Abubuwan da nake rubutawa

Breaking down the divisions between cinema and video film

2009-04-27T18:56:00.000-07:00

I've decided to copy below part of the text of a paper I wrote a year and a half ago. It was not a stellar paper and thus my decision to cut out the first ten pages here, but problematic and hastily written as it was, I thought there might still be some useful insights in it, particularly in my discussion of Osuofia in London that were appropriate for posting to a blog. Any feedback on how I can revise improve will be appreciated.

So, I start in media res:

In his introduction to Nigerian Video Films, Jonathan Haynes notes that thus far most of the analysis of video films has been done not from the perspective of African cinema but from the theoretical paradigm of popular culture. “[A]t present African film criticism and the Nigerian videos are not well suited to one another; the videos are not what is wanted by the criticism, and the criticism lacks many of the tools necessary to make sense of the videos” (Haynes, 2000, 13). Part of the reason for this, Haynes posits, is because both the celluloid films and the film criticism arises out of a field, “which normally entails the ideologies and mentalities of the modern-elite sector,” whereas the video films arise spontaneously out of popular theatre and popular immersion in foreign genre films, which require far less “technical and aesthetic” education (14). However, although he uses the theory of popular culture in his own work, he admits that the popular culture/high art divide is problematic and should be interrogated.

I will position my own work in this questioning space, looking for a theoretical position which, rather than posing the high art/political celluloid film against the popular art/apolitical video film in a high/low culture divide, will allow me to examine the films together in a continuum of equally valid artistic expression. Particularly relevant is Kenneth Harrow’s call for a revolutionary revision of theoretical perspectives on African cinema in his recently published, Postcolonial African Cinema. He notes that in the past previous film critics of African cinema, including himself, relied heavily on the political dichotomies provided by theories of third cinema. In revisiting those perspectives, Harrow maintains, he is not turning away from the political but instead realizing the limitations of nationalist and modernist positions which merely reproduced the structures that colonialism left behind (Harrow, 2007, 23). Third cinema theorist, Teshome Gabriel theorized three stages of cinema in the third world, the least advanced phase of cinema being that of “unqualified assimilation,” in which “Hollywood thematic concerns of ‘entertainment’ predominate,” whereas the most advanced phase is that in which cinema is used as “an ideological instrument” by the masses (Gabriel, 1989, 341, 344). Harrow argues that Gabriel’s concept of the three tendencies of Third Cinema is problematic because it continues the Hegelian structures of a progressive evolutionary history (Harrow, 2007, 23-24).

Similarly, the conceit of “talking back” or “writing back” or “shooting back” at the former colonizer, so often invoked in discourse about African literature and film, plays an essential role in overcoming the assimilation of colonialism and harmful stereotypes, but does not move beyond structures that self-consciously presume a Western audience.[1] Harrow argues that “The anxieties that current and past African film criticism must attempt to negotiate have to be read through the continuing insistence that the films respond to the false images generated by Hollywood, to the false history generated by the west” (xii). Once we can move beyond the anxieties about authenticity, we can “move on to the sites of power that have determined who disposes of the means of controlling the production of the image, of the ‘real’ truth….. ‘Who speaks’ becomes ‘who can produce the speech,’ ‘who can disseminate the discourse,’ ‘who can control its production’” (xiii).

Harrow’s formulation is very useful to my own project, in which I attempt to navigate between the often elitist critique and “popular” productions. In an earlier draft of this paper, I had attempted to set the celluloid film against the video film, high art against popular art, the elitist goals of those trained in the West by those who trained themselves, but such a dichotomy did not work. It was too reductive. It risked glossing over the complexity within the arguments of the video filmmakers as well as the “cineastes”--attempting to authenticize one side against the other. I had to scrap the paper and start over again. As Harrow has argued, attempting to establish a more pedigreed authenticity for one over the other does not work. That said, this question of the definition of African cinema, whether “art film/political tract or entertainment” is at the heart of many of the critiques of Nigerian video films. In an introduction to 2001 African Film Festival in New York, Brian Larkin has noted that

With a few exceptions, the concept of African Cinema, then, refers to the films Africans produce, rather than those they watch - on TV, in the cinema or in video parlors. It has come to represent an art cinema, produced by filmmakers and analyzed by critics intent on pushing forward the boundaries of film form and representation. To this point, it has managed to exist outside the demands of the marketplace and a popular audience (Larkin, 2001, par 1)

Larkin’s purpose here is to introduce Nollywood to an American film festival audience, yet Harrow’s questions of authenticity also give more space to other African celluloid directors who have not made films that fit into a third cinema paradigm. Younger Francophone African filmmakers are typically more interested in questions of audience and have questioned the ideals of FEPACI both in their didactic “third cinema” aesthetics, as well as an over reliance on French funding and approval.

Response of “Cineastes”

Malian director Adama Drabo tells Melissa Thackway that he is glad he “picked the trade up on shoots” rather than going to film school: “I am very happy today to be able to express myself freely, rather than to have a master, a guiding line… A lot of filmmakers before me were tempted to make images for Europe, to satisfy Europe, but they soon realized their mistake. I do not try to make images for Europe” (Thackway, 2003, 189). Similarly, Congolese filmmaker Ngangura Mweze, who made the crowd-pleasing, yet still socially critical, films La Vie est Belle (1987) and Pièces d'identités (1998), emphasizes in an interview with Frank Ukadike that “what is important now for African cinema is to bring African audiences to African films” (Ukadike, 2002,136). He notes that the problems in African audiences stem from two factors, first, the dominance of foreign films that can be exhibited more cheaply than African films. The second reason, he explains,

“is that the African audience often considers African films less amusing and too cultural. This situation is probably due to the fact that we filmmakers can be influenced by who finances our films. Everybody knows that our films are financed in Europe. The consequence is that the filmmaker is not obliged while writing or directing his film to take into consideration the taste of the wider African audiences” (135).

Although he considers himself a political filmmaker, he is critical of filmmakers who place a didactic message over the emotional impact of the story (138). In another essay, Mweze questions the assumption that “entertainment cinema is necessarily incompatible with Africa’s development” (Bakari and Cham, 1996, 60). He tells the story of how a young boy in Ouagadougou at the 1989 FESPACO film festival “asked why we did not make a film with an African Rambo, because, he said, ‘I really would like to see an African Rambo in the cinema.’…. With hindsight, it seems to me that we should have taken that question a little more seriously, if only out of respect for a member of the audience who … because of his age, represented a future African audience” (64).

The outspoken Cameroonian filmmaker Jeanne-Pierre Bekolo makes his critique of African cinema in a film commissioned by the British Film Institute to celebrate 100 years of filmmaking. Aristotle’s Plot (1996) is a hybrid art/action film ostensibly about African filmmaking in which Bekolo combines elements of the Western and the gangster film with the self-reflexivity of European art cinema and subverts any expectations of what African cinema should be. Here the kinfolk of the African Rambo Mweze is talking about come to life when young cinema-goers name themselves after their favourite action heroes: Van Damme, Bruce Lee, Schwarzenegger, and eventually become the gangsters they so admire. In the film, the leader of the gang, Cinema, so named because he had seen 10,000 (implied non-African) films, battles E.T., or Cineaste, the political African filmmaker who turns up his nose at such “shit.”[2] Cineaste, who had returned from foreign training abroad, gets the police to shut down the movie house named Cinema Africa where Cinema and his wanna-be-gangster friends watch imported action films, just as FEPACI has attempted to have the government regulate distributors who import foreign films. But not long after the takeover when Cinema Africa begins to show African films, Cinema’s gang of action heroes, Bruce Lee, Van Damme, Schwarzenegger, etc attack the projectionist and the lone audience member, an African American” who is watching the films to learn about his “roots,” (a dig at Haile Gerima and his film Sankofa) and cart off the films to start their own movie house. To their dismay, after they’ve built a new cinema out of scraps and called it, “New Africa,” they find that instead of the latest Bruce Lee, they’ve stolen reels of African films. Cinema walks out of the theatre where the only sound that can be heard are the bleating of goats and clucking of chickens, saying “It’s an African film. You go out. Have a piss, have a meal, go back and they are doing the same thing that they were doing when you left.”

However, despite their mutual animosity, throughout the film Cinema and Cineaste move closer to each other. Cinema is forced to watch African films and Cineaste is transformed into a Rambo-like character on a motorcycle, who fulfills the desires of the gangsters for “African action films” when he engages them in a shoot-out. When all the characters succeed in killing each other, Bekolo explains in the loquacious voice over narration, through which he has been musing about the nature of African cinema over the course of the film, that he is abandoning “Aristotle’s Plot.” As the acknowledged auteur of the film, he tells the audience that he is bringing Cinema, Cineaste, and the other gangsters back to life. Rising from where they had fallen in the gun fight, they resume the battle, this time kung fu style. At the end of the film, Cinema and Cineaste ride quarrelling off into the sunset together, indicating that the African cineaste and the African audience, while still disagreeing about aesthetics and entertainment, are finally communicating.

Bekolo’s model for the relationship between the audience and the filmmaker, also works to situate the relationship between the critic and the filmmaker. In the film there is also is a rather dim-witted policeman who has been commissioned by the Police Chief to discover the reason that someone can die in one film and come to life in another. Throughout the film, he plagues not only Cinema and Cineaste, but also a filmmaker in a bar, played by Bekolo, with questions that indicate he has not watched very many films. The policeman is a reoccurring motif in Bekolo’s films, and Harrow indicates that they become “the figures of an obsessive patriarchy” which are “rendered [into] the ridiculous, impotent form” (Harrow, 2007, 143) The image of the policeman handcuffed to Cinema and Cineaste that occurs at the beginning of the film reappears near the end, indicating that the audience and filmmaker are both unwillingly bound to the structures of the state. But when the policeman tries to shoot Cinema a crowd beats him down, and Cinema and Cineaste escape the policeman’s authority on Cineaste’s motorcycle. Despite Bekolo’s question in the voiceover: “why does the African filmmaker always have to be political?,” his satirical portrayal of the figures of authority takes on a political relevance that resonates in the criticism of Nigerian video film.

The Political Critique of the Mirror

While video films are often criticized for dwelling too often on the negative or embarrassing aspects of society, a closer look reveals that many of them actually play the role of what that most political of African critics, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, mentions as a crucial aspect of art, that of a mirror which “reflects whatever is before it—beauty spots, warts, and all” (1998, 21). Odia Ofeimun recognizes this aspect of filmmaking in his hymn to the video film phenomenon: “I dare say the video films are actually giving back to us a mirror image of the way we are, the ways in which we behave and mis-behave: uncouth, slapdash, raucous, and hostage to badly-managed and rather manager-less towns and cities….” (Ofeimun, 2005, 53). And while Ofeimun admits that the films are “often repetitious and not always obedient to the laws of professional decorum or excellence,” he maintains that

there is so much energy and creativity that older motion picture industries have something to learn from. From boardroom struggles to political power play, military adventurism and godfatherism in politics, ritual murder, drug abuse and the rehabilitation of drug abusers, witchcraft and churchcraft, high living and low life, prostitution and AIDS, the home-videos … are turning out the Nigerian story in a no-holds-barred fashion which leaves no room for anybody to hide. In this they recall the sass of junk journalism, and, in a sense, what was called guerrilla journalism under the military” (53).

Ofeimun makes an important link between the video films and the earlier goals of third cinema to become a “cinema of the masses” (61). And while critics often accuse filmmakers of continuing the structures of cultural imperialism in which they mindlessly reproduce foreign films they’ve seen, I argue that filmmakers often borrow aesthetic structures from foreign films and layer them on top of subversive folk tale genres that mock the powerful elite of the nation. Kingsley Ogoro’s Osuofia in London, for example, was controversial among expatriated Nigerian audiences for being “unpatriotic to Africa” as Bekeh Utietang put it. The film riffs on the objectifying documentary opening of the racist South African film God’s Must Be Crazy, using a smug British-accented narrative voiceover to intone over crosscut images of the “bush” of Africa” where the greedy Osuofia lives, and the “urban jungle” of London, where Osuofia’s long-lost brother has just died. The voiceover states magisterially that “politics and confusion never entered” the heads of the innocent folk in Africa, yet we are immediately thrown into a story in which Osuofia utilizes every manner of politics, confusion, blame-throwing, and trickery to maintain his control over a household of daughters, village debt-collectors, and hangers-on who come visiting when they smell a meal. Granted, it is not a flattering portrait of the “rural man” or a beautiful picture of village life, but it is not meant to be. Ogoro uses the intertextual reference to the God’s Must be Crazy to parallel the structure of the film made by white filmmakers under apartheid in which a happy noble “bushman” goes on a quest to a distant land to rid himself of the harmful foreign influence of the coke bottle that had been dropped in their village by

a pilot. According to the film, the bushmen had never before encountered any part of “civilization,” and the coke bottle wreaks havoc on their “simple” lives. The South African comedy reinforced the ideologies of apartheid: the place of the African was in the bush, where he would be happiest. The bushmen are the good Africans, while the freedom fighters who kidnap the kindly white schoolteachers are stupid villains.

The structure of Osuofia in London loosely follows that of the God’s Must be

Crazy, and, as such, an uncritical viewer might think that the filmmakers Kingsley Ogoro and Nkem Owoh accept the racist assumptions about the inferiority of the “African bush” and the superiority of the cosmopolitan center of London. However, the greedy nature of Osuofia, which critic Bekeh Utietiang complains about, is actually what sets him apart from the “noble savage” in the South African apartheid film. Osuofia in this film is the classic trickster from the oral tale, who tricks and is tricked in turn. (Indeed most of the characters played by the actor Nkem Owoh work in this paradigm.) The film is chock full of trickster characters, from Osuofia’s friend who comes visiting whenever he smells food, to the fiancée and lawyer of Osuofia’s deceased brother in London who double-cross each other, to Osuofia himself. Going to London to claim his brother’s inheritance, he makes a fool of himself at every turn, accusing the butler of trying to steal his bags, asking for fufu at a McDonalds restaurant, and haranguing people for “mutilating my name.” Yet in refusing to adjust himself to life in London, he reverses structures that require the African to assimilate to Europe yet provide little pieces of Europe for the European tourists in Africa. Osuofia also makes a fool of the British fiancée and the British-Nigerian lawyer who try to trick Osuofia out of his inheritance, obstinately insisting on cash and a “trailer” to transport the money back to Nigeria. The lawyer is named Chris Okafor, an Igbo name, and Osuofia joyously engages him as “my brother.” However the lawyer has a crisp British accent, egregiously “mutilating” Osuofia’s name, just as the other British characters in the film have, and condescendingly explains to him that he cannot take cash because “your currency is not recognized in our country.”

