Muslim on her own terms: the subversiveness of After Love

At its heart, After Love is the story of a woman grieving. This is already a compelling premise to me because grief is rarely the central story and more often a conclusion. But what I found particularly touching and exciting about this tale of grief is that it is specific to Mary alone. As a result, the ending of After Love does not necessarily bring the viewer the same catharsis it brings Mary, and in this lies the subversiveness of the entire film.

When the slim, white, French woman, Genevieve (Nathalie Richard), finds the older, plumper Mary (Joanna Scanlan) – dressed in hijab and shalwar kameez – on her doorstep, she mistakenly assumes she has come to clean her house. The weight of this racialised assumption is amplified by the fact Mary does not get to introduce herself – despite practicing in the mirror in advance. Instead, Genevieve pre-emptively robs Mary of any control over the moment and proceeds to continuously cut her off by taking incessant phone-calls. This is symbolic of an erasure familiar to all visibly Muslim women in western Europe. Before we even get to utter a word or introduce ourselves on our own terms, European secular white supremacy deigns to dictate who and what we are: subservient and only acceptable in roles of service.

It was therefore in that moment of the film that I first felt a sense of kinship and camaraderie with Mary. Despite being white, in adhering to the ‘Pakistani clothes’ she had worn all her life, and her headscarf, she was perceived as unintelligent, uncivilised and unintelligible – a racial ‘character’ assigned to all Muslim women. And while I know that part of the reason viewers are able to eventually humanise and empathise with Mary is because they view her as ‘actually/originally’ white, it is important to think about the ways Mary is and is not racialised as Muslim throughout the film because it reflects political realities that shape our world.

As viewers, we live in a context where the hijab-wearing Muslim woman is rarely viewed as human. More commonly, she is used to represent a threat to European nations and borders. In the UK, the case of Shamima Begum’s citizenship revocation exemplifies this. Shamima is never viewed as a child with context who was groomed at the age of 15 to leave the country and join ISIS. Instead, policy-makers and news-media depict her as an inherent threat and already-an-outsider to the society which shunned and made her vulnerable enough to choose to leave. On this basis her Britishness is deemed ‘removable’. Conversely, Mary’s ‘Britishness’ never faces such precarity because of her whiteness, but at the same time, by being visibly Muslim, she enters a mystifying space where she is both insider and outsider. This makes Mary’s interactions with Genevieve – her late husband’s long-term secret girlfriend – especially fascinating. Their interactions are not only laced with the love and betrayal of their shared partner, but also with a wider, ubiquitous (and therefore unspoken) racial context.

In the first place, it is Genevieve’s Islamophobic assumption that Mary has come to clean her house, which enables Mary to enter her home, her trust, and her life. In this way she subverts Genevieve’s prior-formed assumptions to her own use. But at the same time, we must ask if it is only due to Mary’s whiteness that Genevieve comes to eventually humanise her beyond being merely her cleaner. In fact, this is a question all viewers must grapple with when watching After Love. Is it only when Mary clutches at the pale flesh of her bosom and stomach in the mirror, or lays nude in the bath, that we recognise her loneliness and grief? And if so, what does this mean for Muslim women off-screen who refuse to make our bodies known to viewers in this way? Can we be granted the same intimate compassion?

In a sense, this question plays out in the subtext of the film itself. For example, one day Genevieve finally asks Mary the question that lies on the tip of Europe’s tongue: “how do you feel about wearing it?” Mary responds, “What do I feel? I don’t, I’ve worn it longer than I haven’t’.” It is easy to underestimate the importance of this answer. Aside from mere indifference, Mary’s response is a refusal to justify her hijab on terms that are intelligible to Genevieve. To her, it does not matter that Genevieve does not understand. This is radical. It is a refusal to enter the media-circus version of the conversation, or to sit at the interrogation table. Instead, Mary owns the truth of the mundanity and simplicity of her Islam. It is part of her being. This, to me, is what marks Mary out from a Muslim character written for white European voyeurism. Where others may have made Mary a ‘whistle-blower’ who ‘saw the inside’ of Islam as a married woman and now denounces it, writer-director Aleem Khan dignifies Mary with authenticity. Simply, Mary is Muslim, and that is why she covers her hair.

In her book, The Political Psychology of the Veil: The Impossible Body, Sahar Ghumkor writes that the demand made for Muslim women to “free” themselves by “unveiling”, reflects a European/western anxiety over the fact that Muslim women who cover do not desire a form of “freedom” that necessitates our undress. To “not desire this freedom”, she writes, is viewed as “a symptom of madness” because it “shatters the narcissistic image of the western giver [of rights and freedoms]”. Muslim women who cover therefore symbolically reject the premise that modern Europe relies on: that its principles, values and ideological heritage are universally morally superior. By opting out of such “universal logics” hijab-wearing Muslim women become unbearable to the western imaginary. And it is such opting-out which I believe characterises Mary’s entire life, marking her as such a real and quietly subversive character.

