More "Mo"
Yusra: “You donkey! It’s your favorite. How could you do that, huh? I swear I will barbecue you. How could you do that to me?”
Mo: “I’m sorry!”
Yusra: “Dummy!”
Mo: “I didn’t mean to hurt you. You think I wanted to be in Mexico selling falafel tacos?”
Yusra: “Do you know how much trouble — To your health, my love. Eat. — Do you know how much trouble you made for yourself?”
Mo: “Mama, this is delicious.”
That gem of a back-and-forth between Mo Najjar (played by Mohammed Amer) and Yusra Najjar, his mother (played by Farah Bseiso), occurs in Episode 2 of the second season of “Mo,” which Netflix released last Thursday. Mo has just returned from an unintentional trip to Mexico and he is sitting at the dining table with his mother and brother, Sameer (played by Omar Elba). In those few seconds of dialogue the writers captured the relationship between mother and son, the mother’s critical love, the son’s desperation to get home, and the importance of food. Those themes ran through Season 1 and continue in this (what might be the final) season.
I wrote about Season 1 of the Netflix series “Mo” in 2022:
Mohammed Amer, a Palestinian American who has been doing stand-up for 20 years … has crafted a sensitive, funny, and wrenching comedy/drama, “Mo,” which is now available on Netflix. The show is loosely based on his family’s lives as refugees and their struggle to survive in Houston while they fight with the government for asylum. I have seen documentaries in which Palestinians describe their personal experience of the Nakba by Zionist militias, and the continuing ethnic cleansing by Israel, but this is the first Palestinian story I’ve seen on a commercial streaming platform. The family talks about being forced by Zionists to leave their village of Burin... “Mo” skirts the politics of Israel/Palestine and of anti-Palestinian racism, but for most Americans, this will be the first time they see Palestinians portrayed as human beings.
Season 2 is even better than Season 1 — more emotional, more political, and just as funny.
Season 1 ended with Mo stuck in Mexico, and that’s where Season 2 begins. No matter where Mo goes, he is a stateless, undocumented immigrant without a work permit. In Houston, he sells “genuine knockoffs” from the trunk of his car; in Mexico he plays marimbas in a mariachi band, sells “falafel tacos” from a push-cart, and wrestles (really badly) under his “professional” Lucha Libre name of El Oso Palestino. With all legal means to return to the States blocked, he turns to a coyote, fords the Rio Grande, and gets arrested and thrown into a detention center.
The series is partially autobiographical. Mo Amer was born in 1981 in Kuwait to a family that fled Haifa in 1948 during the Nakba and Burin in 1967 when Israel occupied the West Bank. In 1990 the family, minus the father, fled Kuwait when Sadaam Hussein invaded. They landed in Houston, where his father joined them in 1992. Amer became a citizen in 2009, which allowed him to go to Palestine, Jordan, Kuwait, and Iraq and see family he hadn’t seen in almost 20 years. Amer’s father, who died in 1995, takes up a lot of space in the story, especially in Episode 8, which is based on Amer’s memories of his visit to his family’s hometown of Burin in the West Bank.
One of the many moving scenes comes toward the end of Episode 7. Yusra is sitting on the dock of a lake, doom scrolling on her phone the latest settler/IDF attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. Her daughter, Nadia (played by Cherien Dabis) walks over and sits next to her.
Yusra: “The Israelis destroyed another school in Yatta.”
Nadia: “Mama, you’re going to kill yourself watching the news 24/7.”
Yusra: “Nadia mama, what do you want me to watch instead, huh? That bakery show you always talk about?”
Nadia: “It’s wholesome, uplifting, and sometimes that’s helpful. I mean, we’re allowed to watch things we enjoy, we’re allowed to do things we enjoy, aren’t we?”
Yusra: “Ya mama, how can I watch anything when there is kids watching their homes, their schools being destroyed in Yatta? Not only Yatta. They’ve confined Jenin, Ramallah, Nablus, Al Khalil.”
