Hagar (2005)
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Judaism is founded on the paradox of exile. In Genesis 12:1 Abraham, the first Patriarch, is commanded by God: “Go for yourself from your land, from your relatives and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation.” Abraham obeys and leaves with his wife, Sarah, for Canaan – Eretz Israel. There God appears to Abraham and tells him: “To your offspring will I give this land” (Gen. 12:7). Yet later, Abraham is also told that his offspring “shall be aliens in a land that is not their own.” Nes engages the story of Abraham and his family in two photographs, Abraham and Isaac and Hagar. In Hagar, the protagonist appears as a beggar in a deteriorating, leaf-strewn stairwell open to the elements. The story of Hagar and Ishmael’s expulsion by Abraham and Sarah is often used as a symbol of the expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 War and her name has been appropriated by Israeli peace activists. Nes’s depiction of Hagar can also be interpreted in light of narratives of feminine identity in Israeli culture and their imbrication in politics. Read against projections of Oriental and European notions of femininity vis a vis constructions of Israeli female identity, she is neither the passive, exotic beauty nor the hardworking pioneer who nourishes the land. Yet circumscribed by her role as mother, she is representative of the universalized suffering of a woman who has lost or may lose a child. An icon of anguished Arab or Jewish motherhood, lost in the desert, Hagar is a woman cut off from the land that defines her through the functions of giving birth to and nourishing the boys who will grow into the men who will inherit and control that land or die for it.