Marble Falls Home with mi companera means having a minute to chill before the lights go out, no matter the exhaustion of the day. Ever since we were kicked off our son’s account, we have regularly checked out Netflix to get our money’s worth. We specialize in noir, especially crime procedurals featuring women detectives or police on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. If it’s from Iceland, Scandinavia, Poland, the UK or the EU in general, there’s a decent chance we’ll take a look. This is escapism, pure and simple. Every once in a while, we look for a comedy as a change of pace. For example, we devoured Kate Hudson’s “Running Point,” in two-nights recently.
Then there’s “Mo.” Mo is short for the actor and comedian Mohammed Amer, who sort of plays himself in both seasons. We’d watched the first season, when it came out. It was one of those “strangers in a strange land” kind of things. Mo was a Palestinian refugee in Houston, Texas complete with Houston Astros swag wear, cowboy hats, and the whole thing.
The second season though was a surprise. I’m not going to say there weren’t some funny parts, but the themes were serious business. Amer went hard on the several fronts. One was the craziness and callousness of the undocumented experience. He and the rest of his family are Palestinian and applied for asylum during the Kuwait war, where they were then. In the show, he gets kidnapped by some drug dealers and ends up in Mexico, and frustratingly can’t get to Houston for his asylum hearing, because he can’t get the special visa that would allow him to do so, and ends up with a coyote crossing the border illegally, and of course gets busted. The indifference of ICE and the detention system highlights the too true-life picture of the immigrant experience, from the courts to the jails and more. He can’t be deported though, because he’s stateless, as a Palestinian.
The most powerful part of this season though comes at the end when he gets a “green card” marriage and can visit occupied Palestine with his mother and brother. It’s just a TV show, right, but it was a tragic current events lesson and too much of a reality show. We see the incessant need for permits from Israel and the impossibility of getting them, as well as the repeated checkpoints and the “banality of evil,” as Hannah Arendt described a different experience, from the guards in all situations. We can feel the poignancy of only getting to harvest olives on their land two days per year, and then are confronted with settlers being protected by IDF soldiers, as they try to hack down one of the trees. We learn about the red roofs that denote houses taken over by settlers. We see the special access to certain highways if you have an Israeli license plate. We feel the family’s effort to keep the key to the house where they lost in the takeover and occupation of the land where they hope to return. In one scene, Mo tries to return a young boy who has wandered into their home, and the settler father has an AK-47 pointed at him on the handoff. His mother can’t stop watching the Gaza war and its destruction and killings on her phone in towns where she was raised.
Sure, we read about these things, but seeing dramatic recreations is powerful, and finding them in a comedy is not just a surprise, but a life lesson. This isn’t a show about the current Gaza War or a recitation of the tragedies and outrageous of both Hamas and Israel. It’s a dramatic presentation of a Palestinian family, who are both fully American and at the same time deeply attached to their homeland and their relatives in Palestine.
Watching “Mo” won’t bring peace to the Middle East or end the Gaza War, but it will help people who are confused by the headlines and the recent Trump political freebasing and the current evangelical lobbying for the US to support Israel taking over the West Bank as well, to understand more clearly that there are many sides to this story. The Palestinians have rights and claims that deserve respect and justice, every bit as much as the Israelis.