Nadia: “I understand you Mama, but…
Yusra: “There’s no ‘but.’ Those kids are Osama’s [Nadia’s young son] age.”
Nadia: “I know, and it’s horrible, and it’s killing me, too. But how is us stressing out about it gonna help them?”
Yusra: “Nadia, we owe it to them by watching at least.”
Nadia: “And we owe it to them to live, too. It’s on us to pass who we are to … to our kids, to Osama’s kids, inshallah. This is how they’re not gonna erase us. No matter how hard they try. We’re more than our pain and suffering, Mom. You wouldn’t know that watching this news.”
Yusra: “You’re right. You’re right.”
Nadia: “You have to look after yourself, so you can help others.”
Yusra: “Well said. Here, I’ve put my phone on the side.”
Nadia: “You’re my everything, Mama.”
Yusra: “Habibi.”
Nadia: “The entire world is not enough for what you deserve. Only God is enough for you.”
Nadia’s words to Yusra are Mo Amer’s gift to his mom. “It’s a love letter to my mother,” Amer told Vulture. “This whole thing is a love letter to my family.”
Two consequential milestones occur during this season: Yusra and Sameer are granted asylum, and Mo and his long-time girlfriend María (played by Teresa Ruiz) marry after a rocky several months.
Episode 8 takes Mo, Yusra, and Sameer to Burin for a long-awaited family reunion. The three are able to travel because of the changes in their legal status. The episode could not be shot in the West Bank, for obvious reasons. The team hired a local camera crew to collect exterior shots of Burin, the West Bank, the Apartheid Wall, and Israeli settlements. The interior scenes were shot in Malta.
Rolling Stone described Episode 8 as a “staggering episode” of “shatteringly understated power.” It is moments of liberated joy wrapped in layers of violence, apartheid, and casual dehumanization. I will say no more about this part of the story. You must watch it for yourself.
At the end of the episode, Mo, Yusra, and Sameer are checking in at Ben Gurion Airport for their return trip to Houston. As the airline worker calls security on them — guess why — the camera pans down to his computer screen, which shows the date: October 6, 2023.
The writers room for Season 2 opened before October 7, 2023. The outline of the second season had already been sketched out. How was the team to respond to the violence of that day and the genocide that followed? Amer explained to the Independent why he decided to end Season 2 on October 6 rather than restructure the story:
“Every time we went down that rabbit hole [of how to handle October 7], it created a slew of issues and problems. It became really didactic,” says the 43-year-old. “Also, the most glaring thing is that doing so would make it seem like everything [that’s affected my family] started with October 7, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Oddly enough, you think it’d change the trajectory of our story, but quite frankly, this is the same song and dance just escalated by 1,000.”
Perhaps Season 2 is more political than Season 1 because the context has changed from 2022. The videotaped carnage of the Israeli/U.S. assault on Gaza sparked an uprising on college campuses that forced a fundamental change in public opinion about Israel and the Palestinians. Palestinians had been describing Israel’s Judaization project as “apartheid” and “genocide” for decades. Those words finally found their way into public discourse after October 7. I don’t remember those words being used in Season 1, but they are in Episode 7 of Season 2 and they are shown “in practice” in Episode 8.
I like that the dialogue in “Mo” switches easily among English, Arabic, and Spanish. I like that the people in the story could be my neighbors and friends. I like that they are stressed, anxious, happy, funny, sad, angry, hurtful, sorry, wrong, sometimes self-centered, loving, concerned. They have girlfriend problems, boyfriend problems, legal problems, financial problems, mother-in-law problems. “More than anything,” the Guardian wrote, “you can feel the humanity pour out of every frame [of this story].”
When we peel away the racial dehumanization of Palestinians, we recognize ourselves in the Najjars — a working-class family trying to make ends meet in the face of an unfriendly system. “It’s not just what this Palestinian family on television is going through,” Amer told the Guardian, “but really it’s a metaphor for everyone that’s trying to hold on.” That is the heart of solidarity.
Episode 8 ends with Nina Simone singing “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free.” Me, too. For Palestinians. For everybody.