in Palestine, writing, “The sea as an open and free space emerged as an important sphere which had to be used and…conquered by the Zionist movement.” He quotes the essays of David Ben-Gurion as evidence, which asserts, “The road to the sea is a way to expand our country, to augment our economic base, to strengthen our national health, to enforce our political position, to dominate the elements. The sea opens unbounded horizons for us. [...] We should remember: this country of ours combines land and water.”87 Here, Fanon’s words ring hauntingly true when he wrote “The settler makes history and is conscious of making it.”88 By way of settler colonial logic, the emptiness of a land and sea necessitates the non-existence of its inhabitants whose sovereignty and humanity must be vehemently denied. Edward Said writes that for the Palestinian race, they “become synonymous with unregenerate, essentially unmotivated terrorism.”89 The terrorist figure, conceptualized more generally through 86 Mainwaring, Cetta, and Daniela DeBono. “Criminalizing Solidarity: Search and Rescue in a Neo-Colonial Sea.” Environment and Planning C Politics and Space, January 12, 2021, 1032. 87 Siegel, Björn. “‘Going Down to the Sea’: David Ben-Gurion’s Maritime Turn and Jewish Migrations to Mandatory Palestine, 1933-1948 “Goin…,” n.d. Accessed May 1, 2025, 135-7. 88 Fanon. “Concerning Violence,” 51. 89 Said, Edward W. The Question of Palestine. First Vintage Books. Random House, Inc., 1980, 111-12. 37 the Arab body, is what Gayatri Spivak describes as the “abstract enemy”90 to the West whose vague entity always holds the threat of violence. Salar Mameni builds upon Spivak, writing “This abstraction opens up the notion of terror to a substantial level of uncertainty so that being a terrorist becomes a slippery state of being,”91 thereby always foreboding its contamination. If Elizabeth Povinelli writes that the terrorist figure is “the virus and the waste dump, the drug-resistant bacterial infection, and the nuclear fallout,”92 then it is no coincidence that Israeli politicians and military leaders have historically described Palestinians as “local bacteria,”93 a “genetic blemish,”94 and the “‘cancer’ in the body of the ‘Jewish State’ that must be removed by whatever means necessary.”95 The colonizer, yet again, projects his sickness onto the colonized. To prevent the leakage of Palestinian/Arab bodies, Israel has implemented a careful and vicious practice of surveillance, allowing for a precise population control which can easily differentiate between subject/citizen, or more precisely, Arab/non-Arab. This, Elia Zureik argues, is necessary as “The nation-state relies for its legitimacy on the intensity of its meaningful presence in a continuous body of bounded territory.”96 Furthermore, Said claims that the success of Zionism has been its “policy of detail,” producing a “specific territory with 90 Spivak. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Harvard University Press, 2013, 373. 91 Mameni, Salar. Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics. Duke University Press, 2023, 15. 92 Povinelli, Elizabeth A. The Three Figures of Geontology. Duke University Press, 2016, 61. 93 Aronson, Geoffrey. Creating Facts: Israel, Palestinians, and the West Bank. First Edition. Washington, D.C: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1987. 94 Mearsheimer, John J., and Stephen M. Walt. The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. London: GARDNERS VI BOOKS AMS006, 1900. 95 Bishara, Marwan. “Apocalypse in Palestine: The Rise of Israeli Fanaticism.” Al Jazeera. Accessed May 1, 2025. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/1/30/apocalypse-in-palestine-the-rise-of-israeli-fanaticism. 96 Zureik, Elia, David Lyon, and Yasmeen Abu-Laban, eds. “Colonialism, Surveillance, and Population Control: Israel/Palestine.” In Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power. Routledge, 2011, 205. 38 specific characteristics, that was surveyed down to the last millimeter, settled on, planned for, built on, and so forth, in detail.”97 Yet simultaneously that this specificity is detailed, it is constantly shifting too, a term Eyal Weizman calls “elastic geography”: The linear border, a cartographic imaginary inherited from the military and political spatiality of the nation state has splintered into multitude of temporary, transportable, deployable and removable border synonyms – ‘separation walls’, ‘barriers’, ‘blockades’, ‘closures’, ‘road blocks’, ‘checkpoints’, ‘sterile areas’, ‘special security zones’, ‘closed military areas’ and ‘zones’ that shrink and expand the territory at will.98 One example of this elasticity takes us back to the ocean, in which fishermen are prohibited to go past the limit of “20 nautical miles from the shore,” yet “Israel never allowed Palestinian fishermen to venture beyond 15, and periodically imposed much heavier restrictions.”99 Israel is thus a perpetual space of exception100 which paradoxically operates through both hard delineations and bendable laws, allowing the unregulated control and diminishment of every aspect of quotidian Palestinian life. Like Christian Salmon poetically writes, as quoted by Derek Gregory, “It might arrive at your doorstep like a delivery in the night, as quickly as the tanks can roll in; or it may slip in slowly, like a shadow. The border keeps creeping along, surrounding villages and watering places…”101 97 Said. The Question of Palestine, 94-5. 