In the first place, by marrying a Pakistani man in the 1970s she made an early choice that defied white western sensibilities. How could she opt in to being with a type of man narrated in the mainstream only as patriarchal and barbaric? Why would she choose a culture/religion of what we are told is solely regression and backwardness? And more confoundingly, once her husband has died and been found out to be unfaithful, how can she still adhere to ‘his’ norms and customs?

Such questions may arise in the minds of some viewers but their very formation strips Mary of autonomy as the author of her own life. They assume she has no agency because it is unimaginable that she would choose this life. Subsequently, it is her refusal to even engage in these questions that makes Mary’s character sturdy and real. She is more than just a fantasy Muslim made for the white imagination, she is mundane and complex and imperfect – and this is why her story is compelling.

In fact, Mary’s refusal to be a Muslim character who serves solely to other and reject Islam is especially powerful in a context where the 2021 Missing & Maligned report on ‘the reality of Muslims in popular global films’ found that Muslim women made up 0.4% of characters in popular UK films between 2017-2019. Even this 0.4% play the role of characterising Muslims as foreign and other. Therefore, that Mary’s Muslimness is not a plot-device but simply an aspect of her being, is crucial and a radical departure from cinematic norms.

As a result, as much as I know a mainstream audience would not humanise Mary in the same way if she were ‘actually’ a Pakistani, migrant, or Black or brown Muslim, her refusal to make herself palatable to the white western gaze (despite being white) or to give up on her faith, or make her motives entirely legible to a secular context, makes her a subversive, dignified and believable, Muslim protagonist. The story of her grief is her own and the film is not concerned with it making sense to other than Mary. There is a rare honesty in this.

In fact, when I asked Khan how audiences were engaging with After Love in the first few Q&As, he mentioned that some viewers expressed a desire for him to ‘explain’ Mary to them. To me, the expression of that desire symbolises a huge success. It proves that Mary retained her agency in a way that was unintelligible to some viewers. They could not make sense of the feelings that motivated her or her inner complexities – specifically, for many, this centred on the fact that she ‘continued’ to be Muslim. But to even presume that Mary would not continue being Muslim is to meet her in a place at odds with her lived reality. Who, at the age of 60, after a relationship of over 40 years, would suddenly change their entire way of life upon the death of their husband? And why? How shallow and dishonest a life would she have had to have lived for that to make sense for her?

No. Mary’s version of events is much more realistic, and thus sincere, than any secular-western gaze demands. And that is because it is grounded in love instead of didactically responding to the demands of the political discourse. Mary has lived a life of love in which loss has been a constant companion. She is who she is because of the life love led her to – as she tells Genevieve, “I did something for my husband that no one else could.” So, although the film is titled After Love, we see that there is no ‘after’ to the love Mary has experienced – it is in her being, her grief, her faith and catharsis, and re-ignited in her relationship with Solomon (Talid Ariss) and Genevieve. It is all-encompassing and irreversibly changing.

Mary is perhaps braver than most viewers not because of how she dresses or her daring to enter Genevieve’s home and life, but because she chose to live a life of love even when it was not intelligible, did not make sense, or was unacceptable to others. In fact, Solomon is perhaps the only character who sees her in this fullness. When she recounts to him that, “my husband and I were a secret, too”, she explains how they agreed to look at the moon at the same time every night when they were apart. Solomon asks what happened if the moon was not visible? She tells him, that in that case, they did not see each other on those nights. Her matter-of-fact explanation of a type of loving that exceeds the romantic imagination of a social-media generation is touching. She does not feel the need to justify or over-explain. She retains her dignity because she retains her truth.

And Mary’s truth is a truth of faith, of grief, and of love that can hold betrayal and loss within it and still encompass the possibility of loving her husband’s ‘other’ son. That is a life that is brave enough to be on its own terms. And ultimately, that is what Mary’s character and story are: the story of being on one’s own terms. This is the radical subversiveness of this film that does not exist to whet a western imaginary, or justify any element of religiosity and Islam, but to tell the story of a Muslim woman grieving – on her own terms.

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is an award-winning poet, writer and educator from Leeds, UK. She is the author of Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia (2022), poetry collection Postcolonial Banter (2019), and host of the Breaking Binaries podcast. Suhaiymah is published in multiple anthologies focused on resisting racism. She has written for The Guardian, The Independent and Al-Jazeera, and her poetry performances have millions of views online.

This article appears in the booklet for the BFI Blu-ray edition of After Love. After Love is also available to watch on BFI Player.

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