The most striking moment in the film is a scene in which the British-Nigerian lawyer grows so frustrated with Osuofia that he rushes into the bathroom, and stares straight into the mirror/camera, carrying out a monologue that seems to come straight out of one of Frantz Fanon’s case studies of the alienated colonized subject in Black Skin, White Masks. Although ostensibly talking to himself, he actually looks straight at his audience and speaks in a thick Nigerian accent: “I hate these semi-

illiterate—foreign clients. They get me so annoyed and give me problems and wahalla, oh!” There is a cut to a medium shot of Okafor standing in front of the bathroom sinks, doubled in the mirror, as he says, “When I get annoyed, I start to loose my British accent, eh? My cultivated English accent. I start to talk like my father, and I don’t like it. Oh…” Cut back to the closeup on his face, staring into the camera, he now seems to address the Nigerian audience of the film, who by this time is sure to be in gales of laughter: “You’re laughing at me. You think I have a problem? You think I have a coconut problem?” The camera moves away as he moves back out of this realm of psychological revelation, “Ok,Calm down. Ok, Ok Deep breath, stiff upper lip.” Washing his hands and face, he puts back on the “mask” and says, British accent regained, “God save the Queen. Ben Okafor, solicitor. Excellent. How can I help you?”

This brilliant monologue, in between Osuofia’s sightseeing antics in London, reveals a subversive critique of the suave Nigerian elite living up in Europe: both in their hypocrisy and in their alienation. Here the political mirror to society is quite literally the mirror that reveals Okafor to himself and to us. Okafor exemplifies the neocolonial elite who identify with the “queen,” in stealing from his Nigerian countrymen. While the God’s Must Be Crazy, on which the narrative is loosely structured, was directed towards an elite white audience in South Africa and Europe and reinforces apartheid ideologies, Osuofia in London is geared towards an impoverished Nigerian audience and subverts the neocolonial ideologies about the superiority of Europe. While the audience laughs at Osuofia bumbling around London, he also becomes a surrogate for their own dreams of going abroad, both giving them what they want to see in the polished surfaces of London and as well as exploiting the cracks in the façade that reveal that the absurdities and contradictions in London and the elite Nigerians who live there. Although Nigeria is often exhibited by the Western media as a hotbed of corruption and online scams, Osuofia in London reveals that London has its share of double-crossing con-artists and subtly points to larger structures of corruption.

This film is just one among many of the comedian Nkem Owoh’s films that layers urban dreams and urban legends onto the trickster tale to farcically illuminate the hypocrisies and tensions of Nigerian society. Although video filmmakers are often seen the antithesis of African cinema as embodied by the “Father of African cinema” Sembene Ousmane, the satirical social commentary these films often provide, reminds me of the mockery Ousmane makes of the impotent El Hadj in Xala. If looked at closely, therefore, the dichotomy between the political “high art” of African cinema and the low popular art of the video film breaks down. A new theory of African cinema should be one that reads these new narratives alongside the old. Together, they will provide a more precise understanding of how filmmakers use what they have at hand, whether funding from the French, Bollywood song and dances, or racist South African comedies, to create art that both questions and entertains.

Works Cited

Films

Bekolo, Jeanne-Pierre, dir. Aristotle’s Plot. California Newsreel. (1996)

Ogoro, Kingsley. Osuofia in London. Ulzee Nig. Ltd, (2003)

Sembene, Ousmane, dir. La Noire de…. (1966)

________________, dir. Xala (1975).

Popular Magazines, Newspapers, websites, and blogs: (FIX)

Balogun, Sola. “There's nowhere in the world artistes are banned.” Sun News Online. 23 September 2005. Accessed 19 December 2007. <http://www.sunnewsonline.com/webpages/features/showtime/2005/sept/23/showtime-23-09-2005-001.htm >

Daniel, Trenton. “Nollywood Confidential, Part Two:A conversation with Zeb Ejiro, Ajoke Jacobs, Tunde Kelani, and Aquila Njamah.” International Reporting Project 2005. Accessed 19 December 2007.

Jimoh, Mike. “Nollywood Nothingwood..says Eddie Ugbomah.” Sun News Online. November 19, 2006. Accessed December 19, 2007. <http://www.sunnewsonline.com/webpages/features/showpiece/2006/nov/19/showpiece-19-11-2006-001.htm>

Larkin, Brian. “Video Awudjo!” African Film Festival. Accessed 30 September 2006. <http://www.africanfilmny.org/network/news/Rlarkin.html>

Utietiang, Bekeh. “Osuofia In London: A Philosophical Perspective.” Nigerians in America. Accessed 19 December 2007.

“Thunderbolt” California Newsreel. Accessed 19 December 2007.

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“Welcome to Nollywood,” Guardian Unlimited. March 23, 2006. Accessed 18 December 2007.

Scholarly texts:

Adamu, Abdalla Uba, Yusuf M. Adamu, and Umar Faruk Jibril, eds. Hausa Home Videos: Technology, Economy and Society. Kano: Gidan Dabino Publishers, 2004.

Adesokan, Akin. “‘How They See It’: The Politics and Aesthetics of Nigerian Video Films.” In Conteh-Morgan and Olaniyan. 189-197.

Akbabio, Eno. “Attitudes of Audience Members to Nollywood Films.” Nordic Journal of African Studies. 16:1 (2007) 90-100.

Armes, Roy. African Filmmaking: North and South of the Sahara. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2006.

_________. Third World Film Making and the West. Berkely: University of California Press, 1987.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989.

Bakari, Imruh and Mbye Cham. African Experiences of Cinema. London: BFI, 1996.

Balogun, Francoise. Le Cinema au Nigeria. Brussels: L’Harmattan, 1984.

Balogun, Ola. “Africa’s video alternative: An inventive response.” The Unesco Courier. 51:11 (1998) 40-42.

Conteh-Morgan, John and Tejumola Olaniyan. African Drama and Performance. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2004.

Dakata, Zulkifl A. “Alienation of Culture: A Menace Posed by the Hausa Home Video” in Adamu, Adamu, and Jibril. 250-254.

Diawara, Manthia. African Cinema: Politics and Culture. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1992.

Ebewo, Patrick J. “The Emerging Video Film Industry in Nigeria: Challenges and Prospects” Journal of Film and Video. 59:3 (2007) 46-57.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks: The Experiences of a Black Man in a White World. Trans Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Gabriel, Teshome H. “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films” (1989) in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Eds Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 340-358.

Harrow, Kenneth W. Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2007.

Haynes, Jonathan, ed. Nigerian Video Films. Revised and Expanded Edition. Athens, OH: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 2000.

______________ and Onookome Okome. “Evolving Popular Media: Nigerian Video Films.” In Nigerian Video Films. 51-88.

Larkin, Brian. “Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy.” Public Culture. 16:2 (2004) 289-314.

___________. “From Majigi to Hausa Video Films: Cinema and Society in Northern Nigeria.” In Adamu, Adamu and Jibril. 46-53.

Moller, Olaf. “A Homegrown Hybrid Cinema of Outrageous Schlock from Africa’s Most Populous Nation.” Film Comment. 40:2 (2004). 12-13.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

Ofeimun, Odia. “In Defence of the Films we have Made.” Chimurenga. 8 (2005) 44-54.

Ogunleye, Foluke. African Video Film Today. Manzini, Swaziland: Academic Publishers, 2003.

Olayiwola, Abiodun. “From Celluloid to Video: the Tragedy of the Nigerian Film Industry.” Journal of Film and Video. 59:3 (2007). 58-61.

Thackway, Melissa. Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Film. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2003.

Ukadike, Nwachkuwu Frank. Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

[1] Salman Rushdie riffed on the title of the George Lukas film The Empire Strikes back to coin the clever phrase, “the Empire writes back to the Centre” to refer to postcolonial writing, which was then adopted as the title of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s seminal collection of postcolonial literary criticism The Empire Writes Back. Since then, the phrase has been riffed on in other works, such as Melissa Thackway’s study of Francophone African film, Africa Shoots Back, (2004) which cleverly references Rushdie and Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Helen Tiffen, as well as playing with the metaphor of the camera as gun and an instrument capable of violence. (It is also likely an indirect reference to Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The Barrel of the Pen.) However, the limitations of these formulations are obvious. It posits the creative work of postcolonial societies as always in active dialogue with the former colonizer, rather than moving on, as many popular writers and video filmmakers have done, to address contemporary concerns to which the colonizer is no longer central.

[2] Aristotle’s Plot was commissioned by the British Film Institute, alongside films made by Godard, Scorsese, Bertolucci and others to celebrate a century of film. However, in the voice over narration in Aristotle’s Plot, Bekolo questions their motives: “Why me? Was it Christian charity or political correctness?” and satirizes Western expectations of slow rural African films by beginning the narrative voiceover, “It all started in the African bush, when I was with my grandfather chewing kola nut. I heard the drums telling me I had a phone call from London.”

Mutum Duka Mod’a Ne: HIV as Transformative agent in Hausa Novels and films

2008-10-03T06:26:00.000-07:00

I was recently reminded of this paper I presented at the African Studies Association conference in 2006. I'm hoping to work more on this paper and include an analysis of Sani Mu'azu's recent film Hafsah. (I will include images of the handout I passed out at the conference if I can get the photos to upload.)

Mutum Duka Mod’a Ne: HIV as Transformative agent in Hausa Novels and films

In Abubakar Imam’s classic Hausa novel, Ruwan Bagaja, published in 1934, the character Alhaji Imam tells the story of his cyclic quest for the water of cure. Leaving home, Alhaji sets out on a mission to avenge his stepfather who had been mocked and shamed when he told the king that the magical water of Bagaja would cure his chronically ill son. Alhaji journeys for many years until he finds the curative water, returns to the village, and cures the prince who had been languishing since Alhaji left. A journey that began in shame ends in glory and healing, the young boy who left the village has been transformed into a successful man—the life disrupted by the prince’s illness and Alhaji’s departure is brought back into balance. This transformative quest structure, which has its origin in even older Hausa folktales, has continued in contemporary Hausa literature, which often shows how shameful circumstances may be redeemed. Imam’s symbolic search for the “water of cure” is especially significant in looking at recent Hausa novels and films that deal with the HIV virus. While other contemporary narratives that deal with societal ills end with the “cure,” HIV takes on symbolic meaning that complicates the cycle of redemption found in many earlier literary structures. I am specifically interested in how HIV has entered the social imagination, and the multiple ways in which a “disease without a cure” is conceptualized.

Social ills seen as contributing to HIV: forced marriages and hawking goods on the street, which drive girls into sex work; the neglect of the poor and sick by the wealthy; the outwardly-respectable alhaji who secretly preys on young girls: all of these negative aspects of society are censured in other recent novels and films. Within these critiques are the seeds of reform, illustrating how misfortunes can be redeemed or “cured.” In Balaraba Ramat Yakubu’s novel Wa Zai Auri Jahila, the heroine Zainabu is able to overcome her traumatic forced marriage by running away, seeking education, becoming a successful nurse, and ultimately marrying her childhood sweetheart who had originally refused to marry her because of her lack of education.[1] In this model, even great sins may be redeemed. In Sani Danja’s film Jarida (Mai Tsada) a woman destroys her family in her greed for a large contract, by following the instructions of a boka (a magician) to sleep with her drunken son-in-law. After the death and disaster that follows, she redeems her deadly sin by becoming a teacher in a girl’s Q’uranic school and warning the children against greed. The revelation of the sin acts as a purging process out of which can be born a new beginning.

The introduction of HIV in certain Hausa films and novels fits into these pre-existing models. In Sani Danja’s NGO sponsored Jan Kunne, the once promiscuous Babangida reforms and begins to go around to villages educating people about HIV. His wife Mariyya is able to overcome the abuses she suffered as a child-street hawker and the stigma she initially suffered as a person living with HIV by becoming the Hausa ideal of a virtuous, respectable wife and mother. Their child continues their legacy by growing up to be an HIV-AIDS activist. Arguably the introduction of the disease into this family’s life has worked as an instrument of transformation. Although their lives are shortened, they are richer and fuller than they were before their encounter. Similarly in Saliha Abubakar Abdullahi’s novel Ba A Nan Take Ba, Namlat is able to overcome the trauma of her earlier abusive marriage and the stigma of HIV to become a counselor at a hospital, advising other HIV-positive people who have gone through problems similar to her own. Although she refuses to marry the HIV-negative man who swears he will sacrifice his life for her, this event merely emphasizes her ability to make her own decisions and a life independent of any man’s protection. She becomes a heroine very similar to those found in the fiction of feminist writer Balaraba Ramat Yakubu, whose female characters overcome patriarchal oppression to become prominent actors in society. As the Hausa proverb that I chose for the title of this paper states: “Mutum duka mod’a ne: sai an danna shi, kana ya debo ruwa.” “Every man is like a drinking gourd; it is not until he is forced down that he will bring up water.”

While the works I’ve described above support the idea that HIV is incorporated into the redemptive quest structure, becoming a symbol of regeneration rather than of destruction, other works complicate this overly optimistic formula. In other novels and films, HIV is seen as a symbol of judgment for a sinful lifestyle, or an uneasy indication of a modernity in which known ways of dealing with social problems are disrupted. Although I’m interested in how NGO-narratives have been adapted to Hausa literary conventions, this summer while in Kano for predissertation research I became much more intrigued by the way HIV has entered the social imagination—the many different ways HIV is perceived, rather than just the authorized versions.

A theme that emerges over and over again in films and novels is that of HIV disrupting this cycle of redemption. The novels and films that began to sweep across Hausaland in the 1990s focused on the powerful force of love in conquering and reforming the corrupted values of their elders. In Ado Ahmad Gidan Dabino’s bestselling novel In da so da Kauna, the heroine Sumayya jumps in a well when her parents force her to marry a corrupt businessman, instead of the virtuous but poor young man that she loves, Muhammed. Her controversial revolt is justified as necessary for the reform of a system in which money has become more important than character and girls have become pawns in the economic schemes of their relatives. The suicide does not succeed, and eventually the love between the two sweethearts overcomes all obstacles. The Hausa ideal of balance is achieved through the passionate Sumayya with her ties to the earth, and the rational Muhammed with his invocation of Islam. In da So da Kauna is one of the most famous of a genre of Hausa novels in which love plays such an important part that they are called littattafan soyayya, novels of love. Love becomes a symbol for healing and balance in a society imbalanced by corruption.