98 Weizman, Eyal. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. New York: Verso, 2007, 6. 99 Brison, Amos. “‘Anyone Who Goes near the Water Risks His Life. But If We Leave the Sea, We Die.’” +972 Magazine, March 11, 2025. https://www.972mag.com/gaza-fishing-war-siege/. 100 Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. 1st edition. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 101 Gregory, Derek. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. 1st edition. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004, 128. 39 The ruthless occupation of Israel is therefore the par excellence of Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, in which a nation’s racialized population is “subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead,”102 and Giorgio Agamben’s thanatopower, the state structure which determines who lives and dies.103 This has, without contention, reached its most detrimental effects after October 7 2023, which has included (but not limited to) indiscriminate attacks on homes, mosques, hospitals, schools, universities, and refugee camps, as well as blockades to humanitarian aid, murder of journalists, physical and sexual abuse of detainees, and intensified forms of starvation, dehydration, suffocation, and immobilization.104 I thus use the definition of genocide to describe Israel’s humanitarian crimes on Palestine, as evoked by Holocaust scholars like Israel Charny,105 Daniel Blatman, and Amos Goldberg,106 over 300 Holocaust survivors,107 as well the International Court of Justice cases of South Africa 102 Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Duke University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478007227. 103 Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. 1st edition. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1998. 104 Amnesty International. “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity.” Amnesty International, February 1, 2022. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/. 105 Charny, Israel. “Leading Genocide Scholar Israel Charny on Gaza War.” genocidewatch, March 28, 2024. https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/leading-genocide-scholar-israel-charny-on-gaza-war. 106 Blatman, Daniel, and Amos Goldberg. “There’s No Auschwitz in Gaza. But It’s Still Genocide.” Haaretz, January 30, 2025, sec. Israel News. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-01-30/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/theres-no-auschwitz-in-gaza-but-its-still-genocide/00000194-b8af-dee1-a5dc-fcff384b0000. 107 Boren, Zachary Davies. “Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants Accuse Israel of ‘Genocide.’” The Independent, August 25, 2014. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/holocaust-survivors-and-their-descendants-accuse-israel-of-genocide-9687994.html. 40 v. Israel108 and Nicaragua v. Germany under the Genocide Convention.109 On April 5 2025 in Washington D.C., protestors collectively carry a banner with an estimated list of all the Palestinians killed since the genocide began. It seems to stretch for miles.110 Yet amidst the unspeakable horrors, Israel’s relentless attacks on Palestinians also reveal its own greatest weakness: its legitimacy. Opposed to previous colonial structures, Zionism hinges upon neither common language, ethnicity, nor religion, but rather the belief in the expulsion of Palestinians in a pure Jewish state. It is therefore an ideology built upon, and solely comprised of, racial segregation and ethnic cleansing which, despite its claims of ethnodiversity, can never accept the Arab body. Said described the myth of the Orient through the “imagined geography” where “It is enough for ‘us’ to set up these boundaries in our own minds; ‘they’ become ‘they’ accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from ‘ours.’”111 This, as he argues, can become “entirely arbitrary”112 because such divisions are ultimately immaterial, slippery, and therefore watery. Similarly, Zureik writes, “Though Othering is a convenient way of propping up one’s ego and power, it is inherently fragile: it must be constantly fed by the illusory inferiority of the Other – and is thus constantly at risk of being 108 “South Africa’s Genocide Case against Israel.” In Wikipedia, April 30, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=South_Africa%27s_genocide_case_against_Israel&oldid=1288172813 Page Version ID: 1288172813. 