In-betweenness oF the reFUgee experIence In hIs hoUse (2020)

By Lesley Finn

Refugees run from unsafe spaces, where to return could mean death. But…what if the place you are running to is no better? This in-between space is where horror resides.

Many current events have encapsulated this horrifying experience. There is fierce fighting in South Sudan, with tens of thousands of refugees fleeing Khartoum and Darfur on foot towards neighbouring Chad. Simultaneously, the British government has doubled down on its refusal to accept “illegal” refugees, once again threatening to offload asylum seekers to Rwanda or some other “safe third country”, and thus essentially condemning these asylum seekers to nomadic status. Even those permitted to enter the UK, itself a hotbed of racial violence, are funnelled into a system stretched beyond its abilities, and rife with Kafkaesque hurdles and insanities.

Bol and Rial Majur of His House (dir. Weekes, 2020), live in this in-between space, having fled South Sudan, (wherein they endured a frightening sea journey that resulted in the death of their child by drowning), before being tossed onto British shores. They know they are fortunate in having a roof over their heads, but are still neither welcome nor wanted in this barren, concrete, inorganic and inhospitable new environment. As they attempt to navigate their new home, they begin to realise that something has followed them from their homeland, something that threatens to sabotage their efforts to settle into this strange new world. Trauma is not simply alluded to in this film, it is made real: the Majurs are haunted, quite literally, by a creature that Bol refers to as a seawitch. Horror is an appropriate genre for an immigrant tale, stuck as the Majurs are in an uncategorisable space, neither in their familiar South Sudan nor ‘at home’ in Britain. They cannot return, nor can they move forward until they have been assessed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that a culture can be analysed through the monsters it produces, and monsters – both real and societal – abound here. First, the social worker assigned to the Majurs embodies the simultaneous concern and disdain felt by those wielding power over those who have none. He wants the refugee couple to succeed by being “one of the good [refugee families]” and yet enforces rules apparently designed to make them fail. The seawitch, a fear-inducing presence inside the walls of their house, reveals itself as a whitefaced, hollow-eyed, inhuman figure: a true monster. The schoolboys that Rial approaches to ask for directions confuse her by deliberately sending her off in the wrong direction. Their monstrous taunts of “Go back to Africa” are not mere examples of racial hostility, but illuminate the divide between those who belong and those who do not (and by inference, never will). Then, as the narrative pro- gresses, Bol himself is shown to act monstrously, as it is revealed that in South Sudan he stole a child to save himself, and then failed to protect her. But it is not the presence of monsters that truly makes this story horrific. It is the untethered, traumatised state of the refugee, combined with the impossibility of assessment for refugee status, that is revealed to be the site of horror here. Horror in His House is located in the feelings of isolation and in-betweenness, of not belonging to the new place whilst no longer being a part of the old place, of being nowhere and, by extension, no one.

The film makes continual attempts to represent this in-between space formally, often by visually threading two opposing situations into the same moment, creating a visual manifestation of what it means to be caught between the proverbial traumatic rock and the unwelcoming hard place. At the film’s halfway mark, Bol is eating in his kitchen. He is attempting to assimilate to his new life by sitting at a table and using cutlery (instead of eating with his hands, cross-legged on the floor, as is the custom in South Sudan).

Gradually, however, the camera pulls out to reveal another spatial dimension behind him, comprised of a red, glowing, misty ocean, with water bubbling beneath him, and voices whispering in his native tongue. The soundscape here further indicates an in-betweenness, with Bol’s knife and fork clattering against the side of his plate as he cuts his food in the house in England, mingling with the wind whistling and waves splashing around Bol’s feet as he stands in an endless ocean, far from the English housing estate. Bol falls into the water as bodies rise from it and then, suddenly, he is awake and standing in the kitchen. There then follows a reality-defying sequence that turns on the interplay between light and dark. The darkness of the interior of the house provides no comfort and this sequence of jump scares is generated by the simple act of turning the lights in the house on and off. Just as Bol has been trapped in an in-between space (neither house nor ocean), something terrifying exists in the space where light and dark meet. Bol wakes in his darkened kitchen, following his terrifying vision of the ocean. He can hear voices and turns on the lights. There is nothing there at first, but then a series of unex- plained wet footprints appear on the kitchen floor. Bol switches the lights on and off and we understand that the voices (and now shadowy figures) only exist in the half-light when the lights are turned off. Suddenly, the lights turn on and off, seemingly of their own accord, until Bol sees a small child (the girl he stole and who drowned) with her hand on the light switch. She is in control of the light and it is her that is controlling his trauma. As she switches the lights off one last time, multiple figures attack him, choking him and almost slicing open his throat. Bol’s hands reach for the light switch, turning the lights on and the figures vanish.

This interplay between light and dark throughout the film underscores the idea of something not-quite-right existing in the space between the two. Immediately upon moving into the house, it is noted that there is no working lighting. Despite the social worker’s reassurance that this is just a case of a missing lightbulb, the couple eats by candlelight every evening, keeping the curtains open for some light from the bright street lamps. Eventually, Bol rips away the drywall, pulls out some electric cables and manages to connect the lighting. In the process, however, the resulting holes in the walls allow their trauma-related demons to emerge. The walls of the house act as a membrane between the real and the unreal, where the horrors of their past confront the horror of the here and now. When Bol destroys the walls with his hammer he destroys this membrane, allowing the ghosts, the manifestations of his trauma, to pour through. Even when the lighting is connected, the house is still dark and dingy, creating shadows around every corner (and we all know what lurks in the shadows in a horror film). In sharp contrast, the world outside of the house is bright – too bright – glaring and yet drained of colour in a concrete, sharp-angled world. There is no warmth or greenery in this out- door space, only hostility and garbage, piled high outside of their front door. But the darkness inside the house provides no comfort.

What is the solution for the Majurs? How do they begin to adapt to a new life when both their past and their current situations make it so difficult? The film does provide one possible solution, after revealing the horrors that they, and countless refugees like them, have faced, including fleeing massacres, atrocities, barren landscapes, and explosions. This is the trauma that they are dealing with at the same time as they confront the horror of realising that their arrival in England is no escape from violence, prejudice, or injustice. Bol and Rial, like most refugees, carry their trauma with them and their resettlement does not make the monsters go away. In fact, His House suggests that in a country with unsympathetic refugee policies, refugees are often faced with yet more monsters to add to their collection. And so, in the final frames of the film, the couple are seen surrounded by their ghosts; their acceptance of them allows them to tentatively move forward. There is no guarantee that they will be allowed to stay in England but by confronting their past trauma, they can perhaps accept it, giving themselves space to move on with their lives.