In many of the novels dealing with HIV, however, this symbol of love is complicated. Lovers are not able to marry because of the intrusion of the disease, which is often associated with earlier acts of immorality. In Sa’adatu Baba Ahmad’s novel Mu Kame Kanmu, the young girl Sugaira is madly in love with the sophisticated Marwan, but after he relates the story of his wild life before he met her and confesses that he has AIDS, they are not able to continue with plans to marry. In the film Zazzabi, a man falls in love with the beautiful daughter of a doctor. After the doctor is mysteriously murdered, it finally comes out that the daughter’s fiancé discovered that her father was the same doctor who told him that he was HIV positive. What initially seems like a charming love affair turns into a gruesome string of murders and attempted murders, as he dispatches anyone who begins to suspect him. The stereotype of the vengeful AIDS patient, who tries to infect as many people as possible, seen in both Hausa and English Nigerian creative works—here takes on an even more complex form—the AIDS patient who must eliminate those who know his secret and will prevent him from living a normal life. After his secret is revealed, the girl eventually returns to a former boyfriend, only to have him tell her that he too has AIDS, which he had contracted in an imprudent encounter with a prostitute years earlier. The redemption of past mistakes through love, in these cases, is complicated by the existence of HIV. Zazzabi reinforces the feeling that HIV has halted the forward progression of the narrative; it is like a scratch in a record that causes the needle to jump backward and start over again. While the Hausa ideal is balance, this film is left profoundly unbalanced. Forces of social regeneration are no longer working. The girl is left fatherless, loverless, and alone.

Although in Jarida (Mai Tsada), the woman who got pregnant by her son-in-law was able to redeem herself by becoming a Quranic teacher, the redemption of similar “fallen women” in many of these tales is made more complex by the introduction of HIV. In Ibrahim Sheme’s novel ‘Yartsana, Asabe runs away to become a prostitute after being forced to abandon her sweetheart and marry another whom she does not love. After years of unconventional adventures, she meets her old sweetheart, repents of her lifestyle, and is ready to start a new life. Her desire to be reintegrated into the sphere of Hausa moral society is heightened by seeing how her friend Bebi has made the transition from prostitute to virtuous wife and mother. Unfortunately, soon after her change in lifestyle, Asabe finds that she has contracted AIDS. Instead of being rewarded for her repentance, she dies abandoned and alone. Like other Hausa quest narratives, she has come full circle back to the village she had run away from, but hers is not a triumphal arrival like Alhaji Imam’s but one of defeat. Similarly, in the film Bakar Ashana, a respectable young man wants to marry the prostitute Zainab. Enchanted with the idea of becoming a proper wife, Zainab goes through her iddah waiting period before marriage, wandering through the brothel in a hijab, devoutly praying, and giving advice to the other prostitutes; however, before she can marry her fiancé, she grows ill with AIDS and dies. The cycle of redemption is thwarted by the introduction of the incurable disease. Instead the cyclic movement of the tale seems one of despair. In the film, Bakar Ashana, I’ve just described, the story is framed between two deaths: a prostitute dies at the beginning, followed by a party scene with the prostitutes dancing. From these two extremes, the narrative emerges: the Cinderella tale of a woman who transforms from prostitute to virtuous woman. However, this transformation ultimately seems to make no difference. Following another scene in which the prostitutes dance, the film closes with Zainab’s death. The progressive and hopeful narrative is enclosed between the double wall: the “shameless” dance of the prostitutes and death. While Zainab gasps out a Q’uranic verse on her deathbed, she is unable to escape the disease that marks her identity as a prostitute.

The novel ‘Yartsana and the film Bakar Ashana are unique in that they explore somewhat sympathetically the lives of two prostitutes, investigating their emotions as well as the exciting life they are caught up in. Most of the other novels and films I read reduce this complexity to flat symbolism. Prostitutes become stand-ins for the disease itself, providing cameo appearances to explain how HIV enters the domestic sphere and captures “innocent” victims.

Although HIV is usually associated with activities that take place outside the sphere of Hausa morality, these novels and films demonstrate the anxiety that the disease of outside, a disease of corruption, is infiltrating the inside of the domestic space. In Saliha Abubakar Abdullahi’s novel Ba a nan take ba, a virtuous wife is infected with the disease by her husband who drinks, smokes, and frequents ladies of the night. In Guduna Ake Yi, a young woman describes how her father, a virtuous and successful businessman, was infected with HIV after a corrupt doctor gave him a blood transfusion without testing the blood. Her father then passes it on to her mother, who passes it on to their newborn daughter. In the film Waraka, a Fulani herder sleeps with a prostitute while in town to trade cattle. Much later, he infects his little sister when he cuts himself on a broken bottle, which she immediately cuts herself on as well. Other than characters in NGO-sponsored films, who have counselors and support groups, those who have contracted the disease through interactions that fall outside the sphere of proper Hausa morality aren’t presented with much of a second chance in most of the other films. The cattle herder who accidentally infects his innocent sister dies, racked with coughs; the prostitutes die before they can become respectable. Intended marriages, (the ideal state of balance in Hausa society) are halted.

But while death might be viewed by the Hausa audience as a fitting punishment for those who did not heed laws of proper behaviour in life, there are hints at redemption after death. Although most of the films dealing with HIV end in death, the film Waraka provides an alternate interpretation of what that death means. The innocent girl who contracted HIV through being cut with glass bloodied by her infected brother is comforted by the words of her lover reminding her about Paradise. The ultimate cure, he tells her, is not in this life but in the next. The end of the cycle—the restoration of balance might not be fulfilled in this life, but it will be after death. The producer of the film, Ahmad Sarari, told me that he centred the story around an “innocent victim” to combat the stigma that one could only have HIV if one was a prostitute. However, the comfort he imagines in the words of Q’uranic poetry, also can be found for the characters who repent of sins before they die. Zainab in Bakar Ashana dies with the verse from the Q’uran on her lips. Other characters appeal to God and swear to live virtuously the rest of their days. In this formulation, HIV might be a judgment, but it is also a chance for repentance and renewal, if not in this life, the next.

Although the majority of these works ended with the death of the characters infected with HIV, I am the most intrigued by the novels and films that end with their characters still alive—the brooding young men in Zazzabi and Mu Kame Kanmu who have to tell their sweethearts why they cannot marry; the infected wife turned counselor in Ba a Nan Take ba. Instead of neatly tying off the plot with death, these living characters leave open multiple possibilities of how to imagine a life with HIV. (HAFSAH-2007-produced and directed by Sani Mu'azu takes this in a particularly interesting direction. I will expand this later....) The cycle is left open—unfinished. Out of the four novels on HIV that I’ve mentioned here, three of them take the form of the protagonist telling their story to another listener, much like the storytelling competition in Ruwan Bagaja, in which Alhaji tells of his quest for the healing water of Bagaja. The first person narration of these stories similarly becomes a quest for healing: by telling their story, they live on beyond the pages of the novel and beyond their own expected deaths. The readers attention is drawn to the story of their lives told in their own words, not to their objectifying death. Brian Larkin writes that “the mass culture of soyayya books [novels of love]… develops the process of ambiguity by presenting various resolutions of similar predicaments in thousands of narratives extending over many years. By engaging both with individual stories and with the genre as a whole, narratives provide the ability for social inquiry” (Larkin, “Indian Films,” 28). This process is continued in Hausa film. Since the pool of actors is relatively small, the same actors appear in many different stories that are variations on a theme. In the films with HIV narratives, it is especially striking to see an actor like Sani Danja who played an HIV patient turned activist in Jan Kunne playing a stricken lover who cannot marry his girlfriend because he is (again) HIV+ in the film Zazzabi. In the process of telling many stories, Hausa novelists and filmmakers probe the boundaries, imagine multiple scenarios, various possibilities. Redemption, here, comes not in a formula, not in one specific “water of cure,” but in the exploration of many lives, in the stumbling and imperfect attempts at negotiating an incurable disease through one story, one quest, after another.

WORKS CITED:

Hausa Novels:

Abdullahi, Saliha Abubakar. Ba A Nan Take Ba. Zaria: Hamden Press, 2004.

Ahmad, Sa’adatu Baba. Mu Kame Kanmu. Kano: 2003.

Gidan Dabino, Ado Ahmad. In da so da k’auna 1, 2. Kano: Nuruddeen Publication, 1991.

Imam, Alhaji Abubakar. Ruwan Bagaja. Zaria: NNPC, 1966.

Sheme, Ibrahim. ‘Yartsana. Kaduna: Informart Publishers, n.d.

Sulaiman, Fauziyya D. Gudu Na Ake Yi: 1, 2. Kano: 2006.

Yakubu, Balaraba Ramat. Wa Zai Auri Jahila? Kano: Gidan Dabino Publishers, 1990.

Hausa films:

Babinlata, Bala Anas, dir. Waraka: the Cure. Kano, Klassique Films, 2005.

Bala, Aminu, dir. Bakar Ashana. Kano: Bright Star Entertainment, n.d.

Belaz, S.I. dir. Zazzabi. Kano: Sa'a Entertainment, 2005.

Danja, Sani Musa, dir. Jan Kunne 1,2, 3. Kano: 2 Effects Empire, 2002-2004.

_________________. Jarida (mai Tsada) 1, 2. Kano: 2 Effects Empire, 2004 and 2005.

Critical Works:

Larkin, Brian. “Indian Films & Nigerian Lovers: Media & the Creation of Parallel Modernities” Readings in African Popular Fiction. Ed. Stephanie Newell. Oxford: James Currey, 2002.

Whitsitt, Novian. “Islamic-Hausa Feminism and Kano Market Literature: Qur’anic Reinterpretation in the Novels of Balaraba Yakubu,” Research in African Literatures 33:2 (Summer 2002): 119-136.

[1] As described in Novian Whitsitt, “Islamic-Hausa Feminism and Kano Market Literature: Qur’anic Reinterpretation in the Novels of Balaraba Yakubu,” Research in African Literatures 33:2 (Summer 2002): 119-136.

Film Review/Gender Analysis of Hausa film Inda Ranka

2008-10-03T04:46:00.000-07:00

This is a summary/analysis I wrote up as a sample for a class I'm teaching. I'm a little uncomfortable with the 'judgmental' end, as I tend to like to just analyze and not 'review,' but I figured a practical componant might be good for the students, since many of them are hoping to become practitioners.

Photo that keeps refusing to upload

Inda Ranka
Produced by Nura Hussani; Directed by Sulaiman Alubankudi(no date, purchased in 2008 from Almah Video, Jos)

Summary: The film Inda Ranka engages with recent criticisms of the Hausa film industry by following the rise and fall of a poor girl Safiya (Kubura Dackho), who enters the Hausa film industry and is able to transform her economic situation for the better while transforming the lives of those around her for the worse. While initially discouraged in her dreams of becoming an actress by director (Ishaq Sidi Ishaq) and the producer Mahmoud (Nura Hussein), Mahmoud’s wife Samira (Jamila Nagudu) urges him to give the girl a chance. Upon being accepted as an actress under Mahmoud’s protection, Safiya goes to a boka who gives her “control” over Mahmoud’s mind. The rest of the film shows how Safiya destroys lives around her: Mahmoud leaves his patient and kind wife Samira at home while chasing Safiya and quarrelling with her over her supposed affairs. Safiya is shown with a series of lovers: the producer Mahmoud, her elder sister Binta’s (Maryam Usman) fiancé, a wealthy alhaji (Mustapha Musty) who provides her with a house, a car, and trips abroad, another wealthy man (Baballe Hayatu) who wishes to marry her, and an elderly ‘Commissioner’ (Aminu Hudu) who promises to help her take revenge on Mahmoud for shouting at her. Safiya kicks her sister out of the house, ignores the advice of her mother who wants her to leave her profession and get married, and calls Mahmoud’s father a “useless old fool.” When her duplicitous nature becomes obvious to her various suitors, Baballe, on the advice of Alhaji Mustapha who says she is “not marriage material,” rescinds his marriage proposal and instead marries her virtuous elder sister Binta. The bewitched Mahmoud is reconciled with his long-suffering wife Samira, whose sad song has stitched together the episodes of the film. The final (and only) song and dance number comes at the end of the film, in which Safiya and Binta are shown dancing with their various suitors.

Analysis: Inda Ranka reproduces many stereotypes of women in its reflection of the controversies currently surrounding the Hausa film industry. While the film industry is shown as a professional public realm operating according to established procedures (particularly one in which young girls who want to enter the industry are advised to return to school and get the permission of their parents, while no similar injunction appears for young men), Safiya (and by implication, other ‘greedy’ and ‘ungrateful’ young actresses) introduces chaos into these smooth operations. It is arguably not the film industry that spoils her but she who spoils the film industry. Mahmoud is shown as being a respected and professional film producer in a loving relationship with his wife, but Safiya destroys his life by “controlling him” through the powers of a ‘pagan’ boka. Safiya also disrespects her chosen profession by coming late to the location and using it as a way to attract wealthy lovers. In addition Safiya is shown as being contemptuous of her elders and Hausa traditions in the way she responds to criticism from her mother, sister, and Mahmoud’s father. She refuses to marry, preferring to have the independence of a profession and the attentions of many suitors. Cinematography, editing, and mis-en-scene emphasize Samira’s shrewish nature—she is shown in close-up shaking her finger at those who offend her. She is often portrayed as sitting in shadows. For example, when Mahmoud’s father confronts her, his virtuous nature is highlighted by the light yellow background, which casts light on his face. On the other hand, the shadowy corner in which Safiya sits casts a sinister green pallor over her face, a colour motif that is repeated when she tells Alhaji Mustapha she would rather lose him than her career.