109 “Nicaragua v. Germany.” In Wikipedia, April 23, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nicaragua_v._Germany&oldid=1287011703 Page Version ID: 1287011703. 110 peoplesforumnyc. “The People’s Forum on Instagram: ‘WE WILL HONOR ALL OUR MARTYRS! Since the Start of the Genocide, Israel Has Indiscriminately Massacred Innocent Men, Women, and…’” Instagram, April 5, 2025. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIE1BFtOe7G/. 111 Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London Penguin, 1978, 55. 112 Said, 54. 41 discredited.”113 The colonizer of the New World through Glissant’s writings suffers in the same way, in which “Identity will be achieved when communities attempt to legitimate their right to possession of a territory through myth or the revealed word. Such an assertion can predate its actual accomplishment by quite some time.”114 This is why Fayez Sayegh argues that Zionism’s biggest enemy is not “not Gentile ‘anti-Semitism,’” as commonly echoed, but rather “Jewish ‘assimilation’” whereby “‘assimilation’ is the loss of ‘Jewish identity’; it is the prelude to the ‘dissolution’ and ‘elimination’ of the ‘Jewish nation.’”115 Israel’s unabating monitoring and dissemination of Palestinians is therefore the anxious and desperate assertion of a fundamentally precarious racial integrity and power structure, or what Farid terms as a “white cartographic anxiety,” which exercises its “overt will to stabilise its presence by inflicting somatic damage on racialised bodies.”116 “This anxiety,” he continues, “manifests itself transcendentally on the beach,”117 which forever “bears the somatic and psychic scarring of Arab bodies and their antecedent indigenous traces.”118 Evidently, the beach is a frequent motif in Palestinian cinema, particularly as its liminality lends itself well to the porous Palestinian body constantly in between shifting borders and unstable lines. As Irus Braverman writes, “The prolonged state of liminality eventually extends to such a degree that the Palestinian comes to embody it and to take it with him or her 113 Zureik, Lyon, and Abu-Laban. “Colonialism, Surveillance, and Population Control,” 7. 114 Glissant. Poetics of Relation, 13. 115 Sayegh, Fayez. “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965).” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (January 1, 2012): 206–25, 22. 116 Farid. “Terror at the beach,” 64. 117 Farid, 65. 118 Farid, 60. 42 wherever and whenever they go.”119 Director Sobhi al- Zobaidi agrees when he says, “Film was ‘a passage, a crack, a flight, a leap’, wherein Palestinians could ‘weave our space as we go, constantly reconstituting ourselves in relation to changing geographies.”120 al-Zobaidi’s short film About the Sea (2007) exemplifies this littoral porosity by layering Palestinian contemplations of access and ownership of their beaches over shots of the ocean and sounds of gentle waves: “We’re always talking about liberating Palestine, but we never think of the sea, even though our liberation motto was ‘From the River to the Sea.’” In The Roof (2006), director Kamal Aljafari asks his friend to put the phone by the ocean so he could hear the waves from his apartment, insufficiently accessing what he cannot otherwise. In Lina Soualem’s auto-biographical film Bye Bye Tiberias (2023), her mother, actress Hiam Abbass, sits on the rocks by Lake Tiberias where she had once taken her daughter to, reflecting on what it meant to leave her family behind in the occupation. And finally, I turn towards Annemarie Jacir’s Salt of this Sea (2008), which repossesses the beach as a tool to defy the rigidity and immobility of the Palestinian body under occupation. As an expat herself, Jacir’s oeuvre frequently reckons with questions of borders and diaspora, from the fictional feature Wajib (2017) about a father and a newly returned son, to the short documentaries Like Twenty Impossibles (2003) and A Few Crumbs For Birds (2005).121 No film, however, as comprehensively and boldly exemplifies these themes as Salt of this Sea, which follows Brooklyn-born Soraya’s (Suheir Hammad) return to Jaffa, the hometown of her 119 Braverman, Irus. “Civilized Borders: A Study of Israel’s New Crossing Administration.” Antipode 43, no. 2 (2011): 264–95, 274. 120 Tawil-Souri, Helga. “Cinema as the Space to Transgress Palestine’s Territorial Trap,” January 1, 2014. 121 While Jacir was an only editor and director of photography for A Few Crumbs for Birds, she played a large part in its inception when director Nassim Amaouche was stalled at the Iraqi border and struggled to find a story for the film. When Jacir played him a Palestinian song, Amaouche was inspired to make the film about borders, waiting, and liminality. 