Something I’ve been avoiding

Part of an ongoing development journal for The Ogress of Fez, a feature drama about Oum El Hassen and the intersecting forces of empire, gender, and violence. Learn more.

There are parts of this story I’ve hesitated to write. Not because they aren’t important, but because they sit too close to the bone. I’ve kept the focus on history, on the systems (colonial order, regulated sex, surveillance…) and I think that has been necessary, at least as a starting point. It has given me a framework to develop within, as well as some distance.

But stories have a way of turning. And this one keeps circling back to Oum. I haven’t really written about what drew me to her, not in a way that captures what she is to me. The emotional rhythm of her feels familiar, though I still hesitate to name why.

She unsettles me. That much I’ve said. I’ve called her contradictory, difficult, fractured. But I think that language softens something. The truth is harder to confront. I feel drawn to her. Protective, almost. And I’m also afraid of her. There is something in her I recognise, though I’d rather not admit how or why. I won’t say more than that here… but those who need to might read between the lines.

Oum is a woman forged by abandonment, humiliation, and powerlessness… wounds inflicted long before the film begins. In their place, she has cultivated control. Sometimes it manifests as care. Other times, as sadism. She shelters vulnerable women. And she kills them. That contradiction defines her. Her reasons are never fully explained, but we sense what simmers beneath: rage misdirected, shame unspoken, misogyny and racism turned inward. These women may have reflected what she could not bear in herself; their need, their softness, their belief in safety. In destroying them, she may have been trying to destroy the part of herself that once hoped for protection.

She is not “complex” in the neat sense that word so often implies. She’s messy. Contradictory. At times, deeply caring. At other times, violent… in her silences, in her precision, in how she controls a room. And at times, violent in the most literal sense. Her tenderness coexists with cruelty. She is not consistent. And that too feels familiar.

There are people whose presence makes you feel both loved and afraid. People who hold you tightly and leave you flinching. People who protect you, fight for you, speak of devotion, and still manage to leave a kind of mark that takes years to understand. Years longer to speak of. If it can be spoken of at all.

What do you do with that kind of love? The kind that nurtures and erodes you at once. That teaches you to be loyal to someone who has hurt you. That leaves you both caring for and frightened of the same person.

I know that territory. I’ve moved through it slowly, as one learns to cross a room in the dark… carefully, and without sound. And while this film isn’t autobiographical, there are things in it that press against that terrain. I write around them rather than through them. But they’re there. Sitting just under the surface.

Oum, for me, is the embodiment of a kind of emotional logic I’ve never found language for. The logic of someone who has been so destabilised, so shamed, so unprotected, that the only way to feel secure again is to become the one who decides. Who determines. Who survives by creating structure, even if it becomes its own form of cruelty.

And those around her adapt. They learn how to read the room, how to stay small, how to anticipate. They become careful. Not because they are weak, but because they have to be. Because someone else’s mood becomes the weather.

There’s a tendency, especially in cinema, to redeem characters like her. To offer some final moment of grace or revelation. I don’t want that. I don’t think it’s honest. What I want is to hold her in view without trying to fix her. To let her be all the things she is. Powerful and frightening. Tender and brutal. Loyal and dangerous.

I used to think that understanding someone’s past could undo the harm they caused. That if you knew their history, if you knew the pain behind the rage, it would somehow be enough. It isn’t. But it does make the harm harder to hold. It blurs the edges. You start making space for their pain before your own. You start feeling responsible for their survival. You start protecting them.

That’s the contradiction I keep writing toward. And maybe why I keep writing around it.

I’ve come across that quote often attributed to Rumi: “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” It’s beautiful. But it also feels incomplete. Not all wounds let in light. Some seal over. They calcify. They lodge in the nervous system… in your posture, in the way your shoulders rise without you noticing, in how you scan a room before you speak, in the narrowing of what you believe is safe, or possible. They shape how you move through the world. How you read silence. How you listen like an antenna. How you brace for tenderness or affection, because you’ve learned it can turn at any moment.

I don’t want to dramatise that. I don’t want to build the film around it. But it’s in there. Threaded through. Shaping the tone. The pacing. In every detail and choice.

This isn’t a story that moves toward resolution. It resists clarity. It asks us to stay in the discomfort of not fully knowing who someone is. To sit with the people we love who have frightened us. The people who have tried, and failed, and tried again. The ones who are capable of great tenderness. And of immense harm.

Oum won’t explain herself. She doesn’t need to. The film isn’t her confession. It’s just the space in which we watch her. And where, perhaps, someone will see something they’ve never said out loud.

I’m writing into that silence. Not to expose it. Just to acknowledge that it exists. That it shaped something in me. That it still does.