Several ‘virtuous’ women appear as foils to Safiya. Samira is portrayed as the opposite of Safiya. She is a kind, loving, and faithful wife, and her mournful song provides the bridge to many scene transitions. While Safiya responds with a shrill and angry voice to ‘just’ criticism, Samira is never shown as raising her voice even when her husband abandons and abuses her. Instead, she is shown as constantly weeping. Closeups on her tearful face reinforce portrayals of the ‘good wife’ as helpless victim. Similarly, Safiya’s kind sister Binta, who cared for their ailing mother while Binta chased career ambitions, is shown several times weeping—the ‘good’ to Safiya’s ‘bad.’ (The choice of actress for this role becomes ironic in light of later ‘sex scandal’ involving Maryam Usman. The marketing possibilities of Maryam ‘Hiyana’ Usman’s participation of the film are highlighted in the choice to have her face prominantely displayed on the cover of the video, rather than that of the main character Kubura Dackho. The cover becomes more of a commentary on 'real life' than on the 'fiction' of the film--illustrating the name of the film "Inda Ranka" the beginning of a proverb "Inda ranka kasha kallo" meaning "In life you will see many things...." In this case, life is stranger than fiction...)

While the film challenges current interpretations of the inherent immorality of the film industry (since the problem is seen with the character of the actress rather than her work), the treatment of Safiya as ‘devil’ woman and Samira and Binta as ‘angel’ women perpetuates the social ideology of the status quo. Professional behavior in filmmaking is shown as the realm of men. Actresses, who use their fame as a platform for personal enrichment, become scapegoats for the misfortunes of the industry. Safiya lifts her sickly mother and unemployed sister out of poverty, but her ambitions to maintain an independent professional life and not immediately marry are shown in the context of a rebellious and ‘immoral’ lifestyle.’ Her ‘success’ is shown not in terms of her ability to perform well as an actress but in her ability to sexually attract wealthy men. On the other hand, the women praised as being virtuous are those who have no identifiable profession and who are defined by their relationships with their husbands or fiancés. Samira faithfully grieves her bewitched husband. Binta, whose first fiancé is stolen by Safiya, is rewarded with Safiya’s humiliation when the rich alhaji who had first proposed marriage to Safiya decides to take Binta as the ‘mother of his children.’ This seems to be the best reward a good woman can be offered.

However, even these virtuous women are portrayed as ‘weak’ in judgment. The film subtly places the entire debacle at the feet of Mahmoud’s wife Samira, who encourages him to employ Safiya as an actress, despite his better judgment. Men are seen as the victims of women. At the beginning of the film, the male production assistant tells Safiya that when they have helped other actresses enter the industry, young men have ended up as the errand boys to these ‘ingrates.’ The fall of the virtuous Mahmoud is seen as result of Safiya’s scheming. Her other suitors are shown mostly as innocent dupes, who eventually discover her with other lovers. Mahmoud’s father suffers humiliation at the hands of Safiya when he advises her to leave his son alone (initially at the request of his wife). This humiliation is shown visually in an extreme close up of his profile, which obscures his eyes, while he begs the woman who is sitting spider-like in the shadows behind him.

In a film that engages the current controversies surrounding the Hausa film industry, the producers of the film missed a chance to creatively respond to criticisms in a gender-balanced way. Portraying the achievements, as well as the challenges, women face in the film industry could have provided an enlightening defense of the role of the film industry in contemporary Hausa society. Instead, Inda Ranka risks perpetuating dangerous stereotypes that damage the reputation of the film industry and hurt the chances of women to choose the film industry as ‘respectable’ profession.

Jiji, a novel by Changchit Wuyep: a summary and conversation with author

2008-08-05T08:36:00.000-07:00

With a storytelling flair remniscient of Amos Tutuola, Abubakar Imam, Flora Nwapa, and Zainab Alkali, nurse and writer Changchit Wuyep spins a tale about a Sinbad-like hero, Jiji, that is rooted in the worldview of the Tarok people of Plateau State:

In one of the worst storms ever seen in the village of Jangnap, a child is born who will bring both misfortune and deliverance his people. Claimed by a river goddess who will not be appeased, the child is miraculously saved from drowning by a gorilla and is raised by mountain people, propelled from one adventure to another by multiple warring gods, who desire him as their champion. The novel takes the form of a journey in which the hero and his faithful gorilla companion are pulled between two forces of dark and light, the water goddess and the mountain god. While given supernatural forces by the gods, his strong sense of justice comes from what he has learned in his years of travel in the mountains, the forest, the desert, and the sea, and his interaction with hermits and villagers, spirits and gods. After having grown from an infant to a man, Jiji arrives back to Jangnap. It is his sense of justice learned of his wanderings, even more than the gifts of the god, that bolsters him in his final battle against oppression.

Conversation 2 August 2008 with Changchit Wuyep, the author of Jiji

Changchit Wuyep is an author and a midwife working with the Plateau State Hospital Management Board.

T-C: Could you tell me a little bit about how you came to write the book.

CW: Well, I used to be so much interested in stories when we were children. Our mother used to entertain us a lot with folklore. As I grew up, I became interested, wanting to know more about the culture of our people. That is why I decided to go around to some major tribes in Plateau State to get to know more about their culture, especially that of the Tarok people.

T-C: So, in this book you tell the story of a child who was lost and who was raised in part by a gorilla and in part by people who found him, and goes on this long journey. How much of this are stories that you’d heard before and how much is something that you made up?

CW: Actually, the entire story is made up. You know, I used to be an avid reader of stories, so one day I just decided that why don’t I, too, write something that somebody will buy and then read? That I will have pride if I see somebody reading my own work. That was why I sat down and constructed the whole thing.

T-C: So it’s a story that you made up entirely?

CW: I made up the whole thing.

T-C: You mentioned that you enjoyed reading a lot of books. What would you say are books that are your influences, or books that you have enjoyed reading?

CW: The Land of A Thousand and One Nights.

T-C: Ok, I saw reflections of that!

CW: And then, I did read some Shakespeare too. I have read the Complete Works of Shakespeare, but most especially The Land of A Thousand and One Nights. That is the one that had a great impact on me.

T-C: What about Hausa novels. Have you read, like, Abubakar Imam?

CW: Yes, I read the story, of, somebody the Blind Storyteller, is it Malam Shehu the Blind Storyteller? I can’t remember the author of that book. You know, we read that one so long ago in primary school, over 30 years ago.

T-C: Did you read Ruwan Bagaja or Magana Jari Ce by Abubakar Imam?

CW: I have not come across those novels. You know I have problems understanding Hausa grammar. That is why I have not read many of their books.

T-C: What about films. Have there been any films that have influenced you?

CW: No, most of my working life has been in the rural area. So I hardly watch films, so to say.

T-C: Did you ever read the Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling?

CW: Jungle Book? No.

T-C: No? That’s interesting. The novel reminded me a little bit of that because that’s another one about a child that is abandoned in the forest and is raised by animals and grows up…. So you mentioned that a lot of information came from your brother. Could you tell me a little bit about the cultures that are represented in the book?

CW: Like icir? That icir is more or less the kind of magical thing. It is demonic in origin, because although I never went near, there was an instance that it happened in our village. Somebody was pounded to a pulp in a mortor. And you know, after pounding, this same human being, they would make some incantations and surprisingly the man would just get up. But like you saw recorded in that book, if there happens to be an enemy around and he is more powerful, he will make their powers fail until they go and beg him. And even then, he has to agree before that person so pounded will come back to life. So, there are a lot of demonic influences there. But the icir is a wooden effigy, a short wooden effigy. I saw it once.

T-C: So, in the book, Jiji is Tarok?

CW: Jiji is Tarok.

T-C: What are the other cultures he encounters in his journey around?

CW: Well, like I said, the Tarok Culture, which he came to I think at the tail end or so. He started with the Ankwai culture. The Ankwai are our nearest neighbors south. And as you can say they have this Nienman as their major goddess that they worship…. You saw something recorded about this anthill. That is the dwelling place of their god. Normally they have different ways of worship that we’ve seen recorded there. A masquerade will interview women. Women have to come confess everything they have done in life. Interestingly, the men do not confess anything. It is only the women that will line up, and even then they will have half a chicken in their hand, and they will begin to confess everything they have done. I am trying to remember the name of that anthill. It has a name: Matkarem. That is their goddess that they worship.

T-C: And is Patmala [the river goddess who plays a large role in the novel] an actual goddess?

CW: Patmala is somebody that exists only in my imagination, and nowhere else (laughs)

T-C: It seems to fit in with other stories of mammy water spirits and that sort of things. What about the mountain god?

CW: Gungun? Gungun was made up by myself. I just made him up.

T-C: That’s very interesting because there seemed to be a struggle between him and Patmala.

CW:Between him and Patmala. Yes. There are over three of them. Like Nienman. Patmala and Gungun. They were all interested in him, but the two major characters in his life are Patmala and Gungun…. You know there is one interesting thing about the culture of our people here. I don’t know if you noticed that. Because if any food is being prepared for a god or goddess, they normally have a particular grindstone, and there is a law guiding the rule of that grindstone. It is not anything that you grind on it—you only grind what will be used for that occasion. And once it is over, it is kept aside, waiting for the next occasion when it will be used. So that is peculiar to most of our people on the southern plateau.

T-C: So, the Tarok people, where exactly on the Plateau do they live?

CW: We are on the lower Plateau. And interestingly Tarok—Langtang is the only local government that has a single tribe. Like in Jos here you have the Burim, the Miango, the Naraguta. But in both Langtang north and south, it is only Tarok people. And they are non-warriors. Ask anybody around. Although… they say we are too proud, we are too this, we are too that.

T-C: So in the stories that you heard growing up, were there elements of this at well? Were there any specific parts of those stories that you put in the novel?

CW: No, in fact I just sat down one day and imagined all this thing.

T-C: How long did it take you to write?

CW: It took me over a year. The reason is that as I was writing, it came to the point where Poyi, one of the characters that shaped Jiji’s life, you know, it came to the point where they had to separate. He had to die. And I couldn’t find it in my heart to write that, even though it is fiction. So it took me months before I made up my mind and wrote it. Then later on, I felt that the whole thing was not worth anybody’s time. So I just kept the book aside, until my daughter disturbed me so much that I had to pick it up and complete the story.

T-C: So that was in…?

CW: I wrote this since 1990. I wrote this in 1990 and put it aside….The reason I left it for so long—you see that is why piracy is a very wicked thing—there was this Swedish man who said he was interested in it. So, at the time that he came, I gave this script to somebody to edit for me. Each time the man would come to Nigeria, I would go to him to give me and he would say, no, he has not finished working on it. He came the second time, the same thing. So, the third time when the man sent for me, I went and said, ok, you say you are not finished, just give me the script the way it was. He said, no, his secretary had taken it somewhere, and he couldn’t get it. It was not until the [Swedish] man was banned from Nigeria, because he went and produced The Man Died with Wole Soyinka—so it was when he was banned from entering Nigeria—that was when the man came and gave me the script. Not knowing that he himself is interested in it. He asked me to come that we should make a film with it, but I refused. Originally, we made it as a film script. It was the late Mandazi [sp?] who advised me to publish it as a book.

T-C: Would you be interested in having it made as a film now?

CW: Yes, in fact, originally, I wrote it as a film script.

T-C: Do you still have the original script that you wrote?

CW: My house got burnt, nearly got burnt one time. So the whole original script was burnt. If not because this one was with that man, the whole thing would have been burnt.

T-C: So, at least that helped!

CW: Well, it turned out to be a blessing in the end.

T-C: Wow, sorry. Yes, I was thinking as I read this. This would make a nice film, or an animated film, or--

CW: I just took it to this--I don’t know if you know the late Mandazi [sp?], the one that used to produce Behind the Clouds, the soap opera. He is the one that said, no, that I should make it a book, if not, people would pirate it, and I would be left high and dry.

T-C: So maybe if you do the book first and then someone does a film from the book?

CW: Yes, that is what he said. So, if only I can be connected to any of the Film Corporation. Reputable ones, I would be very happy.

T-C: Well, you know if it is published, maybe someone will want to make a film from it, even a children’s film. Even though it’s not a children’s book, I think it could make a film that would be appropriate for children to watch…

CW: You are the tenth person or more that has been telling me this. You know most of the people who read it say “make it into a film, now!” And about five people approached me one day, just in one day, and said that I should write a part two of this thing. That this one is not complete according to them. So I am already on chapter six—Jiji part two. So, this one will be printed as Jiji part one.

T-C: So part two, is that about his marriage and his life after?

CW: Yes, his marriage, and the exodus. You remember I mentioned one island there. So, it will terminate when the whole people settle on the island.

T-C: The other thing I wanted to ask you about. The songs in the book. Did you write the songs or were those Tarok songs?

CW: I wrote the songs. You can see that it is a challenge. I explained that the song is praising Jiji and teasing the dwarf, Nwaka.

T-C: Have you ever written in Tarok or Hausa, or just in English?

CW: Just in English. Actually I am working on [another] one. This one I aim at helping youths to come out of drug addiction, all these things by exposing the ills, I use characters to expose ills.

T-C: Is it a more contemporary story?

CW: Yes.

T-C: So, you have the new project. You have part two of this. Do you have any other works in progress?

CW: I have others in the offing. It’s just to find the time to sit down and finish them. Most of my energy is geared towards finishing the one I am telling you about. Because I hate the way you find children being involved in drugs and so on. So we are working on it with consultants at JUTH, Dr. Audu.

T-C: So what is a brief summary of the story?

CW: I just used characters to depict the various type of drugs, their complications, you understand? The effect on the youth. I used even alcohol, so that the children, as they read, they will see that from drugs, they don’t only end with drugs alone. They either become armed robbers, ritual killers, or even occultic members. They are initiated into most of these things as a result of taking drugs. So, I’ve used different drugs to depict their own peculiar complication. For example, you know this solution that they take, it results in blindness sometimes. Or the Indian hemp, sometimes they go mad, or they even die as a result. I have done some research into various means of how the youth are now taking drugs. You may be with them, but you won’t know-- I can be transacting business with the person around me and not even know that I have just been transacting business. So those are some of the things that I depicted in that write-up, although I have not finished working on it.

T-C: Do you have any other write-ups that you are in the process of working on?

CW: That one and Jiji Part Two, and there is another one, Safiya. In that one I aim to depict the ill effect of unforgiveness. It is going to be good. I know I am the one writing it, but I know it will be good. (laughs) I am on chapter seven, but I will stop that one. I want to finish the others. I have finished my life story. It is called Silent Tears Turned Amazing Grace. I am just waiting for some events to unfold, then I will just complete the book. And I have about twenty songs written down. I am looking for children with whom we can rehearse these things. But money is a problem…. I brought a copy of a song last time [to Jos ANA] to show the people there. That one is very close to my heart. You know I am a children’s evangelist, so I like to do things that will help them. Maybe one day, I will bring some of them for you to see. I have written the “Widow’s Song”, “An Orphan’s Song,” then the “Children’s Plea,” and “Wakar Nijeriya,”—this one is in Hausa. And many others songs about social vices.