43 grandparents, to recover her late grandfather’s money and connect with her culture. However, the relatively straight forward task quickly becomes convoluted when the bank refuses to give her the funds which were frozen and made obsolete following the 1948 Nakba. Forced to confront her anger and sense of injustice, Soraya embarks on a journey of anarchic citizenship, which I define as living below and outside of the law, a decision profoundly made through and after her contact with the beaches of Jaffa. I argue that this alternative citizenship allows Soraya to assert her Palestinian identity in a way which moves both against and with the elasticity of the occupation. In doing so, she reveals its inherent fragility while also becoming deterritorialized122 and fluid in her Palestinian embodiment. Jacir thus turns to the beach as an expression of freedom, even if only fleeting, as resistance to the state’s hard lines and borders. The film begins with house demolitions as walls are pulled down and rolled over by tanks. Interspliced in-between, a military airplane flies overhead before a bomb is dropped on the ground producing black gusts of air. Then, the film turns towards the sea as dozens of Palestinians cram into boats, pushing past each other against the thick viscosity of the waves. These shots are archival footage of the Nakba, considered the beginning of the occupation and thus the rupture of Palestinian stable space/time. When the next shot lingers over the turbulent waves of Jaffa, no longer archival despite its black and white filter, the film makes a wordless statement that the consequences of the Nakba continue into the present. This opening sequence also creates a juxtaposition between land and ocean, in which the demolition of houses evokes a dry sensorium, full of dust, sand, and rock, which become the reminder of land which is no longer theirs. Conversely, the wet affection through the waters captures both the possibility of escape and the deathly chaos which ensued as thousands tried to leave by boat, something Ilan 122 Deleuze, Gilles. A Thousand Plateaus. 44 Pappé documents with one recount from Haifa: “Men stepped on their friends and women on their own children. The boats in the port were soon filled with living cargo. The overcrowding in them was horrible. Many turned over and sank with all their passengers.”123 Through this, the Nakba is captured through conflicting registers of ownership (land) and exile (ocean), as well as life and death (both), mediating the beach as a site of trauma, displacement, and escape. Turning more diegetically, this sequence also posits a disembodied subjectivity through Soraya’s grandparents who fled to Lebanon refugee camps shortly after. The look towards Jaffa on the waters therefore represents this subjectivity which is both situated in a very specific pocket of time yet also forever detached from linearity. The latter materializes through Soraya, who seemingly inherits her grandparents’ memories of Jaffa before 1948, representing how the Palestinian identity of exile is one that is uniquely multiplicitous, bodiless, and porous. Said seems to encapsulate Soraya when he writes that while “Palestinian children today are born in such places as New York or Amman[,] they still identify themselves as being ‘from’ Shafa’Amr or Jerusalem or Tiberias. These claims are almost meaningless except as they add to a genealogy of paradoxically Palestinian presence that sets itself against the logic of history and geography.”124 We are then thrown into the film’s narrative with Soraya’s arrival into Israel, which automatically places her under suspicion by airport staff and border officers. This scene intentionally drags on as each question gets more invasive, repetitive, and racialized. One officer asks demeaningly, “What kind of name is that?” Soraya answers, “It’s an Arab name.” The 123 Zureik, Elia, David Lyon, and Yasmeen Abu-Laban, eds. “Colonialism, Surveillance, and Population Control: Israel/Palestine.” In Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power. Routledge, 2011, 96. 124 Said. The Question of Palestine, 121. 45 questions turn into searches, which turn into undressing, illustrating how the insistent need to investigate the Arab body for a ‘problem’ has less to do with security measures (“You understand this is for your own security?”), and more to do with an excuse to humiliate and reject the Palestinian. This encounter thus encapsulates the violence of the occupation, which even in the most quotidian context and with all the legal documentation, shimmers on the surface. Interestingly, it is both female and male officers who scrutinize Soraya. Female participation in racialized sexual violence has been historically a troubled concept. However, Sherene Razack asserts that this phenomenon has less to do with gender and more with race under a white regime: “White women secure access to citizenship when they participate in the violence of nation.”125 In Israel, both perpetrators and victims of violence become