The Band's Visit---Just kidding!

There are already reviews on "The Band's Visit" so I'm not going to say anymore about that. But I am going to talk about what I did think about after watching "The Band's Visit."

The general of the Egyptian Police Band is Lieutenant-Colonel Tawfiq (that's fun to spell) Zacharya. Tawfiq is a very uptight man, and very proper. He's elderly, but not terribly old. It's hard for the audience to love him at first simply because of he has his pants up in a knot, but as the movie goes on the audience sees that Tawfiq really is hurting, lonely human hiding behind a facade.

Tawfiq was married as the audience can guess at the beginning of the movie when the camera catches on a picture in Tawfiq's wallet/planner of a smiling woman. Tawfiq speaks nothing of this though until almost the end of the movie, when he admits that he did love his wife and they had a son. Tawfiq's son however, got into trouble and Tawfiq, in his choppy English says,

"I did not understand him. He was so fragile. Like her (Tawfiq's wife). I treated him harshly. ...he took his life. And it broke her heart." Tawfiq

It's as though verbalizing the pain Tawfiq has faced alone for so long visibly allows him to melt a little. Tawfiq looks close to tears after admitting how both the lives of his son and his wife are lost, and he expresses that the loss of both is his fault. We'll never know whether or not Tawfiq comes to terms with his guilt and anguish, but we do know that he can face it now.

I'm going to correlate this break of silence on Tawfiq's part to a quote I found in "Telling the Truth" this week.

"...to speak what we feel and not what we ought to say." -Frederick Buechner
*Professor Leeper spoke about this also on our infamous class of depression, it just didn't quite hit home till recently. What can I say? I'm cynical, and maybe a tad slow...

This quote is so important to me, and I feel describes what Tawfiq struggled with for years (three to be exact...his wife had died three years previous to the time of the movie). I also feel that this quote speaks about honesty of words above all else.

Like we'd learned before in class, there's a time and a place to speak, which allows us to not have to worry about the "ought to say" part. If we just speak how we feel all the time, imagine how much simpler life might be. No, not easier, but we wouldn't have to worry about lies. We could listen better because people would learn how to better judge when to speak and when not too instead of hearing all that meaningless noise and tuning it out altogether.

Okay, maybe I'm out of my element in making those assumptions, but I feel like that is how it could be. People might be less broken if they could just learn to say what they were feeling instead of covering it up like pain, emptiness, and sorrow does not exist. And yes, I acknowledge that the heart of people is not pure, and being subject to another saying how they feel can be mortifying and potentially harmful, but through that we can acquire edification and strength.

And at the same time, wouldn't it be cool if someone said something positively meaningful to you and you could trust that it was genuine?

Learning to speak what one feels instead of what one ought, and learning to keep one's mouth shut when it isn't the time to speak what one feels...maybe that sounds mean, but I think it could help some people breathe easier too.

I think it would have helped Tawfiq; verbalizing that hurricane of agony could have helped him come alive and face it instead of wallowing away in bitterness for years.

Lieutenant-Colonel Tawfiq Zacharya