A Hill of Beans

Musings on absences, grief and the power of propaganda in Casablanca...

This Saturday is my mother’s birthday. She would have turned 63. It’s only six weeks since the 15th anniversary of her death. Though I never let her anniversary pass without some small act of remembrance, I’ve realised over the last few years that it’s actually her birthdays which I find harder.

Welcome to AutCasts, a free bi-weeekly newsletter by writer, Aisling Walsh, exploring neurodivergence through cinema’s oddballs, misfits & rebels!

I suspect it’s because birthdays are a more concrete reminder of time passing, how the gap between the present and the time when she was still with us grows ever wider, straying from years into decades. It’s a reminder of the dates not celebrated, the milestones (50 and 60) left unmarked. Birthdays are the moment in the year when, no matter what else is going on in your life, you call your loved one up to share your good wishes or their celebration becomes an excuse for the whole family to gather together. It’s the reminder that there’s no one to call, no candles to blow out, no cake to share, that makes the grief feel so sharp, so present.

So every October 21^st I try and do something to celebrate my mother’s birthday even in her absence, something she and I enjoyed together: I watch a movie and have a glass of red wine in her honour. This year I’ve chosen Casablanca.

Casablanca is a 1942 American romantic drama film directed by Michael Curtiz and filmed and set during World War II. Bar-owner and American migrant Rick (Humphrey Bogart) must choose between his love for a Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) and helping her husband Victor (Henreid), a Czechoslovak resistance leader, escape from the Vichy-controlled city of Casablanca to the US to continue his fight against the Germans.

Of all the gin joints in all the world…

Growing up, my mother and I clashed on almost everything, including our taste in movies. But during the last year of her life I was lucky enough to share a few moments when we sat down together, just the two of us, and shared a bottle of wine over one of her favourite movies. The most memorable of these were Terminator and Casablanca, both of which I watched for the first time with her. These two blockbusters and enduring classics couldn’t feel more different in mood and subject matter, but Mum loved both. I wrote about Terminator 2, and why a single mother of three might have been so enamoured with Sarah Connor, for Literary Hub last year. This year I decided to dedicate some time to Casablanca. There’s nothing obviously neurodivergent about the movie except, perhaps, Rick’s recalcitrant and disgruntled personality, so please indulge me in this nostalgic homage to my mother. 

It’s hard for a self-identified cinephile to admit this but, growing up I had a strange aversion to watching ‘old’ movies especially if they were in black and white. I’m not sure why exactly, but it has something to do with a certain discomfort with the acting conventions and aesthetics of early Hollywood which jarred with the 80s and 90s style of film-making that I grew up with. This might be an autistic thing of favouring familiarity over the unknown, or something else. Suffice to say, I did not see Casablanca until my Mum made me sit down and watch it with her over the 2007 Christmas holidays.

Prior to this my only exposure to Casablanca had been the Simpson’s parody with the alternative ending. But almost from the beginning I could recognise the quoted, misquoted and parodied dialogue from countless other movies and TV shows, phrases so familiar they have become part of our cultural lexicon. While Mum rolled her eyes and laughed every time I turned to her to say ‘That’s where this is from?’ she could recite the script from start to finish and wasn’t shy about repeating favourite lines! By the end of the movie I realised that Casablanca was more than a cinematic classic, it has influenced countless movies, become part of our everyday speech and is a masterpiece of wartime propaganda.

This crazy world…

I’ve been thinking a lot about propaganda this week, the stories we find acceptable to tell and those which are buried under the rubble of imposed censorship, silence and forgetting. Casablanca works because the story at the centre of the movie, a love triangle and the real and complex decisions individuals must take during war, transcend the medium of wartime propaganda. It has endured because the moral struggles of Rick, Ilsa and Victor are impeachable, the enemies are patently clear and the good guys are willing to sacrifice love and happiness in the struggle for freedom. The movie’s resolution is also deeply satisfying: the recalcitrant American isolationist, Rick, whose motives and intentions are suspect throughout choses honour over self-interest. He and the Vichy traitor, Captain Renault, unite in friendship and the struggle against Nazism.

We know Rick’s a good guy under all the layers of bitterness and cynicism from his subtle gestures of support for the allies. His record fighting on the Republican side in Spain against Franco’s fascism is also mentioned in passing. Celebrating this political allegiance would be inconceivable in following decades, as the US war against Communism intensified. But in Casablanca it remains a badge of honour.

The most troubling relationship in Casablanca is that of Rick and Sam (Dooley Wilson). Ostensibly friends and colleagues, their few moments on screen together betray a persistent racial hierarchy at a time in the US when Black people lacked the most basic civil rights. Rick’s quips about underpaying Sam and his sale of the business with Sam included, betray a culture where Black people were considered little more than property, despite the pretensions to liberty and democracy. Sam, meanwhile is loyal to a fault, following Rick around Europe to serve as bell-boy, entertainer and confidante, depending on Rick’s need.