un-gendered, in which all Palestinians are threats which must be managed by all Israelis. When Emad (Saleh Bakri), the local man Soraya falls in love with, is also forced to undress in front of IDF soldiers, it becomes increasingly clear that gendered violence under an occupation becomes an all-encompassing assertion of white power. Learning the hard and elastic laws of the Israeli state after this encounter, Soraya begins to embody a fluid identity, which allows her to split past surveillance and borders, aided by her American passport, perfect English, and ambiguous racial features. This can be best seen during the bank robbery scene, in which Soraya and Emad cover their faces with veils of a niqab and keffiyeh respectively. As they escape with Marwan (Riyad Ideis), they ditch the veils and dress themselves with the Judaist items Soraya had bought in Tel Aviv, including the kippah, mitpaḥat, and a Star of David window ornament. This successfully lets them through the checkpoint with no questions from the patrol police, a stark difference to Soraya’s encounter at the airport. In 125 Razack, Sherene. “How Is White Supremacy Embodied? Sexualized Racial Violence at Abu Ghraib.” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 17, no. 2 (2005): 341–63, 359. 46 doing so, the characters take advantage of Israeli’s arbitrary statehood, which defines itself through religious and racial codifications in its distance from the Muslim Arab. Their successful racial slippage also initiates their anarchic citizenship, granting them liberty by (secretly) breaking the law. Yet while she momentarily revokes her Palestinianess, Soraya does not abandon it, as evinced by the Palestinian and Islamic signifiers of the keffiyeh and niqab during the robbery which demonstrate her desire to unapologetically embody the Palestinian when overpowering the Israeli. And while the film does not address this, Soraya and Emad’s racial slippage is a somatic privilege which not every Palestinian has, though even this privilege has its limits without documentation which remains virtually impossible to get. The character’s subsequent entrance into Jaffa fully initiates Soraya and Emad’s wateriness, mediating the binaries of belonging (land) and exile (ocean) between their two Palestinian identities. Early in the film, Soraya and Emad’s identities meet tension, in which the former’s refugee status from Palestine produces an almost idealistic perception of the homeland and how to reclaim it, and the latter who grew up trapped and dejected in its cruel occupation makes him want nothing more than to leave. Again, the Palestinian identity is expressed through a multiplicity between those who chose to leave and those who didn’t, as well as those who were able to leave and those who weren’t. Soraya’s escape from Palestine (through her grandparents) by boat thus contrasts with Emad’s continued inhabitation, creating the dichotomy between ocean and land which lends Soraya towards a porosity Emad initially struggles to embody. And while these two identities find friction, they are both in a constant state of exile and peril of belonging, thus both land and ocean. Soraya’s return to Jaffa and Emad’s escape from the West Bank therefore momentarily lift this state of exile through their ability to move across borders and be fluid in contrast to the state’s hard lines. It makes sense then, why Emad chooses to 47 follow Soraya’s lawlessness following this, discovering the freedom in this fluid amphibious movement: “With my look and your accent, we have it made.” Saliently, this freedom is expressed through the access to the beach, which for the average Palestinian (particularly those in the West Bank) is a pipe dream. Earlier in the film, Emad drives Soraya through the land, suddenly slowing down and stopping to say “This is it. My limit. I’m not permitted to go further.” Over a mellow soundtrack, the two get out of the car to sit on the rocks to overlook the city. Emad points towards the open horizon, “That’s the sea over there. See those houses? That’s Tel Aviv. The sea lies beyond it.” At this mountaintop, the manmade structures of checkpoints and walls are invisible, only the bare expanse of the land filling the screen. The mere glimpse of the sea, though still so far away, provides a momentary relief away from the oppressive city which refracts back on itself bitterly as a constant reminder of its unattainability. For Soraya, the sight makes her reminisce through her grandparents’ memories: My grandfather swam in that sea every morning, then he’d walk on Al Helwa Street to reach Al Tawfiqiya library, then on to Al Nuzha Street. Cars weren’t allowed to pass on Al Nuzha. The orange traders—Jaffa oranges—met at Al Salahi market. My grandfather always talked about the Al Madfa Café: Umm Kulthum sang there, and Farid al-Atrash. My grandmother really loved Farid. Sometimes, my grandparents went to the cinema. The