One of the reasons I didn’t watch The Prince of Egypt for a year — between early-2018 and early-2019, though the emotional buffering probably began in late 2017 — was this juxtaposition. I’ve been struggling with my mental health, and call me oversensitive or over-think-y when it comes to this film and its modern real-world connections and applications, but I was beginning to dread the prologue, among other parts of the film. That sense of dread only worsened over the summer of 2018 when the United States started separating families at its southern border, and I saw that some people (namely white American Christians) were starting to say they’ll save adopt the separated babies and children, which would in fact only compound the trauma, not address the underlying injustice, and cement their own complicity.
It’s always been hard to watch child-theft and infanticide unfold onscreen, knowing that this has happened off-screen throughout history, and that it is happening now, and to be left to wonder if I’m supposed to believe that Tuya is simply a benevolent figure who saves Moses via adoption. Rather than run away from the story, or have it become totally unbearable to me, I’ve been asking myself: how to reconcile the images above and also create something constructive and practical from it, learn from it? Here’s what I’ve been thinking about:
The “Deliver Us” prologue shows us Goshen, where women are being pushed aside and having their infant sons taken from them to be killed. It’s violent and terrifying. We then watch Yocheved part with her baby, put in a position that no one should be put in (on top of slavery and the threat of infanticide). The scene eventually shifts to the water garden, a harbor where the Queen of Egypt is playing with her toddler son; there’s no threat to her or to him.
And honestly, on the one hand, maybe the film is really just trying to show the audience that Moses has reached a safe place away from the brutality, the edict, and life as a slave (a visual answer to “Do you know somewhere he can live free?” / “River, deliver him there.”). Maybe the contrast is an attempt more to counterbalance the legitimately distressing opening sequence. Miriam gets to see her brother survive, and that’s crucial as well. Perhaps these things might all be the case, but I’m left wanting. For a way to process these images: the violent and the peaceful, the persecuted and the powerful, the vulnerable and the sheltered. For something to glean from them. [An important aside: I’ve also been wondering/arguing with myself if I should view Tuya’s initial action toward Moses as not-oppressing-the-stranger, or as preserving-a-life — Would it be better if I interpreted things this way? Is Tuya doing her part? And what if I’m still skeptical (again, left wanting)? — I feel the not-oppressing and the saving gets undermined, overshadowed, reversed, by her erasure of his identity, because through that action she’s perpetuating the violence and oppression done to him and his people. And Moses may gain physical safety, but he’s not given a life where he’s in full dignified possession of the truth, his truth.]
What I take away from these images of the Hebrew women and Tuya is a lesson about the dangers of complacency and willful ignorance. For both in the prologue and in the later, parallel water garden scene with Moses, Tuya strikes me as someone who, even if she is aware of what’s happening around her, chooses to, can afford to, remain unaware and unquestioning. It’s a luxury, and easier that way. I just can’t shake the images at the top of this post. Tuya’s comfortableness, her nonchalance, as this genocide is occurring in her backyard. Doesn’t she see? I’ve been thinking about, revisiting, this: “Forget and be content” is something she tells Moses to do, regarding his origins and his adoption, but what if that(’s because it) reflects her own attitude, not just about her son and where he came from, but about his people and their oppression, which she benefits from. It’s something she practices. (It’s no wonder Moses has to unlearn the mindset of “not seeing because he doesn’t wish to see”; it’s something he learned from both parents. And it makes me reconsider the moment right when Tuya tells him to “forget and be content” [top left gif]: I wonder if that look on his face is him… seeing her in a new way, cluing into the implications of that attitude for the first time.)
Another central takeaway is that I refuse to be or become complacent like her. “Forget and be content” has never been my attitude regarding the injustices in this world; neither is it something I believe in regarding adoption and the injustices in adoption, and I won’t let it become my attitude. Challenging complacency and the powerful is necessary. I know I need to, will, continue to fight. To see, to act. To continue to question, even the blessings that come my way, because they just might have come at the expense and pain of others.
