The blue spectre of exile: Mirrored displacements in Darin J. Sallam’s Al-Babaghā (The Parrot)

Abstract

Al-Babaghāʾ ( The Parrot ) is a short film that bears the unmistakable aesthetic mark of Jordanian–Palestinian filmmaker Darin J. Sallam. It depicts the arrival of a Tunisian Jewish family in the city of Haifa after the events of the Palestinian Nakba in 1948 (also known as The Catastrophe) and chronicles the challenges they face when adjusting to their new life in the emergent State of Israel and in the enclosed space of the stolen Palestinian home, which they now occupy. This article argues that Sallam’s film uses the character of the parrot to triangulate and implicate the Tunisian family within a liminal space between hegemonic Zionism and the expulsion of the Palestinians from their land and homes. In so doing, Sallam mirrors and links the experiences of Arab Jews with those of Palestinians in dual and interconnected manifestations of exile.