T-C: Do you write a lot of songs in Hausa?

CW: Most of them are in Hausa, about social vices. But I need someone to help me, and being in rural areas is a problem.

T-C: When I was reading Jiji, I felt that the rural area really came out. There was a nice sense of the landscape in the book…. So, you’ve talked about things that you want to help people learn, are there lessons in Jiji that you want to bring out?

CW: Well, the lesson in Jiji is. I want people to know that evil is not good. For example, when you read about the Long Pell. And you see the end of it, and some of the comments that Jiji made. He said that he is a friend of the poor but an enemy of the oppressor. That is the lesson of Jiji.

T-C: So, even though Jiji was set in precolonial times, do you feel that there were things that relate to contemporary life?

CW: Only the lesson that you learn from it. Otherwise, I don’t think there is anything that relates. But I also want people to know that in those days this is how the Tarok people are. For example, if you see the dressing of that man [in a photograph she wants to use as the cover for the next edition]. The children will now know that, eh, so this is how our people used to dress. Bows and arrows. Some of them have even forgotten about it. Icir. Most of them don’t know. Odem. Things like that. If you go to Tarok land now, you will hardly see idire. There is something mentioned there: idire. So this will now motivate them to ask what is edire, what is esu? That kind of thing.

T-C: So it kind of teaches them their history?

CW: Ehen

T-C: Well you did a very good job of that. It taught me something. Thank you very much.

Review of Yeleen (1987) directed by Souleymane Cissé

2008-01-27T19:54:00.000-08:00

Yeelen (1987, Mali) directed by Souleymane Cissé

The visual patterning in Souleymane Cissé's film Yeelen reinforces the coming of age, journey motif and the parallel structure of the myth. Nianankoro’s mother sends him on a journey in which he travels from childhood to adulthood and must struggle against his father to find his own destiny. The struggle against the father counters the reformative new with the corrupted older tradition.

While Yeelen tells the story of Nianankoro’s journey from “childhood” to “adulthood,” from mother to wife, the pursuit and the chant of the father is a motif that stitches together Nianankoro’s journey. The father travels together with his two slaves and his post, seemingly driven by an anxiety that Nianankoro and his mother are trying to change tradition. And if tradition is defined as secretive purity, as Nianankoro’s (good) uncle implies when he explains that his twin blinded him when he asked him to “reveal secrets so that all might benefit,” then Nianankoro’s father has cause for worry. Although Nianankoro’s (bad) uncle disrespectfully dismisses the Peul king as a “little Peul” apparently because of their inability to do magic, the Bambara “nation” survives through Nianankoro’s marriage with the Peul woman. And at the end it is the Peul woman who is left to pass on the story of the “Bambara” nation to her son. Nianankoro penitently offers his life to the Peul king because he had “broken our laws” by sleeping with the king’s young barren wife; however, during the previous scene in which this sin is implied, the lovers seem lost in a trance comparable to that that the old men go through during their ritual. The smiling face of the girl appears to Nianankoro disembodied and surrounded by the same white light that blinds father and son in their final battle. The union of the Peul woman and the Bambara man seems to be fated, the breaking of the old law inevitable in order to bring about the new order. The Peul king seems to realize this, when Nianankoro’s uncle comes looking for him. Although Nianankoro and his new wife had left the Peul camp in shame, the Peul king refuses to betray him, saying that he had “helped us.”

The old laws have become corrupt. The father’s killing of the albino, the exploitation of his slaves, the blinding of his own twin brother, and the uncle’s arrogant dismissal of the Peuls contrasts with Nianankoro’s solitary journey and his ready willingness to help the Peuls who had initially taken him into captivity. After the mother tells Nianankoro how terrible his father is, we later find out that the father is pursuing Nianankoro because the mother has stolen his tools of sorcery. The mother’s theft counters the father’s cruelty. The importance of these two women (the mother and the wife) to Nianankoro also contrasts him with the father, whose world seems almost entirely made up of old men and young male slaves. Nianankoro seems to perform as the instrument of a more inclusive feminine world. The mother tells him his history and sends him on his quest. His wife picks up the story to pass on to their son. The “mothers” challenge the secretive authority of the “father,” while also revealing the chain of continuity in which the story is passed from mother to son.

Visually, the film takes us from the dark enclosed space of the mother’s house to the large empty savannah landscape that Nianankoro and his father travel across. Her prayer for Nianankoro’s safety, submerged as she is in watery purples and blues, parallels the end of his journey to the mountains and the long purple horizon as his uncle tells him of his origins. The framing of the purple horizon near the top of the shot is the same when the mother prays to the goddess of the waters “Save my son, keep him from ruin,” as it is when the uncle tells him “Last night, I saw a bright light cross the sky…. The catastrophe will spare your family.” The mother and the uncle are linked in their desire to preserve and share life; the father’s single minded purpose seems to destroy it. The uncle tells him that he became separated from his twin, when he asked him “to reveal secrets so that all might benefit. In a rage, he rushed out with the wing of Kore and blinded me.” It is significant, therefore, that the mother and the uncle are identified with water and greenery, while the father’s journey seems to be through the dry, brown landscape. The father’s practice is linked to death (the immolation of the chicken, the implied slaughter of the albino, the resolve to kill his son) while Nianankoro consistently preserves life: he ends the war between the Peul and their invaders, he plants the seed in the womb of the “barren” Peul woman. The flowing of the milk over the mother’s head is visually paralleled by the flowing of the waterfall over the son and his wife; it becomes a cleansing symbol of new life. It is not long after this ritual cleansing that the uncle tells Nianankoro that “if I were to die today and you too, our family would not perish. Your wife is pregnant with a son, who is destined to be a bright star.”

The catastrophe that the uncle predicts comes about. The father and son destroy each other in a battle of light, and leave behind them a landscape that seems completely devoid of life—the mother and son wander through dunes of sterile sand. However, rebirth is symbolized in the ostrich eggs that the boy uncovers in the sand. The mother and son leave the ostrich eggs in place of the wing, symbolizing the birth of a new tradition out of the curse of the old. Told history by his mother, Nianankoro’s son, “the bright star” will begin his own quest for light.

Review of Keita (1995) directed by Dani Kouyate

2008-01-27T19:44:00.000-08:00

Keita (1995), Burkina Faso, directed by Dani Kouyate

As the griot Djeliba is leaving his young pupil Mabo’s home, he tells him, “Do you know why the hunter always beats the lion in the stories? If the lion told the stories, he’d win sometimes too.” This statement is at the heart of the conflict in the film between “tradition” and “modernity” and also hints at an aporia that opens the claim of any foundational story to deconstruction. The hunter and the lion of Djeliba’s proverb seem in the context of the two entwined stories to be as follows: hunter=the colonizer/neo-colonial ruler; lion= “traditional” ruler/his griot. (As D.T. Niane notes in an endnote to his transcription of Sundianta: an epic of old Mali, “the lion is the totem and ancestor of the Keitas” (85). Thus the lion in the proverb represents the history told by the griots of the Keitas).

The conflict manifests itself in the struggle between the “modern” teacher at the government school and the “traditional” teacher, the griot Djeliba. In school, Mabo learns that he “descended from gorillas,” that Christopher Columbus discovered America, and that the ancestors of the French, “the Gauls” were to be considered his ancestors as well. But, of course, Christopher Columbus did not discover America any more than Mabo’s ancestors were the Gauls. Because the Europeans conquered the Native Americans, their own history ceases to exist in colonial classrooms. Mabo’s history is similarly threatened by the story of the Gauls. It is significant that after Djeliba begins the story, Mabo is unable to answer his teacher’s question about the ancestors of the French—indicating that the history he has been learning from Djeliba is interfering with the hegemonic European version of history he is supposed to learn at school. Djeliba tells him that “your ancestors were not gorillas. They were kings.”

There is a tension between Djeliba’s notion of destiny and the teacher’s adherence to “the survival of the fittest.” The teacher maintains that if Mabo were to write that his ancestors were kings rather than gorillas he would fail the state exams; therefore it is beneficial not to question too closely what one is taught but “assimilate” to the expectations of those in power. Djeliba, on the other hand, encourages Mabo’s questions, and the story he tells emphasizes the coming to power of one who was most “unfit” because it was his destiny. In Darwinian theory, the ugliest woman in the kingdom who refuses the sexual advances of her husband for an entire year is the least likely mother of the king. A disabled boy who is unable to walk for years is the least likely king and founder of a dynasty. The idea of destiny, which in one reading could encourage an unthinking fatalism, here encourages a resistance against the story told by those in power—the grasping of power by those who initially seem most unlikely to succeed. The lesson Mabo learns, therefore, is that even those in power must bend to the dictates of destiny—that a previous history can undermine that taught by the conqueror. This is the significance of Djeliba ending the story of Sunjata as he and his mother and siblings go into exile. The powerful brother may have won this round, but as Sunjata claims, he will return. Similarly, although Djeliba chose to leave Mabo’s house after the open conflict with Mabo’s teacher and mother, this is not the end of the story. Now that Mabo knows the beginning of the Sunjata story, he will be sure to return over and over to this oral history to further understand his identity. Djeliba left the story near the beginning; Sunjata did return to regain control of the kingdom and become emporer of the Mali empire. Likewise, the film implies that the story of his history and his “destiny” will give Mabo and his friends, to whom he relates the story, the tools with which to overthrow the hegemonic knowledge of French education and create their own nation that acknowledges their own rich history.

However, the binary oppositions established between the ideas of “gorillas” and “kings,” between the “hunter” and the “lion,” are complicated by the existence of another aporetic space in the proverb Djeliba tells Mabo as he is leaving. If the lion is able to overthrow the hunter, the lion merely replaces the hunter’s hegemony. After all, the lion is a hunter as well. Perhaps the antelope that he hunts also has a story. In Djeliba’s story of the beginning of the world, he says that “Wagadou was the theatre of all creatures.” Mabo’s ancestor said “The world cannot go on without a leader. Do you agree?” With this, he offers himself as their leader, and the creatures “said together, ‘No one hates you.’ So he proclaimed himself king.” At the heart of this triumphant creation story, told as a way of legitimizing the kingship of the Keita clan, is a profoundly ambivalent moment. Mabo’s ancestor has proclaimed himself king, but while his proclamation was not challenged (at least in the telling of this story), neither was it enthusiastically welcomed. Although this ur-ancestor rises to the top in his story and the stories the griots tell about him, there are a whole host of creatures whose stories are subsumed in his, leaving the question: is it necessary to have a leader? Is it destiny that causes Sunjata to come out on top, or does the story maintain that it was his destiny because he did come out on top? What, ultimately, is the difference between destiny and survival-of-the-fittest?

The existence of the resistant women in the story, Mabo’s mother, the two stubborn buffalo women, and even the first wife of Sundiata’s father, reveals other voices that have been suppressed and twisted by one telling of history. Sundiata’s father “has to” rape his wife before the prophesied son can be born. Djeliba chuckles that women in the village who couldn’t do housework wouldn’t have been able to find husbands. As Djeliba tells the story, he and Mabo recline in the shade, while the servant girl washes dishes in the background. Djeliba’s story, while questioning the superiority of the new French colonizer, also reinforces stereotypes of the jealous co-wife, and the necessity of quelling a stubborn woman. Perhaps some of the resistance of Mabo’s feisty “modern” mother to his initiation comes from her resistance to the idea that her fate is ruled by her “destiny” as a woman. The housegirl remains at the bottom of the “food chain,” for even if Mabo’s mother claims “liberation” through the modern lifestyle of the urban Francophone environment, can this subaltern speak? And does the story she overhears, which is meant for part of a boy’s initiation, speak to her?

Works Cited:
Kouyate, Dani, dir. Keita: The Heritage of the Griot. Burkina Faso, 1995.
Niane, D.T. Sundiata: an epic of old Mali. Essex: Longman, 1986.

Review of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's Bye, Bye Africa

2008-01-27T19:33:00.000-08:00

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Bye, Bye Africa. 1999.

In his 1999 film Bye, Bye Africa, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun questions the role of African cinema in everyday African life. It appears that the models his semi-autobiographical protagonist, the expatriated filmmaker Haroun takes for making films (or those of the filmmaker he plays in the film) have more to do with French ideals than with what people in Chad actually want to see. When he returns home after years in France to mourn his mother, Haroun's father questions the use of his profession, noting that if he had studied medicine, he could have saved his mother. Referring to the film that Haroun made about “some European (Freud),” he asks “What’s the use of cinema,” claiming that “Your films are not made for us. They are made for Europeans.”

Haroun attempts to explain to his father the need to define himself in film: “The white man’s land is nice, but not yours. The day you think you belong you lose something.” His response indicates that his homecoming is a way of re-discovering his Chadian identity. After watching the footage of his deceased mother, he quotes Godard: “Cinema makes memory.” His decision to make a film in tribute to his mother indicates that he is retracing his steps—attempting to capture his memories of the events that have formed his life and his art. When he says “to forget my grief, I’ll make a tribute to the one who gave me life,” he simultaneously pays tribute to his literal mother and his symbolic mother, the dying cinema in Chad.

However, as is indicated in the opening scene that shows him answering a long distance phone call while in bed with a white woman, his ten years in Europe without traveling back home seem to have turned him into a European. He no longer seems to understand life in Chad. He walks around with the video camera, shooting everything he sees, as if he were a European tourist. When the man outside the theatre attacks him, he shouts “He is stealing our image,” and although Haroun thinks the man is mad, the situation is more complex than Haroun imagines. In his films oriented to a European audience, his images of Chad do become a kind of exploitation—stealing images of a crumbling infrastructures to offer the West as confirmation of Africa’s incapacity. The radio clip from Thomas Sankara’s speech about the imperialism of the West and the dependency that foreign aid creates reinforces Haroun’s ambiguous position. Even the title of his proposed film, Bye, Bye Africa, addresses Chad from a distance, homogenizing the individual experiences of a local place into the large abstract “Africa.” He is addressing Chad, at best, reflexively—over his shoulder.

