Inshallah a Boy

إن شاء الله ولد
Inshallah walad

dir: Amjad Al Rasheed

2023

This is the Jordanian remake of Kinda Pregnant, and instead of Amy Schumer in the lead we have Palestinian actor Mouna Hawa playing a recently widowed woman in Jordan just trying to get by in a country that clearly hates women. And She’s a Woman!

Structurally, culturally, legally, everything is set up to emphasise that women and girls ain’t shit compared to the lowliest man in Jordan. If a woman is married and she hasn’t borne the MAN a SON, she doesn’t even inherit property from her husband when he dies – his brothers inherit instead.

How’s that for a kick in the teeth? And how is that for showing up how meaningless the complaints of American (white) women’s first world problems are in comparison?

Oh no, they mixed up my drink order and wrote the wrong name on my coffee cup boo hoo think I’ll pretend I’m pregnant to get revenge on the world.

No, Nawal has far more to worry about than that. When her shitty husband pops off this mortal coil unexpectedly, the vultures start circling almost immediately. I say her husband Ahmad was shitty because he really did leave her seemingly deliberately in a terrible financial and legal position by having neglected to do a number of actions that would have safeguarded his wife and daughter from what is to come, mostly because he was a shitty person who had been lying and cheating on her before his death. You can’t expect a class act like that to look out for his nearest and dearest, can you?

No. But he would have expected the system, the Patriarchal System, to screw her over the first chance it got, and that clearly did not keep him up at night, adding to the irony that he dies in his sleep.

Nawal has a job, but as those of us with jobs know, it’s no protection against other people’s bullshit, especially when, as at a certain stage of the film, her opponent, being her brother-in-law Rifqi (Haitham Alomari) demands money he is owed from her but also derides her in front of judges because she works and thus neglects her daughter.

She is, as women around the world since time immemorial might have experienced, she is both damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t, in almost every possible circumstance.

The contradiction isn’t lost on her, but she also doesn’t have the luxury of lashing out or pointing out that her entire society is structured unfairly against her and her daughter.

The magnitude of the problems facing her: her husband was fired from work four months earlier but told no-one, so there’s no moneys owing there; he took out a loan from his brother which he was meant to pay back in instalments for a pick-up truck that now sits idle parked outside, and she has to pay back the last four instalments and can’t drive; because she has produced no male heir, and because her husband never formalised the document that stated she sold her jewellery in order for them to buy the apartment she lives in, her husband’s half goes to the brother-in-law, who insists they sell the apartment immediately. He, the brother-in-law, also acts like he’s going to take his niece Nora into his family, so not only will he render Nawal homeless, he’s trying to take her kid away from her as well, probably just out of spite.

On top of that her job is across town, where she attends to a paralysed woman, the wordless matriarch of a Christian family, where the whole family look down on her (for being poor enough to need to work for them, and for being Muslim), or generally treat her as someone lower than their in-house help.

The screws keep tightening, and they never seem to lighten up. To add insult to injury, just as Rifqi starts hassling her daily for his money, a rat appears in her kitchen, terrifying Nawal, making it so she’s not even at ease in her own home, however long she gets to remain there.

Her own home. There is a studied air to how she comports herself. For anyone who lives in a place with a system, and who realises the system is fucked and angled against them, screaming at random passers-by or out of a window that the system is fucked doesn’t actually change anything, however cathartic it might feel at the time. You then, after feeling free for a few seconds, have to contend with the gears that are grinding you down, again, as you continue having to navigate that same system. And, if nothing else, she is absolutely determined to figure something out and keep going even if everyone around tells her to just give up. Just give up, eventually turn into dust and just blow away in the wind…

No. This lady is not for turning, and she refuses to give up. With that steely determination to keep her place and hold onto her daughter, she goes through all the options that she can imagine, some ‘moral’ and appropriate, and others… less so. In desperation she mentions to a judge that she is pregnant, to give her more time to save herself and her daughter from this crushing sexist machine that seems to be bearing down on them.

The judge, probably having faced many a woman in such dire circumstances in the past and done absolutely nothing to help them before, tells her she needs to get tested in order to prove that it is so. If it is, and it’s a boy, well, the world is her Jordanian oyster.

This is a part of the world where women, once mothers, are referred to as “mother of (insert son’s name here)”. She is often referred to as “mother of Nora”, being her daughter, but that doesn’t carry the same weightiness, the same importance. If she was pregnant, with a son, many of her legal problems, but not financial ones, would evaporate.

It doesn’t seem likely, though, does it, since her philandering husband was banging someone else and pointedly not her when he chose to involuntarily shuffle off this mortal coil. And yet, there are circumstances which seem to make her nauseous, just like they would if she were pregnant.

But no, the first test comes back negative, the home tests she takes come back negative, so she’s either going to need a miracle or something shady in order to survive.

Even in a place as conservative and misogynistic as Jordan, which doesn’t have the morality police bestriding the streets looking for women to beat up, the idea of an emotionless hook-up is not out of the question. There are apps there, even there.

And then there’s the other nurse who helps with the paralysed Christian woman, he, being Hassan (Eslam Al-Awadi). He offers his shoulder to cry on, he offers to help her financially, he tells her that now that her husband is dead, it’s his time to shine. Isn’t he an option in order to beat the system?

Well, he is an option, but Nawal has to navigate not just a legal system in which she’s set up to fail, but a social system that, due to prehistoric notions of morality and honour, judges her every action, interaction and facial expression just looking for any excuse to brand her a pariah, take what little she has away from her, and then probably give her a solid stoning just for good measure.

No, surely that’s an exaggeration. I meant to write that the penalty for a woman sleeping with someone she’s not married to in Jordan means she can get 3 years jail.

The guy? Eh… they probably give him a packet of cigarettes as a punishment.

Though the central performance is fantastic, and Nawal is an absolute (controlled) force of nature, it is a very stressful experience watching this film. It’s like watching someone who’s not a great swimmer tread water for two hours as people throw more and more objects at her that she’s meant to catch and then juggle, as more and more aquatic predators start to circle around her, waiting to draw blood. And she’s meant to keep her head above water, and keep smiling as well, just in case any random men’s feelings might be hurt if she stops smiling. There are serious and strong themes throughout this flick, and there are no easy solutions or much respite the further it goes along.

Even though their relationship starts off frosty, she forms an uneasy alliance with a Christian woman, being I think the granddaughter of the woman she looks after. Lauren (Yumna Marwan, superb) and Nawal try to help each other out of the diabolical circumstances they find themselves in. She has her own entire film’s worth of storyline to go with her character, but we only see unsettling glimpses of it. At first we might think what separates the women is money, in that Lauren’s family has money and Nawal has none, but in the end they are both condemned because even money can’t protect either of them within a society that deems them second class citizens. They are united by being women, and thus legally and morally helpless in the face of men’s brutality, institutional, personal or otherwise.

“We are both in the shit” Lauren says at one point, and she is depressingly right.

This was a phenomenal film, and the irony of the title is not belied by the ending, which at first seems simplistic or comically ironic, but when you think about it further, means that Nawal and her incredible resilience in the face of all the crap thrown at her is not for any theoretical boy: it’s for her daughter Nora, and for herself. And that this ending, which seems like a respite, actually doesn’t answer any of the complicated questions about how Nawal is going to solve all of the crises ahead.

At the very least we know she is going to fight damn hard.

9 times Jordan seems like a nice place to visit, but not exist in if you’re a woman and not the Queen of Jordan out of 10

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“And your daughter, when she sees her mother so stubborn and fighting with her uncle, what kind of woman will she grow up to be?” – hopefully one at least as awesome as Nawal - Inshallah a Boy