It’s the one jarring note in an otherwise flawless movie that sweeps you along with the dramatic love triangle, the plight of European refugees trapped in Casablanca and desperate for safe passage to the US, the subterfuge and intrigue and Rick’s battle to overcome his own indifference to join the good fight. It’s such a well-made, enduring classic, transcending the genre of pro-war cinema churned out by the allies at the time, that you could almost forget it was propaganda.

You have to think for both of us, for all of us…

It's impossible to imagine a situation in which the lines between the good guys and the bad guys are so cleanly drawn as they were in Casablanca. As a propaganda vehicle, it feels almost quaint compared to the kind of insidious misinformation and disinformation, overt and covert censorship we must now wade through in our post-truth, fake-news, world of information saturation. These days the struggle and language of victimhood is too often appropriated by the oppressor against the oppressed to delegitimise the rights and existence of countless marginalised communities and peoples.

In Guatemala, indigenous peoples, human rights defenders and social justice activists are branded as delinquents or criminals. They are investigated for corruption for peaceful protests or their “illegal occupation” of ancestral lands and denying the property rights of the people named on falsified deeds and in corrupted land registries. In Australia, the vote to give indigenous peoples constitutional recognition and an advisory role in Parliament was successfully branded as ‘divisive’ despite Australia’s long history of genocide, dispossession, exclusion and institutionalised racism against its indigenous peoples. Women, calling themselves feminists, have turned on trans people as the ‘greatest threat to [cis] women’s safety’ and aligned themselves with conservative forces determined to erase the existence of anyone who strays outside the binary definitions of women and men, heterosexual relationships and procreative sex. And in Palestine, we are supposed to stand by and accept a genocide against people who have been publicly branded as ‘human animals.’

In such a world, the black and white simplicity of Casablanca offers the comfort of knowing you are on the right side of history. But 80 years later, the heroes of Casablanca, the US and French governments (alongside many other allies and non-allies), are currently engaged in a massive effort to repress protest, smother dissent and try to convince us that the genocide unfolding in front of our eyes is a necessary act of war and not a product of the settler colonial machine.

The whole world crumbling…

As a child, I was obsessed with World War II history, particularly the Holocaust, believing it to be an unparalleled act of calculation, cruelty and indifference to the value of human life. I still believe this to be true, but I have since learned that European imperialism enacted a process of ongoing genocide across the globe and the current situation in Palestine is a product of that continuum. As a child I used to wonder what I would have done to protest the violence of World War II and the extermination of multiple populations by the Nazis. I worried that I would not have done all that was in my power, or worse, that I would have been a passive bystander who did nothing at all. At 38, watching the genocide in Gaza unfolding across heavily censored social media channels, that question has come back to haunt me.

I want to join the protests which have happened all over the world but I can’t. I’m currently based in Guatemala where we are heading into a third week of blockades and mass peaceful protests against the sustained attempts to overturn the results of democratic elections held in August. It seems wrong, dangerous even, to expect anyone in Guatemala to redirect their waning energies towards a protest at the Israeli Embassy in Guatemala City, particularly as vigilante violence against the peaceful protests has been escalating and rumours of a military, rather than technical coup, abound. And yet, the two struggles are not unrelated.

Round up the usual suspects…

Following the US embargo on military aid to Guatemala in 1977, the Israeli government stepped in to fill the void. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the worst years of a conflict that lasted from 1960 to 1996, the Israeli government provided arms, training and surveillance infrastructure to Guatemala. This would prove vital in facilitating a genocide against Guatemala’s indigenous peoples, leading to an estimated 200,000 dead and disappeared and 100,000 more displaced over the course of the conflict. The abuses and massacres perpetrated against the largely civilian and indigenous population were well documented and, therefore, it cannot be claimed that Israel acted in ignorance.

The same military, economic and political elites that perpetrated massacres against whole communities throughout the 1980’s are the ones trying to ensure the progressive candidate elected this August, Bernardo Arrévalo, will not become president. Those same elites are among the most fervent supporters of Israel’s Zionist project in Central America. Guatemala was one of only nine countries to recognise Trump’s relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem back in 2017, in violation of international law and the peace agreements established between Israel and Palestine. Guatemala was the only other country to move its embassy to Jerusalem. Guatemala still benefits from considerable Israeli military and security aid, in a country which is rapidly backsliding into authoritarianism and increasingly uses surveillance and violence to repress indigenous communities and human rights defenders.

Young Israeli backpackers flock to Guatemala for R&R after their mandatory service in the IDF. I often wonder if they are aware of their government’s involvement in the massacres carried out in the Mayan villages they visit? Meanwhile, a Holocaust Museum opened in 2016 directly opposite Guatemala’s own Casa de la Memoria ‘House of Memory’, on the main avenue running through Guatemala City’s historical centre. Casa de la Memoria, was opened in 2014 by a local NGO, the Centre for Legal Action on Human Rights (CLADH) to honour the victims of the Guatemalan genocide and educate the population about the causes and impact of genocide. The Guatemalan stare continues to emphasise it’s close relationship to Israel while denying it’s own responsibility for genocide, despite the findings of two truth commissions and multiple tribunals. Ironically, Guatemala’s Ministry of Education has directly supported the Holocaust Museum but not Casa de la Memoria.