Like a European tourist, Haroun does not recognize any responsibility he may have to the people whose images he captures in his films. When he asks the women trying out for a part in his film if they will agree to appear naked, he draws more from European/ American ideas of what cinema should show than from aesthetics born out of the cultures of Chad. When one of his former actresses tells him that her husband would object to her playing naked, he indicates that if she were a serious actress she would be willing to give up her husband for her career. Although she leaves with an ironic regret, another auditioning actress leaps straight to the heart of the problem: “Are you Chadian?” she shouts before storming out.

As his friend Garba indicates, in Haroun’s desire to make “real cinema,” he has forgotten the realities of life in Chad. Haroun seems little aware of how his film on AIDS affects the life of Isabelle: near the end of the film she tells him “Reality scares you. You hide in films. I am not a fictional character. I exist.” His careless use of Isabelle in the film overlaps with his careless use of her in real life. Indeed, over the course of the film he begins to learn what Isabelle warns him about, viz. that “Cinema is stronger than reality”—a lesson that is reinforced by the blurring of boundaries between a fiction film and a documentary. It is as if by acting an AIDS victim in his film, Isabelle has actually contacted a deadly disease that will kill her in the end. Indeed when they meet again after ten years, she foreshadows her own death “I’m finished Haroun. Your film killed me.” Her theft of his camera to film her final words, therefore, brackets her encounter with him: her troubles begin and end on film.

Within Bye, Bye Africa, there are hints that although Haroun is unable to square his own training and technique with the needs of his African audience, film is certainly not dead in Chad. Although the cinema halls are in a state of decay, the video clubs are bursting at the seams, and though people seem to express a nostalgia for the good old days of cinema, the stories they like are action films—not the worn out prints from the cinemas or the films about Freud that Haroun has made thus far. If we read Bye, Bye Africa as a tribute to his two mothers, the actual woman and the cinema, his final recognition of his persistent nephew who follows him about with his skillfully crafted toy camera is symbolic for his realization that though one loved one may die, there are others living now who must be appreciated. The camera that he gives to his nephew near the end of the film implies that the next generation will appropriate film technology to record that which is around them, their everyday life. And although he bids Chad, Africa, farewell, his nephew chases him down the street, filming him. In this conciliatory gesture, the new young filmmaker acknowledges that the expatriated Haroun, too, is now a part of the Chadian reality: he records him as he leaves, as if to say, you will not be so easily forgotten.

Review of Waiting for an Angel and Measuring Time by Helon Habila

2008-01-27T19:13:00.000-08:00

First posted on my other blog and now on my "literary" blog.

If you’ve never read anything by the Caine and Commonwealth prize winning author Helon Habila, the first thing to know is that his use of language is exquisite. The second thing to know is that he makes generous use of irony. Although he is a clearly political writer, he questions over-easy assumptions and political binaries. In his latest novel, Measuring Time, Habila continues the project he began in his debut novel Waiting for an Angel—that is to tell history through the eyes of ordinary people.

Waiting for an Angel opens in a prison setting. The imprisoned journalist Lomba is engaged in a battle of wits with the prison superintendent who is extorting poetry from his prisoner in an attempt to impress a woman. If Lomba’s story were told in a straight line, the way it might appear in his prison file, it would be the story of a failure: a student who drops out of university, who loses friends to madness and military violence and the women he loves to other men, a writer who never finishes his novel and whose journalistic career is cut short by his arrest in the slums of Lagos. However, this is not the story that Habila tells. By breaking up and rearranging the linear story of Lomba’s life, he wrests control of the narrative away from an environment-determined fate. The novel starts at the end of the chronological sequence and then circles back to gather stories of other characters in Lomba’s Lagos: a young boy banished from his home in Jos for smoking Indian hemp, an abandoned out-of-wedlock mother, an intellectual in a tragic love affair with a former student turned prostitute, the daughter of a general whose mother is dying of cancer, a disillusioned woman who runs a neighborhood eatery, a man who defies the soldiers on the night of Abacha’s coup, an editor pursued by the police who refuses to go into exile, a legless tailor who dreams of bidding poverty goodbye.

While the form of Waiting for an Angel reflects the frenetic beat of life in Lagos, the small town setting of Habila’s second novel Measuring Time allows for a more meandering pace. Mamo and LaMamo are twins growing up in the middlebelt town of Keti, and they hate their father, a womanizing businessman with political ambitions. They hate him for breaking their mother’s heart before she died giving birth to them, and they hate him for his long absences and his neglect. The twins’ simultaneous desire for revenge and quest for fame ends in their separation. When LaMamo runs away in search of adventure as a mercenary soldier, Mamo’s sickle cell anemia forces him to stay at home, spending more and more time in his imagination. The narrative of Mamo’s day to day life in Keti is rhythmically punctuated by adventure-filled letters from LaMamo as he travels around West Africa. Mamo reimagines events in Nigerian history: the poet Christopher Okigbo did not die in Biafra but instead lay down his gun to travel around Africa with Mamo’s Uncle Haruna. LaMamo enacts Mamo’s imagined story, becoming a soldier-poet who reports from the Liberian war front, and his words capture the spiritual horror and the boredom of war as it is rarely recorded in international news. The twins long for the other: while Mamo imagines adventures beyond the borders of his small town, LaMamo constantly searches for reminders of home in foreign lands.

The narrative of Measuring Time is frequently interrupted by folktales told by Mamo’s Auntie Marina, letters from LaMamo and a professor in Uganda who becomes Mamo’s mentor, excerpts from the memoir of the first missionary in Keti, his wife’s diary, and colonial reports, and the oral histories told by other characters. One of the most remarkable aspects of Habila’s prose is this inclusion of multiple genres alongside a continuous pattern of tributes to preexisting literary works. In Waiting for an Angel, he borrows the character of the prison superintendent from Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died and gives him some of the associations of the folkloric dodo, a dim-witted monster who is often outwitted by the youth he kidnaps. Throughout the rest of Waiting for an Angel he references writers as varied as Ayi Kwei Armah, Ousmane Sembene, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Franz Kafka, John Donne, and Sappho. Similarly in Measuring Time, he bundles together Plutarch, Christopher Okigbo, William Shakespeare, Wole Soyinka, Alex La Guma, the Arabian Nights and Faust legends, as well as references to oral tales and Nigerian video films. The effect of these competing voices is to open up the boundaries between his fiction and other fictions and historical accounts that lie outside the novel. The illusion of a smooth, progressive, and abbreviated history, such as the Brief History of West Africa that is brought to Lomba in prison (as the Letters of Queen Victoria had been brought to Soyinka in prison) is a false one. Habila’s fictional histories play a function similar to the colonial history the Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in which the district commissioner writes only a paragraph on a man who has been the subject of Achebe’s entire novel. Habila parallels Achebe’s fictional colonial text in Measuring Time with the missionary text A Brief History of the People’s of Keti by Reverend Drinkwater.

It is with these “brief histories” that Habila’s project in both Waiting for an Angel and Measuring Time becomes clear. Mamo is determined to write a history that does not “cut details” as the colonial histories had—a history that tells the stories of “individuals, ordinary people who toil and dream and suffer” (MT 180). The traditional ruler’s story he has been hired to write, Mamo states, is “simply a part of the other biographies…. [that he would] eventually compile to form a biographical history of Keti. That’s what history really is, people and their lives, no matter how we try to manipulate it. It is the story of real people with real weaknesses and strengths and… not about some founding fathers and … even if we want to write about the founding fathers we shouldn’t privilege them, we should place them on par with other ordinary folks…” (225). In Mamo’s subsequent “biographical history,” he writes of his father the failed politician, and his aunt the divorced wife, placing their stories alongside the less than glorious history of the mai, the traditional ruler, of Keti. Every story has its own place alongside the others. When LaMamo returns with a revolutionary fervour reminiscent of Ngugi’s Matigari, the separate lives of the twins blend and become one—LaMamo’s panAfrican experience and his soon to be born child are given into Mamo’s safekeeping and for recording into Mamo’s history of Keti.

Such a history is not merely a radical rewrite of racist colonial histories but an empathetic window into the lives of even the unpleasant characters. The characterization of the prison superintendent in Waiting for an Angel follows Soyinka’s original caricature, but the man is given a more complex psychology. He is a man grieving for his dead wife, a father of a young son. As Lomba realizes when he meets the superintendent’s girlfriend, “The superintendent had a name, and a history, maybe even a soul” (WfA 37). While in Measuring Time, the sleepy-eyed traditional ruler of Keti and his evil vizier take on the typed characteristics of folktale or a video film, most of the characters in Measuring Time are treated with complexity and compassion. When LaMamo calls the old widows who had pursued their father all his life “shameless old women,” Mamo reminds him that “they weren’t so bad… People are just people” (MT 343). And although the missionary Reverend Drinkwater may have misrepresented the history of Keti, his family has become a part of the history of the town. The missionary’s daughters, now old women, live in Keti, tending their parents’ graves. Although they are not Nigerian, they belong in Keti. It is the only life they have ever known.

This concern with multiple perspectives on history is behind what at first glance might seem to be an editorial flaw in Habila’s two novels. When reconstructed in both novels, time doesn’t quite add up. According to the chronology given in “Mamo’s notes toward a biography of the Mai,” the number of years between the installation of the first mai by the British and the current mai should be about thirty two or three years, yet the time period is stretched from 1918 up to the 1980s (MT 238-240). The year-long planning period for the celebration of the mai’s tenth anniversary seems to turn into three. Similarly in Waiting for an Angel, the time between Lomba’s stay at the university and his imprisonment seem much longer than the actual historical tenure of Abacha’s regime. He supposedly meets and falls back in love with an old girlfriend some time after he becomes a journalist. Yet, two weeks before he is arrested (after he has worked at the Dial for two years), another girlfriend, with whom he has lived for a year, leaves him. The times between the two love affairs don’t quite seem to add up.

Placing the novels side by side gives a hint to what Habila is doing here. In Waiting for an Angel, Habila gathers up historical events that happened along a spectrum of ten years and bundles them into the space of a week. Although Nigeria is kicked out of the Commonwealth in November 1995, in the novel, a week after this event, Dele Giwa, the editor of Newswatch Magazine, is assassinated by a parcel bomb on the same day that Kudirat Abiola is assassinated by gunmen. Of course, historically, the two activists were killed ten years apart: Dele Giwa during the Babangida regime in October 1986 and Kudirat Abiola during the Abacha regime in June 1996. The quickening rhythm of disaster in this chapter of Waiting for an Angel parallels the last quarter of the Measuring Time in which Mamo falls into the hard-partying lifestyle of corrupt politicians, religious riots break out, and the quiet town of Keti goes up in flames. Time here is not a mathematical iambic pentameter that can be measured with a clock, but a living fluctuating force that lags behind and loops around to find the stories of multiple characters. It reminds me of the way time acts in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or in oral tales and epics. It cannot be diagramed into a dry progression of events such as those found in A Brief History of West Africa or A Brief History of the Peoples of Keti but instead can only be mediated through the memories of those who experienced it. In his afterward to Waiting for an Angel, Habila acknowledges the liberties he has taken with the chronological order of events, “[N]ot all of the above events are represented with strict regard to time and place—I did not feel obliged to do that; that would be mere historicity. My concern was for the story, that above everything else” (WfA 229).

Mamo’s story of Keti, like the story of Lomba in Waiting for an Angel, becomes in miniature the story of Nigeria—not that it can represent all the complex and multi-faceted stories of the nation, but that it offers an example of what can be written: the individual stories of ordinary people living in extraordinary times. Habila layers his work onto that of older writers such as Achebe and Ngugi who rewrote colonial history in their early works, and joins other contemporary Nigerian writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Teju Cole whose writing seems similarly concerned with providing entry points into historical events as lived by ordinary people. Measuring Time ends with the performance of a play by church women’s group, both celebrating and mocking the appearance of the missionary Reverend Drinkwater into Keti history. Mamo realizes that through their caricatured performance, they are telling the story on their own terms, invoking a way of life much older than the colonial encounter: “They were celebrating because they had had the good sense to take whatever was good from another culture and add it to whatever was good in theirs: they had done this before when they first met the Komda, and many times before that in their travels and migrations, in times earlier than even the oldest among them could remember. This was their wisdom, the secret of their survival. This was why they were still able to laugh… each generation would bring to this play its own interpretation” (MT 382). This at root is the power of Habila’s work—the ability of humanity to laugh in the face of tragedy—the ability to undermine stories that have been told for you by telling them yourself.

The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga

2007-08-24T12:02:00.000-07:00

I'm teaching Nervous Conditions by Zimbabwean author and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga this semester, and while creating a study guide for it, I was reminded of the review I had done of the sequel, The Book of Not, on my other blog, originally posted 9 January 2007. It's buried in the archives and hard to find, so I thought I'd repost it on this "literary blog."

The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Here are my first impressions of The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga. I'd welcome a dialogue with anyone else who has read this book. (Warning: spoilers ahead)

Dangarembga, Tsitsi. The Book of Not. Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarke, 2006.

"I was young then and able to banish things, but seeds do grow. Although I was not aware of it then, no longer could I accept Sacred Heart and what it represented as a sunrise on my horizon. Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully, something in my mind began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be brainwashed, bringing me to this time when I can set down this story. It was a long and painful process for me, that process of expansion. It was a process whose events stretched over many years and would fill another volume, but the story I have told here, is my own story, the story of four women whom I loved, and our men, this story is how it all began."

--voice of Tambudzai, closing paragraph of Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga.

I’m trying to figure out whether my disappointment in The Book of Not is that of a literary critic or merely that of a reader who had loved Nervous Conditions and identified with the forceful yet ambiguous narrative of the main character Tambudzai. Perhaps it is unfair to impose my own expectations of a sequel so long awaited on the author, but from the promising tone of Nervous Conditions' last paragraph, this is the sequel I had imagined: Tambudzai continues at the Sacred Heart academy, does well, receives a scholarship to study in England, and discovers in exile the regretful, cynical voice with which she narrates both novels—finding too late that in her desire for advancement in the European world she had lost her connection to family, to history, and to herself. In the second novel, I imagined, she would begin to retrace her steps to find what she had lost. In any case, I expected that I'd still like the plucky yet imperfect narrator, whatever obstacles she may have to overcome.