Hamra Cinema. When they were broke, they’d wait by the side door and the doorman would sneak everyone in. Have you ever been there? In her vivid descriptions, she seems to almost talk through her grandparents, particularly when Emad responds with “Are you sure you haven’t?” In doing so, Soraya asserts her own futurity in 48 Palestine despite her (until now) material absence, further conflating time and space coherency to resist Israel’s ethnic cleansing structure’s erasure of the Palestinian. Emad, however, cannot relate to the freedom before the Nakba that Soraya’s grandparents had lived. Instead, he says “I haven’t been to the sea in 17 years. They won’t give me a permit to leave Ramallah.” This is also why Marwan doesn’t know the word for ‘sea’ in Hebrew despite learning some words in jail, as the possibility does not even exist. It’s then a sublime moment of liberation when the characters cross to Jaffa and Soraya asks Emad, “Where do we go now?” and he replies, “The sea. The motherfucking sea.” Jaffa, often nicknamed as the “Bride of the Sea” for its picturesque beaches, then becomes a rare moment of joy and solace for the characters who jump into its waters and lie on its sands until the sun sets. However, Jacir makes it clear that the occupation cannot be escaped from, even on the beaches which are rife with suspicious looks from passersby and drones of airplanes above. In one scene, an Israeli woman accidentally enters the characters’ hotel room as they playfight, and though harmless, serves as another reminder of intrusion and occupation. The next time the characters look out at the ocean, Soraya says “I hate the sea,” a wistful contemplation of its porosity between freedom and constriction. All this comes to a nauseating narrative crux when Soraya returns to her grandparents’ house, now occupied by an Israeli woman, Irit (Shelly Goral), who willingly lets the three enter and stay. While Marwan makes friendly conversation with Irit, Soraya silently inspects the house to find mugs in the cupboard, imprinted with comic sans text which reads “Peace Now. End the Occupation.” When Soraya asks, “What happened to all the furniture?” Irit replies, “I don’t know. I guess my family got rid of it at some point.” The next scene cuts to Soraya sitting by the ocean, throwing up and crying with the loud crashing of the waves overwhelming the 49 soundscape. The abjection of her vomit and tears, as well as the comfort she seeks from being by the ocean rather than inside the house, emphasize Soraya’s body as watery even in moments of disempowerment and disgust. Soon after, she swims in its waters, though now the waves move with chaos and threaten to submerge her. Quickly and seamlessly, the beach and the ocean have become suffocating rather than freeing. Concurrently, Irit’s house becomes hard and restrictive in its delineation and designation, akin to the occupation despite its proximity to the borderless expanse of the ocean. Furthermore, Irit’s friendliness and her ‘anti-occupation’ mugs highlight how even the most liberal Israeli citizen can still be complicit in its apartheid structure. This becomes particularly clear towards the end, when Soraya demands her house back, to which Irit says, “You can’t, the state owns it. And the Jewish National Fund said they won’t sell to non-Jews.” When Soraya responds that she can convert, Irit responds with a coy smile, “Won’t work.” Legality, in its arbitrary yet wholly practice, therefore reveals the limitations to Soraya’s fluidity and aversion of the law, which above all ultimately hinges upon racial exclusion. Irit’s juicing of oranges during this conversation also works as a visual metaphor for Israel’s occupation of Jaffa which drains and pulverizes its natural resources; wateriness is evoked again, though through oppression. Deborah Bird Rose words, “To get in the way of settler colonization, all the native has to do is stay at home,”126 comes to prevalence as the tensions between Irit and Soraya rise, forcing Soraya and Emad to leave for the road. It is here that the two embrace lawlessness, jumping across cities and scavenging for vacate spaces to make home. Despite the constant state of fear and surveillance, particularly as any encounter with Israeli authorities will make clear that neither of them has the permits or a 126 Rose, Deborah Bird. Hidden Histories: Black Stories from Victoria River Downs. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1991, 46. 