Our Males And Females

There’s a passage at the end of the Janazah prayer, the Islamic funeral rite, which calls upon Allah to forgive “our young and elderly, our males and females.” It’s a prayer of tremendous importance to a quarter of the world’s population, and yet, inevitably, not everybody – or every body – fits into those gender categories.

Although Islamic law recognises, alongside males and females, intersex/VSC people (khunsa) and feminine men or trans women (mukhannath), knowledge of the latter two is not widespread outside the scholarly world, and various forms of social prejudice complicate the situation as they do for people with other belief systems. Ahmad Alyaseer’s Oscar-qualifying short film focuses on an older Jordanian couple who seem to be dealing with the complexity of gender for the first time, and in the most difficult of circumstances. They are preparing the funeral rite for their child, whose body has been returned to them from overseas. The immediate difficulty they face is that they need the body to be washed within a set time, and they are struggling to find a professional washer, because its gender is ambiguous.

There is no room here for politics as such, or stale debate. Without access to any more sophisticated narratives, the couple have only their instincts to go on, and these pull them in different directions even as they are united by their grief. The father internalises the social stigma, perhaps because he feels that the transition of the person he thought of as his son reflects a failure of his own masculinity. The mother holds true to her given gender role, even in the face of approbation, wanting to protect her child, drawing conclusions not so much from the body as from the face.

It’s dark in the room where the body lies. A draped sheet and layers of bandages add to the sense of shame and secrecy. Alyaseer carefully lenses the film in such a way as to distort the proportions of ordinary objects, just subtly, contributing to the atmosphere of disorientation. The performances are delicate and precise. We can only imagine the disorientation which the deceased once felt, growing up in this place; now, those eyes forever closed, the burden of emotion has passed from youth to age, a reverse inheritance and a reckoning.