Spin, little girl, spin
A prize-winning film that no one wants the US to see
Masafer Yatta
Good Housekeeping is a fortnightly, glossy magazine produced by the Hearst empire, which tells its readership—essentially women—how to keep a good house. What to cook, what the best vacuum cleaners are and how to be a good pillar of society. It was founded in 1885 as an American publication, but now it’s pretty worldwide.
Before the pandemic, the destiny of many copies of Good Housekeeping was that, sooner or later, they would end up in a dentist’s or doctor’s waiting room, or a hospital concourse or a reception desk somewhere where they didn’t produce an in-house blurb sheet. Their fate was to be thumbed and re-thumbed, front to back page, back to front, and perhaps even end up being cut into small pieces by children creating collages in their Friday-afternoon art-and-crafts classes. Now, they’re regarded as a health hazard. Perhaps they always were.
I tend always to give what I read a chance. To enthrall me, excite me, stun me, shock me, entice me, satisfy me. It’s rare for a publication not to hold some secret that makes the reading worth it. I regret to say that Good Housekeeping has never received this honour from me, however. I’ve never really felt the need to be told how to keep a good house, how to cook or what a good vacuum cleaner is or indeed how to be a pillar of society. I tend to thumb through Good Housekeeping fairly rapidly. But, despite not having me among its readership, it does very well. Twice a month.
I recently read a novel called The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne, and it has a rare quality about it: it can perambulate down a narrative and suddenly present to you a stunning shock or a hilarious twist that has you either staring at the page for full five minutes or laughing so uncontrollably that the re-read you’ve promised yourself in order to enjoy the twist a second time—and perhaps laugh even more uncontrollably—cannot be started for full ten minutes. In other words, the reader’s reaction goes from perambulation to rolling around on the floor or catatonic disbelief in a mere second.
And then there are narratives that cause tears to well in your eyes, and they are becoming ever more frequent. The abject misery that some of our fellows on this Earth are subjected to. These reactions can be classified according to the Vincent Scale of Being Horrified:
Category 1: the Good Housekeeping page-flip; nonchalance, disinterest, just passing the time till the doctor’s ready for you.
Category 2. the Good Housekeeping stop-and-pause. Long enough to read the headline and the first paragraph. Mild fascination. Hope the doctor’s running late.
Category 3. the Spike of Interest. You consider secreting this copy of Good Housekeeping into your bag. You read the whole piece, laying it down and maybe even thinking about it. There’s rarely a step between mild fascination and thinking about it. Not with me, there isn’t. Timed nicely—I’m next up.
Category 4. You drop what you’re reading in disbelief. It’ll rarely be Good Housekeeping, therefore. Outright horror. Mounting anger and disgust. Have they no shame? How could they? Who do they think they are? That sort of indignation. Sod the doctor.
Category 5. This category is like a category 5 hurricane, or an earthquake that reaches category 5 on the Richter scale. There are tremors or high winds for a period before the storm breaks or the violent shaking erupts. It starts to feel like a sneeze that won’t come. One of those where you wander around the room, mouth wide open and eyes clenched, staring into the sun to bring the sneeze on. It builds and builds and builds, and still the apogee is not reached. Once you’ve sneezed, you’re drained. A sneeze can bring satisfaction. That’s the difference between a sneeze and this scale of horror.
There is nothing quite so annoying as a child who cries and wails for no reason. And there is nothing quite so heartbreaking as one who cries and wails for every reason. Determining what provokes a child’s distress—hunger, a desire for attention, precociousness, pain, their yearning for their mummy and daddy—has a direct effect on the observer’s inner rush of empathy, which impels them to want to hug the child, to banish their distress and make the world right for them.
That adult yearning to care for those unable to care for themselves springs from an ability to see the child’s predicament through the child’s eyes. That is what empathy is. It should never pose a difficulty for an adult to empathise with a child. Because empathy is the ability to identify the experiences of another person through having experienced them oneself. And everyone has been a child. That is what makes cruelty to children doubly contemptible, because not knowing what it feels like is no defence.
Most of what’s happened to Palestine is category 4 horror. But pockets of it have been category 5. Masafer Yatta was a village in the Occupied West Bank of Israel. It was bulldozed by the Israelis even before 7 October 2023. It’s the subject of the Oscar-winning Israeli-Palestinian film No Other Land.
Agnitra Ghosh in Jacobin describes one of the film’s opening scenes:
The dispossessed Palestinian families are pushed into makeshift rooms inside caves. During the night, a little girl who has just witnessed the horrors of intimidation and violence by Israeli soldiers tosses and turns in her bed, as if swirling. Her mother, tired, trying hard to sleep, feels restless too.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“I am spinning so nobody catches me,” the girl replies.
No film distributor in the United States of America will distribute this prize-winning production.
Feel the sneeze?
Thanks, I guess, at least for bringing this film to our attention. "Horror" shows never cause me to fear - but attacks on children for any or no reason do make me cry.