50 visa to stay, both Soraya and Emad begin to fully embody a littoral liminality. In one scene, after finding an empty cave to sleep in, Soraya is awoken to Emad’s singing and joins him outside: The sea is laughing. Why, why, why? As I carry a jar down to the shore. How many jars have we filled for others? We were thirsty yet gave our water away. We wait in patience while the sea quenches our thirst. Instead of one burden we carry many. The sea is laughing. Why, why, why? As I carry a jar down to the shore. Standing between us, wall after wall. And I am no genie nor a bird. Before he finishes singing, the scene cuts to an orange sitting atop of a car dashboard, rolling carelessly with the movement. The song poetically reflects on the constriction of the ocean which cruelly laughs at the Palestinian, paradoxically in front of the sea and unable to access it. With the seamless transition to the orange, this scene embodies Soraya and her hometown of Jaffa which she has now left and cannot return to, yet its essence still follows her. The end of the film ponders again the limits to which Soraya and Emad can live freely under the occupation. After several close calls with officers, the two are finally caught when Emad is randomly questioned by the police after he fails to respond in Hebrew. It is here when we return to the border and the checkpoint, where the two are separated forever, but also where Soraya expresses a final resistance: OFFICER: Where are you from? SORAYA: I’m from here. OFFICER: Here where? SORAYA: Palestine. OFFICER: How long have you been here? SORAYA: I’ve been here all my life. I was born here. 51 OFFICER: It says here that you were born in the U.S.A. Where were you born? SORAYA: Jaffa. Nuzha street. OFFICER: Jaffa…Do you have another passport? SORAYA: Just Palestinian. OFFICER: Show it to me. SORAYA: You have it in your hand. We return to where we started at the beginning of the movie, in which Soraya is subject to the invasive search of her suitcase and documentation by Israeli officers. Yet rather than adhering to its coherency and calculation, Soraya resists the coherent logic of Israeli borders and identity by fully embodying the fluidity of her immaterial anarchic citizenship. By inscribing herself as Palestinian rather than Lebanese or American, she also willingly accepts her fate under the occupation, always at the whim of its cruelty but persisting nonetheless, taking her right to return in her own hands even when she is forced to leave again. The finale leaves us in the airport where Soraya sits in defeat, her figure small and almost unnoticeable on the screen. Yet the final shot, a two shot of a fountain and a bust, seems to point towards a persisting resistance, particularly as the soundscape moves from the calm waters of the fountain to a song of Arab strings, moving from diegesis to non-diegesis. In the same stroke, Soraya completes her transformation into water, which allows her to escape the close surveillance of her Arab body through her fluidity and immateriality. The use of the fountain (as opposed to the sea), as well as its framing next to the bust of a prominent Zionist figure, further metamorphizes the beaches of Palestine which provide constant oscillations between notions of freedom and constriction. This bitter ending thus remains soberly realistic in the power of the Palestinian against the Israeli state, yet also quietly optimistic in their persistence through a 52 littoral liminality, resisting the hard lines and checkpoints of the occupation, and destabilizing the imperial logic of the state. Even if neither Soraya or Emad ever see or feel the Jaffa beaches again, they carry its porosity, a form of resistance which can never be quelled or controlled. In doing so, they come to epitomize the resilient watery Palestinian identity which Israel fervently tries to erode but still leaks through, somewhere and somehow. 53 Conclusion: Right to Littoral Liminality To return to the beginning of the end, and conversely, the end of it all, we return to the beach. A site which holds immense history, racial inflections, and Anthropocentric orientations, the beach is both our perpetual past and our distant future, collapsing separate planes of time and space into one arcane locale. As I describe in my introductory chapter, the beach resists binaries of ocean and land to account for the multiplicity of Blackness and Indigeneity, whose death and survivance are permanently etched into the sands of colonial time, as well as non-human ontology, to complicate colonial practices and semiotics. Embodying the littoral liminality of the beach, then, is to object easy metaphors and posit a quiet refusal to imperial delineations, instead becoming perpetually unfoldable and inexplicable, and thus increasingly ungovernable. Lucrecia Martel’s Zama unravels coherency through its white settler protagonist, whose inability to move amphibiously and leave the shores drive him to insanity until he transforms into fish. In constant conversation with her auteristic oeuvre, I argue that Martel’s cinematic waters are persistently decolonial and dirty, revealing the implicit dirt of the colonial figure whose moral sickness rules over yet repeatedly fails to infect its non-white, non-human subjects. In Annemarie Jacir’s Salt of this Sea, it is the colonized who now embodies a fluid ontology, purposefully evading and slipping through the racialized occupation. The access and return to the beach then work to destabilize its anxious white possession which, despite its most cruel and extensive efforts, is always at threat of dissipating. In both filmic chapters, the beach, in its two binaries of land and ocean, is also the ceaseless vacillation between freedom and constriction which never meets a neat conclusion. 