Everything is connected, the tentacles of settler-colonialism and Western imperialism reach the furthest corners of our earth.

I stick my neck out for no one…?

But what to do in such a situation? I scroll twitter, I retweet what I can to push back against the wall of censorship and misinformation, the shadow bans on Instagram, TiK Tok and X. I donate what I can. But nothing feels enough. And I wonder, is this what it means to be a bystander to genocide?

I know people read AutCasts expecting a light and fun analysis about movies and neurodivergence, but I’ve never been very good about separating the personal and the political. In fact, I’ve never been convinced there is any value in such false separations and I suspect that only the privileged have the luxury of ignoring politics in art. Here I am reminded of and encouraged by something

Alexander Chee

said at the 2021 Cúirt festival in Galway: ‘life, literature and politics refuse to disentangle themselves.’

I’ve dedicated the last 20 years of my life to studying and working in human rights and my PhD specifically addressed the possibilities for healing in the aftermath of colonial violence and genocide. But what possibilities can there be for healing in the middle of a genocide? How can we even talk of healing when thousands of Palestinian lives are being destroyed as we speak?

The only answer that I’ve heard that comes anywhere close to resolving an impossible question was from Morgan Bassichis of Jewish Voice for Peace, speaking to adrienne maree brown this Monday. Recognising the intergenerational trauma of Israelis and the wider Jewish diaspora, Morgan said: ‘Action is the only antidote to despair. Let action be the practice that organises and transforms our grief and our rage and our terror.’

You can watch the full video here. Whatever your understanding of the history of colonisation in Palestine or the nature of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, Morgan and adrienne make one thing clear, standing against genocide is non-negotiable:

“Where life is precious, life is precious.”

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

We can educate ourselves while doing what is in our power to call for a ceasefire and an end to genocide, an end to occupation.

Fiza Pirani

of

Foreign Bodies

has put together an extensive list of resources and ways to help, some of which I’ve read, some of which I’ve still to get to. You can read the full post here:

Monday Matter: A message for the hurting

Other articles I have found useful this week include:

• Judith Butler writing for the London Review of Books: "This racist framing of contemporary violence recapitulates the colonial opposition between the ‘civilised ones’ and the ‘animals’ who must be routed or destroyed so as to preserve ‘civilisation."

• Adania Shibli on bombings in Ramallah for Literary Hub: “The Israeli Army can now call my mobile phone to inform me of its intention to bomb my house, but my tongue is struck dumb.”

• Sarah Shulman writing for New York Magazine: “At the root of this erasure is the increasing insistence that understanding history, looking at the order of events and the consequences of previous actions to understand why the contemporary moment exists as it does, somehow endorses the present. Explanations are not excuses — they are the illumination that builds the future.”

We’ll always have Paris…

What I appreciate most about Casablanca in 2023, is the idea that two people can share a moment together that transcends the chaos of life. That no matter what happened before nor what comes after, there is nothing or no one that can take that memory from them.

My mother and I did not have Paris but, we did have Barcelona. In 2007 we spent a long weekend together eating tapas and drinking cañas on the cobbled streets of Barcelona’s gothic quarter. A weekend when we managed to set our chequered past aside, before the cancer diagnosis had made itself known and we were just able to enjoy each other’s company. That weekend we met as women, not just mother and daughter, who had decided we wanted to be a part of each other’s lives despite all that gone down between us as.

I worried in the months after Mum’s death in 2008, that in our 23 years together we had shared so few good memories. I worried that the years of conflict and estrangement would overshadow everything else. I worried that the cancer diagnosis, which came only weeks after we returned from Barcelona, had left no time to properly repair the fracture which had hurt both of us so deeply. I worried I had left too many things unsaid and longed for an apology and to apologise for countless acts of wounding, both deliberate and unconscious, exchanged between us.

But, unlike me, my mother was not one for discussing emotions, extended analyses of things gone wrong, or dwelling on things long passed. We shared one conversation, short and to the point, where we both agreed to lay the past to rest. We acknowledged that neither of us had been the real problem in our relationship. Rather, there was a third party, determined to keep us at odds so that we wouldn’t recognise the violence he exercised: a strategy of divide and conquer used against everyone in our family, but particularly the women. In that short conversation, I learned that forgiveness is possible and healing too.

Beyond that, Mum was a woman for whom actions mattered more than words. And so, 15 years later I comfort myself knowing that whatever else, we’ll always have Barcelona and we’ll always have Casablanca.

---

I have no GIFs, no quips nor questions to round this week’s post off. My heart is heavy for multiple reasons. Be well, stay safe, wherever you are.

If you liked what you read, please consider subscribing (for free) or sharing this essay. As an independent writer it’s the best way to support my work!