This is not what happened. Instead the hints at selfishness and the craving for acceptance that we see in Nervous Conditions (her lack of grief over her brother’s death, her relief to get away from the homestead, etc) develop into a character who, by the end of her first person narrative in The Book of Not, is thoroughly un-likeable. Tambudzai dreams of greatness—greatness being that which will propel her ahead of her classmates, to a position where her family have no option but to be proud, a position in which she can have the vengeance of success to hold over her disapproving mother; she will demonstrate to her white classmates and teachers that she is capable of surpassing them. Although Tambudzai is clearly capable of achievement, her frustrating desire to please, her suppression of her rage, results in failure. Tambudzai’s interest in school has little to do with an actual interest in what she is studying but with honours, awards, and exam results. Nervous Conditions is a Dickensonian bildingsroman tracing the successes of the homestead girl who had the support of a benevolent uncle, an optimistic structure ironically undermined by psychological loss of self a la Black Skins, White Masks. In The Book of Not, Dangarembga systematically tears down Tambudzai’s accomplishments achieved in Nervous Conditions. The trajectory of the narrative is a steady descent into lower and lower levels of a self-negating hell.

Like Nervous Conditions, the story is told through Tambudzai’s unreliable first person narration, yet there are fewer moments of tenderness here. The author doesn't seem to like her narrator very much. Dangarembga takes a particularly bitter swipe at Tambudzai when she comes back to the mission on vacation and finds her subdued cousin Nyasha reading Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat. Although Tambudzai has been attempting to memorize the complete works of Shakespeare for her exams, she displays an aggressive ignorance of African literature, saying, “[Nyasha] was reading a book she had not bothered to share with me, which rather than being revolutionary seemed to be about agriculture for it was called A Grain of Wheat, written as far as I could see by someone like poor Bongo in the Congo, a starving Kenyan author” (117). Not only is she ignorant of Ngugi’s work but she disdains the efforts of the other African girls to speak Shona together: “These seniors were planning to spend the entire evening trying futiley to turn back time by speaking Shona! Just imagine! Inviting a mark for refusing to accept which language was allowed and which was not when you were as far as the sixth form!... I was not going to identify with a group that spoke in the only language, out of all the ones that were known at the school, which was forbidden” (169). Success for her is in becoming what she is told to become, in rejecting that which is African to embrace that which is European. To speak Shona is to be out of date, to be insubordinate. Having had her early rebellion over using the white girl’s toilets beaten out of her, she no longer questions any rules placed upon her. This is the point where I miss the fiery character Nyasha, who plays only a peripheral and sedated role in this sequel, and whose blunt observations might have provided a balance to Tambudzai's desperate self-delusion.

The history of Zimbabwe here presented is bitterly cynical. The book opens with Tambudzai’s disjointed, almost incoherent, description of her freedom-fighting sister’s leg being blown off and her uncle Babamukuru being beaten by the villageres for being “not exactly a collaborator, but one whose soul hankered to be at one with the occupying Rhodesian forces” (6). This opening accounts for the terror the elite African students as well as the white students at Sacred Heart feel for the Zimbabwean freedom fighters. Tambudzai locks away her memories of her sister’s leg, until her classmate Ntombi comes to weep in her room about a baby cousin being drowned by “terrorists,” because “[t]hey said my aunt is feeding terrorists… Yes, she talked because of what they did to the baby. But it was too late. My little cousin was broken, just broken!... Then my aunt killed herself, because when it’s like that, you’ll never live… No one is alive!” (172). In an initial reading it is hard to tell whether the “Rhodesian” army or the “Zimbabwean” army has committed these atrocities. Tambudzai’s pain is so deep that she tries not to think about it at all.
Despite the struggle for freedom from white rule, the new Zimbabwe, which has emerged by the end of the narrative, mirrors the old. Language is cloaked in political correctness. At school, the girls are "consumed by ... terror" that they might inadvertantly break the school rules about physical seperation between the white and black students. If a black girl should accidentally touch a white girl in an assembly queue "looks of such horror flooded their faces at this accidental contact that you often looked around to see what horrendous monster caused the expression, before you realised it was your person" (58-9). This history is countered with hypocritical inter-racial hugs between the co-workers at the end of the story. But under this shallow familiarity lurks the old racist structures. Tracy, the white student, who knowingly stole Tambudzai’s trophy for the best 0-levels in secondary school, becomes Tambu’s boss. A white copywriter praises Tambudzai’s advertising copy for a hair straightening product and then takes the copy as his own, going on to win a company prize for the text. (The hair straightening product represents the continued structures of idealizing Europeans ideas of what is good, under new leadership. And Tambudzai’s ability to write sentimental copy about it demonstrates her imbrication in these mental structures.) Tambudzai’s dreams are crushed over and over again. She is the ultimate victim. Although she gets the best O-level results in the class, a white girl gets the prize, while Tambudzai goes unacknowledged. Upon becoming a senior, she chooses to focus on math and science, yet because of her race she is not allowed to attend the national boy’s school the other girls from Sacred Heart attend for the science classes. She is left trying to make sense of the sciences from the handwritten notes of a white classmate. Despite hours of study, she miserably fails her A-levels.

The reader sympathizes with her victimhood, until it becomes obvious that Tambudzai is unwilling to take any action to protest these inequities. She seems to almost aggressively seek a silent martyrdom in pursuit of her own interpretation of unhu, “that profound knowledge of being, quietly and not flamboyantly; the grasp of life and of how to preserve and accentuate life’s eternal interweavings that we southern Africans are famed for, what others now call ubuntu, demanded that I consoled myself, that I be well so that others could be well also” (103). Despite her resentment of racist rules which segregate bathrooms by race, she volunteers to knit socks for Rhodesian soldiers in the fight against her “elder siblings,” to comfort the children of a farmer killed by the “elder siblings,” to ensure that she is viewed favourably by the administration. When Tracy is announced the winner of the prize for the best O-levels, most of the girls know it is a lie because they saw Tambudzai’s results. Yet, when her classmate Ntombi urges her to go talk to the headmistress, telling her that she will come along with her for moral support, Tambuzai refuses and silently sits through the award ceremony in an agony of self-mortification. When the white copywriter takes her out for coffee to inform her that he will be stealing the credit for her “brilliant” advertising copy, she deludes herself that it is a sacrifice she must take for future credit. When he receives an award for the copy, she resigns the job, but she does not even take the satisfaction of claiming her rights in her resignation, but lies that she is quitting to get married.

Much of Tambudzai’s problem is the suppression of her rage: she accepts the position given her by the whites, while taking out her aggression on those who have not achieved her level: the chirpy secretary, her vengeful mother at the homestead. Indeed, although Tambudzai has spent her whole life trying to get away from the bitterness her mother represents, Tambudzai has become exactly what she resents about her mother: she is consumed by bitterness, passive-aggressive vengeance, self-defeating negativity. Like her mother, she is so eaten by self pity that she has no friends, nothing that she enjoys except her own martyrdom.

By the end, the reader has become wary. Even Tambudzai’s smallest goals must be viewed with suspicion, since it is obvious that she is to be allowed not even the smallest of triumphs. At the end of the novel as Tambudzai takes an account of her failures, she realizes that “I had forgotten all the promises made to myself and providence while I was young concerning carrying forward with me the good and human, the unhu of my life. As it was, I had not considered unhu at all, only my own calamities, since the contested days at the convent” (246).

The question I had after plowing through this swamp of self pity is whether Tambudzai, whose cycle of self-imposed goals for recognition, victimhood, and aggressive self flagellation repeats again and again with little new insight, has remained an interesting enough person to warrant the 250 pages Dangarembga spends on developing her voice?

Note: 9 December 2007

Today I googled reviews of The Book of Not and came across these three reviews by Helon Habila, Percy Zvomuya, Helen Oyeyemi.

Lomba's Plaigerism

2007-08-08T09:45:00.001-07:00

An excerpt from Chapter 3 of my MA thesis on Helon Habila's Waiting for an Angel.

[...] The privileging of the imagination is key here. It is the prison superintendent’s lack of imagination that makes him appropriate Lomba’s poetry, oblivious to the possibility that Janice might fall in love with the real poet rather than his gaoler. He cannot imagine that Lomba might use the love poems as a way to escape. This failure of imagination is the fatal weakness of the prison superintendent. From the moment that Muftau reveals his vulnerable side, Lomba takes full advantage of the superintendent’s desire to impress. Much like Lomba’s neighbor on Morgan Street, the illiterate thief Nkem, who had attempted to impress Lomba with his English, Muftau attempts to impress Lomba with his knowledge of poetry: “Perhaps because I work in prison. I wear uniform. You think I don’t know poetry, eh? Soyinka, Okigbo, Shakespeare” (26). Although Lomba cannot express the sarcasm that comes to his lips when he reads Muftau’s first poem, he expresses it in the poems he writes for the superintendent’s educated lady-love. Muftau does not know poetry, but the teacher he wants to marry does. The superintendent’s claim to literacy also unintentionally supplies Lomba with his form of resistance: the first letters of “Soyinka, Okigbo, and Shakespeare” form a perfect “SOS.” Lomba appropriates lines and whole poems from other poets to send to Janice. He slyly undermines the superintendent’s intentional plagiarism by supplying him with already “plagiarized” materials, to act as messages to the educated woman the prison superintendent loves. He appropriates lines from Edgar Allen Poe, John Donne, and the Greek poet Sappho, but their words of love become “scriptive Morse tucked innocently into the lines of the poems” (33). [i] Janice later tells him that she recognized the SOS in the repetition of the line, “Save my soul, a prisoner,” that ran through his poems. The love poetry is turned to a new political and practical purpose. The literary symbol becomes actualized—he is an actual prisoner, not merely a metaphoric one.

The SOS refrain is one of Lomba’s more obvious literary devices, but his use of intertextuality within the poems themselves works both as a way for Lomba to snatch at lines of poetry that lie, like the stars and the rain, beyond the reach of the prison and as a sly indication of Muftau’s inability to write such poetry. Muftau’s blindness to the obvious allusions in the poems that Lomba intentionally plagiarizes points to his stupid deceit. However, the “plagiarism” of classic poems works not just to mock the prison superintendent but to say the things Lomba cannot directly communicate without being discovered. In Lomba’s “bowdlerization of Sappho’s ‘Ode’” (31) the superintendent does not see beyond the conventions of love poetry. He does not imagine that Lomba is writing anything but what he asked him to write: “‘A peer of goddesses she seems to me.’ Yes. Excellent. She will be happy. Do you think I should ask her for. Marriage. Today?” (33). What the superintendent does not know is that in other translations of Sappho, the poet speaks of a rival who sits beside the beloved, hearing her laughter and her voice. The author of the poem stands at a distance from the couple, unable to reach the desired lady whose attention is turned to the rival, except through the poem. This reflects Lomba’s own position. Whereas J. Addington Symonds (as well as other translators) translates the poem so that the author addresses the beloved, indicating jealousy of the man who sits so close that he “…in silence hears thee/ Silverly speaking, /Laughing love's low laughter…” (Symonds 69), Lomba bowdlerizes the poem so that the seeming “author” of the poem is the man sitting “face to face” with her, who is entranced by “listening to the sweet tones of my voice, / And the loveliness of my laughing. /It is this that sets my heart fluttering / In my chest,” (Waiting 32). This beginning of the poem points ironically to the self absorption of the prison superintendent who imagines the tones of his choppy voice “sweet,” and his laughter “lovely,” just as he imagines his own poetry “great,” and that he is making Lomba “comfortable” in prison by giving him cigarettes (41). However, following this initial ironic hint, the poem transitions to another set of imagery, which points to the true author of the poem. As with the Sappho, the author of the poem is not the arrogant man who sits “face to face” with Janice, but the one who waits in agonies in the dark. The last nine lines of the poem, like the refrain of “Save my soul, a prisoner,” work to reflect Lomba’s true position as a prisoner:

I am no longer master of my voice,
And my tongue lies useless
And a delicate flame runs over my skin
No more do I see with my eyes;
The sweat pours down me
I am all seized with trembling
And I grow paler than the grass
My strength fails me
And I seem little short of dying. (32)

Here Lomba demonstrates the powerful potential of the love poetry Muftau thinks “harmless.” Using the conventions of love poetry in which the lover often seems helpless and in thrall to the beloved, Lomba reflects the literality of his own imprisonment. Read one way, the poem reflects the metaphoric imprisonment of the gaoler within the structures of his own conceit; in another way, the poem describes Lomba’s own experiences in prison. The two lines, “I am no longer master of my voice, /And my tongue lies useless” (32), reflect his observations in his diary that “[p]rison chains not so much your hands and feet as it does your voice” (14). The master of Lomba’s voice, indeed, is now the man who gives Janice the poem. “The delicate flame” (32) on his skin can also be read as the “acid, cancer” of anger “eating away your bowels in the dark” (15). And if the “lover” claims that “No more do I see with my eyes” (32) then no more can Lomba see in solitary confinement where after removing his blindfold, “the darkness remained the same” (24). As with any prisoner in a Lagos prison, “the sweat pours down me,” and if he is “seized with trembling” (32) it is like the inmate whose “hands shook, as if with a life of their own” (15) whose “strength fail[ed]” (32) him and who “collapsed into [Lomba’s] arms” (16) crying that “[i]f I go back there I’ll die” (15). The cry of the lover is the cry of the prisoner longing to be free.

If the love poem is powerful as a disguise for a more political reality, it is also powerful because it is a form that allows the imprisoned poet to reach out beyond his solitude to an audience that is both real and imagined. His imagination allows him not just to sneak his poems through the prison walls, but also to imagine liberation for himself. Lomba’s metaphoric “message[s] in a bottle, thrown without much hope into the sea” (39), recall the words of the marabout who had once predicted Lomba’s future in prison: “The water … takes away from us what we don’t need, and drops it at another shore where it is needed. Sometimes it returns to us what it took away, refined and augmented with brine and other sea minerals” (47). If read alongside the story in which Lomba’s poems are taken away from him by the prison superintendent and returned to him by Janice, the passage implies not just destiny but also agency. It is not that the superintendent merely “took” Lomba’s love poems from him, but that Lomba intended them as “messages.” His intended audience was not necessarily Janice but “myself, perhaps, written by me to my own soul, to every other soul, the collective soul of the universe” (38). Lomba’s use of the imagination is a defiant act of will: writing alone in prison, he imagines an audience for himself. The task of writing for the superintendent’s intended eventually gives him a corporeal presence to connect to his imagined audience. When the prison superintendent first tells Lomba that he gave Janice one of Lomba’s poems, Lomba imagines the superintendent’s rendezvous with her at a Chinese Restaurant. In his imagination Janice is reluctant to become involved with the man. He imagines that “[s]ometimes she is at loss what to make of his attentions. She sighs. She turns her plump face to the deep, blue lagoon. A white boat with dark stripes on its sides speeds past; a figure is crouched inside, almost invisible” (29). The poem “Three Words” that the superintendent later pulls out to give her is a poem Lomba had initially written before the raid that landed him in solitary confinement. The nearly invisible person crouched inside the boat that Janice saw earlier seems to become significant—the fleeting presence of the author of the poem, like that hidden almost invisible poet in the Sappho. That a seemingly futile poem meant only for himself had actually reached an audience indicates the power of Lomba’s imagination. When Lomba meets Janice, he finds that “my mental image of her was almost accurate. She was plump. Her face was warm and homely” (36). It is as if his imagination has brought her to life, his SOS poems that he sent out into the world through the unlikely courier of the prison superintendent “written by me to my own soul, to every other soul, the collective soul of the universe” had been found and brought back. He had dreamed his way out of the prison bars, and had reeled in one of the text’s many angels, who pulls his poems out of her purse and gives them back to him.