54 Aptly so, neither does the film’s sense of Otherness. Though Zama is consistently undone, made small and unimportant, his first and final act of defiance grants him the possibility to live and assimilate as Native/fish. In Salt of this Sea, however, the limitations to which the film’s Arab bodies elude state control demonstrate the impossibility of existence in the Israeli state, who’s imperial ethnonationalist structures ultimately precipitate upon racial supremacy and purity. Such an oppressive and pertinent reality resists complete metaphors, forcing us to confront its violence directly through its unwavering camera and overt themes, making Soraya’s littoral liminality also a literal liminality. In contrast, Zama can ellipse its violence or center it off screen, working euphemistically through aquatic and animalistic allusions. The film being a period piece, achieved through careful costuming and setting, further contrasts with Jacir’s film, forcibly filmed guerilla-style to avoid Israeli law and thereby echoing the diegetic anarchic citizenship. Perhaps it is Martel’s white subjectivity which grants her, and Zama, the privilege of metaphor and critical distance that Jacir and Soraya cannot afford. Concurrently, the final shot of Salt of this Sea hints towards a complication to its otherwise straight-forward narrative, reorienting Soraya’s watery embodiment as Palestinian through registers of failure, non-diegesis, and non-being. If the white European subjectivity is a singularity which can be easily unmade, then the Palestinian subjectivity is one that cannot be easily comprehended, already undoubtedly and irreversibly fragmented. Here, Glissant’s “right to opacity,”127 or the rejection of Western transparency, works in two-fold: Zama (and the surrounding water) is made opaque, and Soraya becomes opaque when she can no longer be transparent. In other words, the right to opacity, for the Palestinian, is no longer a choice, but it’s very survivance. If the beach is where both colonizer and colonized are opaque, then it too 127 Glissant. Poetics of Relation, 189. 55 becomes a space of perpetual opacity which, in due time, will extend its liminality beyond the littoral to unravel all forms of cohesion, borders, and lines. This is a process which cannot end without returning to its colonial beginnings. In February 2025, shortly after the ceasefire between Israel and Palestine had been signed, more than 300,000 Palestinians walk through the Gaza strip shoreline “walking along the once-beloved ocean…Many pitched tents on the sand to rest after a long journey, while others used the beach as a meeting point to reunite with loved ones they hadn’t seen since before the war.”128 On these same beaches, almost 20 years prior, Israeli shelling hit and killed seven family members of a young girl. In a video that had since gone viral, she cries over her father’s dead body, becoming known to the whole world as the ‘girl of the sea.’ In 2017, she walks across stage to accept her diploma from the University of Gaza. There, she stands and delivers this: “Remember the girl from the Gaza beach? She was having a good time with her family, happy and laughing. Israeli occupation naval ships struck them. Her father was killed, four of her sisters, her brother and her aunt. Her mother was injured, and so were her other four sisters and her brother. She was also injured. She was 12 years old. I am that girl, Huda Ali Ghalia.”129 Palestinian future, at the moment I write this, is still uncertain. Yet, perhaps through the people’s perseverance, the beach can become theirs again. One day. 128 Zena Chamas. “Children Once Played by the Ocean. Now Gaza’s Beaches Are a ‘sad’ Place.” ABC News, February 7, 2025. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-08/thousands-of-palestinians-journey-back-home-to-gaza-in-rubble-/104864624. 129 Middle East Monitor. “Iconic Girl from Gaza Beach Massacre Graduates,” July 28, 2017. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20170728-iconic-girl-from-gaza-beach-massacre-graduates/. 56 Works Cited “200 Fishermen Killed in Gaza, Fishing Sector Suffers $20m Loss.” 2024. Middle East Monitor. December 12, 2024. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241212-200-fishermen-killed-in-gaza-fishing-sector-suffers-20m-loss/. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Cinema and Media Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Zuo, Mila, 1982-
Littoral liminality : the colonial beaches of Zama and Salt of this sea
Text