Endnotes:

[i] The first line of Edgar Allen Poe’s “To Helen” reads “Helen, thy beauty is to me” (Ferguson, Salter, and Stallworthy 879); Lomba writes “Janice, your beauty is to me” (Waiting 31). The first line and a half of Donne’s “The Good-Morrow” reads “I wonder by my troth, what thou and I /Did, till we loved?...” (Ferguson, Salter and Stallworthy 263); Lomba writes “I wonder, my heart, what you and I / Did till we loved” (Waiting 31). The Sappho is reimagined from any one of many translations. The one I am using for comparative purposes here is J. Addington Symonds’ 1833 translation from Henry Thornton Wharton’s collection Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a literal translation (69).

Works Cited in Excerpt:

Habila, Helon. Waiting for an Angel. New York: Norton, 2003.

Ferguson, Mary, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 4th Ed. New York: Norton, 1996.

Symonds, J. Addington. “Blest as the immortal gods is he,” in Sappho: Memoir Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation by Henry Thornton Wharton. London: John Lane, 1908.

Les Saignantes directed by Jean-Pierre Bekolo

2007-05-26T15:47:00.000-07:00

In 1998, Nigeria’s brutal dictator General Sani Abacha died in bed with two prostitutes. The exact details of his death are not common knowledge, but the rumours abound. Some say his death “by heart attack” was Viagra induced; others spin tales of the prostitutes assassinating him with a poisoned apple. The myths that surround this historical incident point to the importance of the event in the national imagination, and have inspired oblique references in quite a few creative works.[1] In “The Last Sleep” a short story by Sunday Ayewanu, several mammy water spirits disguised as foreign prostitutes overcome the evil ruler of “Benueria.” In a sexual/spiritual struggle, they insist on him giving them government contracts and leave him dead with exhaustion.

The sleaze surrounding the corrupt government of the Abacha regime and the almost spiritual nature of his fortuitous death, as imagined in Ayewanu, is what I thought of when I saw Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s striking and disturbing film Les Saignantes, the winner of the 2007 Silver Stallion at FESPACO film festival. Set in the year 2025, the film opens provocatively with an almost naked young woman floating over a stout elderly man.[2] Strapped into a harness, she performs acrobatic sexual maneuvers— pointing her fingers in an imitation of shooting while thrusting her pelvis into his. Although the harness might seem to indicate the servile nature of the woman, here Majolie is in complete control. The old man lies back passively, waiting for her to swoop down upon him. The next thing we know the old man is dead. Whether this is an accident—he died of heart failure and old age—or whether this is a spiritual assassination performed in her shooting position, we are never quite sure, but it soon becomes apparent that Majolie has on her hands the death of a high ranking government official, the SGCC, who had been going to give her a government contract before he died in flagrante. The rest of the film traces the bizarre adventures she and her friend Chouchou go through to first dispose of the body, reconstruct it, and then hold an elaborate W.I.P (Wake of Important Person) to advance their own careers

A futuristic film set in a dystopian Cameroonian city vaguely reminiscent of the dystopian Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s classic BladeRunner, Les Saignantes is shot in high contrast lighting in what seems to be one long continuous night. The throbbing bass soundtrack of the film underscores the pulse of its rapid, jump-cut, music-video style editing. The characterization of the future city is a pessimistic allegory of the contemporary nation in Africa. By the year 2025, nothing has progressed; rather the country is still ruled by abusive power-drunk leaders who promise contracts to their mistresses; the police still take bribes and have no authority to actually investigate the crimes of the rich and powerful. Near the end of the film the smooth woman’s voiceover, which has performed the narrator’s function throughout the film, intones “We were already dead.” Re-watching the film with these words in mind, one wonders if the film, set a few years ahead in the future in 2025, is not the portrait of the spiritual aftermath of nation that has already died.

The entire culture seems to revolve around rituals of death. The W.I.P.’s become the ceremonies where political connections are made. At an elegant cocktail party or at home with Chouchou’s mother, the sophisticated revelers munch distractedly on maggots and drink what looks like radio-active embalming liquid from giant martini glasses. The mysterious women with their uniform of red headscarves, who cluster around Chouchou’s mother, flicker in and out like ghosts. The narrator makes it ambiguous whether any of the women in the film are spirits or ghosts, dead or alive. With the mysterious force mevoungou, referenced throughout the film, there seems to be little differentiation between the two.

Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye argues in Tradition and Modernity that “[t]he conception of modernity may give the impression that modernity represents a break with tradition and is thus irreconcilable with it; such an impression would clearly be false. For one thing, every society in the modern world has many traditional elements inherited and accepted from previous, that is ‘premodern’, generations…” (Gyekye 271). While Gyekye’s conception of modernity is optimistic, Bekolo seems to invoke death to illustrate the end results of a corrupted modernity. He visualizes the “mammy water” universe of “tradition,” in which the spiritual is inextricably tangled up in the tangible. Mevoungou the mystical power that controls the bodies of the young women after the death of the SGCC is a kind of lifeblood that lies at the heart of the society and which seems to provide the only hope for a “resurrection.”[3]

Given, Bekolo’s fascination with the process of filmmaking itself, I couldn’t help wondering if his portrayal of witchcraft and mevoungou does not have something to do with the medium of film.[4] The film opens, like so many other African films, with a voiceover reminiscent of an oral storyteller and is then interspersed with chapter captions: metaquestions about the possibility of filmmaking in postcolonial Cameroon: 1) How do you make an anticipation (futuristic/science fiction) film in a country with no future? 2) How can you make a film in a country where acting is subversive? 3) How can you make a horror film in a place where death is the party? 4) How can you film a love story, in a place where love is impossible? 5) How can you make a crime film where investigation is forbidden? 6) How can you watch a film like this and do nothing afterwards? After the opening chapter heading, almost half of the film passes before the second chapter comes, but the rest follow in a rapid succession, pounding home the point. If none of these tidy European genres (Science fiction, Horror, Romance, Crime/Investigation) can capture the paradoxes of postcolonial Cameroon, Bekolo indicates that he will create an uneasy amalgam of them all. His refusal to follow the “rules” of filmmaking, which has alarmed so many Western critics, indicates the subversive potential available to those who wield the camera.[5]

Les Saignantes references the grotesque humour of Quentin Tarantino and Hollywood horror films in the cliché of the chain-saw wielding cannibal, as well as the excesses of postmodern Hollywood cross-genre films (one of the pin-up posters in Chouchou’s bedroom is of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge), but he also draws on African orality and urban-legend so often captured in Nollywood videos: government officials who use witchcraft to reinforce their corrupt power. Mevoungou used as a counter-witchcraft against the patriarchal order in Les Saignantes, works similarly to the sorceress’s sex-changing challenge to the patriarchy in Bekolo’s first film Quartier Mozart. Filmmaking, Bekolo implies, like mevoungou allows one to 1) expose the decay at the heart of power in the postcolonial nation and 2) to imaginatively overcome the powerful and corrupt leaders of the nation, using the subaltern figure of the young woman. As the girls prepare for the W.I.P., one of them expresses her fear that their plan will fail: “what if it doesn’t work? We’re just two holes that get screwed in the end.” However, if the postcolonial nation is often represented as a woman raped by the military, if in a crime-ridden urban environment, young women find that they are most often exploited for their sexuality, Majolie and Chouchou turn this symbol of the exploitation of women, their sexuality, into a weapon with which to destroy the powerful minister of state. Mevoungou becomes a potent source of agency and of imagination. As the camera lingers on dark city streets, the final few sentences of the woman’s voiceover clinch the parallel between the witchcraft and filmmaking: “It was mevoungou dancing, dreaming. Mevoungou danced, dreamed in technicolour. We were living in 2025, children behaving as if we had no parents, no children. We had to move on. The country could not continue like that. We had to change”

Read through the metaquestions that structure the nonlinear narrative, Bekolo’s film can be interpreted as a call to action. As the gigantic moon sinks behind trees, the final chapter caption emerges: “How can you watch a film like this and do nothing afterwards?” The tangled plot recedes leaving his questions in relief. This is not merely a pessimistic vision of the future but an indication of imaginative possibilities opened up through the medium of film.

NOTES

For a trailer of the film see this you tube clip:

[1]Nigerian novelists Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Purple Hibiscus and Helon Habila in Waiting for an Angel both subtly reimagine what Christopher Okonkwo calls the “woman-implicated death” of Sani Abacha. Okonkwo notes that Beatrice’s poisoning of the abusive and authoritarian Eugene in Purple Hibiscus re-enacts Abacha’s death. I argue in my MA thesis on Waiting for an Angel that the mob of women who break down the billboard with a smug condom-wielding man foreshadows Abacha’s death that occurs on the margins of the narrative.
[2] The costume that Majolie wears in this scene is visually reminiscent of the famous metal bikini Princess Leia wears in George Lucas’s classic science fiction film Return of the Jedi. The intertextual link here is significant in that Princess Leia is also involved in a struggle against corrupt male-dominated government structures.
[3] Chouchou’s mother and the women in her house who appear and reappear on beat visually echo the witches in Bekolo’s earlier film Quartier Mozart. In Quartier Mozart the neighborhood witch and a young girl named Queen of the Hood change sexes to infiltrate the world of men and expose hidden corruptions at the heart of the patriarchy/nation, represented by the policeman MadDog.
[4] My word choice here is intentional. The definition of the medium as a person through which a spirit is channeled and the medium as the material out of which art is created seem to be conflated in Les Saignantes.
[5] In a quick survey of film reviews on blogs, most of the ones I found were overwhelmingly negative--much of the criticism centred around Bekolo’s assumed inability to follow the rules of filmmaking: http://www.twitchfilm.net/archives/003429.html, http://www.fardelsbear.com/fn3/archives/cat_les_saignantes.html, http://www.blogto.com/toronto_film_festival_2005/2005/09/les_saignantes_at_tiff/

Works Cited:

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Purple Hibiscus. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2003

Ayawanu, Sunday. “The Last Sleep.” Cramped Rooms and Open Spaces: An Anthology of New Short Fiction from the Association of Nigerian Authors. Ed. Ibrahim Sheme. Lagos: Nayee Press, 1999. 16-28.

Bekolo, Jeanne-Pierre, dir. Les Saignantes. Quartier Mozart Films, 2005.

_____________________. Quartier Mozart. 1992.

Gyekye, Kwame. Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Habila, Helon. Waiting for an Angel. New York: Norton, 2003.

Lucas, George, dir. Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi. 1983.

Lurmann, Baz, dir. Moulin Rouge. 2001.

Okonkwo, Christopher N. “Talking and Te(x)stifying: Ndibe, Habila, and Adichie’s ‘Dialogic’ Narrativizations of Nigeria’s Post-War Nadir: 1984-1998” presented at ASA Conference 2005, Washington D.C. 17 November 2005.

Scott, Ridley, dir. Bladerunner. 1982.

Photo Credits: All from Bekolo Films.

La Vie Sur Terre (1998) directed by Abderrahmane Sissako

2007-05-04T15:08:00.000-07:00

In Achille Mbembe’s essay, “At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa,” he engages with Braudel’s notion of temporal pluralities—that there are multiple kinds of time: “temporalities of long and very long duration, slowly evolving and less slowly evolving situations, rapid and virtually instantaneous deviations, the quickest being the easiest to detect” and “the exceptional character of World Time” (22). In Braudel’s thinking, world time has control over certain spaces, while others completely escape it. Mbembe relativizes Braudel’s thesis by maintaining that 1) temporalities overlap and interact with each other. They are not completely segregated. 2) There is no place completely separate from “world history,” but there are modalities, or categories in which it is manipulated to fit with local variables (23).

Abderrahmane Sissako’s 1998 film Vie sur terre (Life on Earth) illustrates Mbembe’s idea of temporal modalities and plays with the idea of “world time.” In the village of Sokolo, everyone knows what is going on in the outside world. In the local radio station, ancient radios are interspersed with glossy images cut from foreign magazines: including an image of a happy Prince Charles, Princes Diana, and baby Prince William frozen in time years after Diana’s divorce and death. A young man enthuses over a Japanese SUV in a magazine, and tells the photographer about the doors in Abijan that open by themselves. The young men sit all day listening to RFE radio from France, on which the millennium celebrations in New York, Paris, and Tokyo are reported. The voice on the radio says: “Not all countries have the same time, but those that do are celebrating the millennium.” This statement seems to get at the heart of the film in which global knowledge from the outside permeates the village, but in which knowledge from the village cannot be found on a larger global scale or even in the next village. One suspects that in the nearby villages similar young men listen to RFE and know world news but do not know the news of the neighboring village.

This is illustrated in the multiple characters who try to make phone calls but cannot get through. The dusty sign “telephone a priority for everyone” is ironic. While on the “outside” everyone may have a telephone, this is obviously not the case here, where the telephone serves as the metaphor for the “inability to speak” to the outside world. The soldier cannot get through to his camp. Nana cannot get through to a nearby town. The character played by Sissako attempts to make a phone call to Paris, but it is misdirected to London. The characters wait for people to call them back—since the telephone seems to work like the news, only in one direction. When the person from Paris gets through the disabled postmaster leaves the phone off the hook and sets off on his crutches to find Sissako. He disappears into the village, and nothing more is heard of him or of the call. Information seems to be lost in a time warp.

The gap in communication and time is contradicted by the visual movement of the film. Far from being a place where “nothing happens.” Sokolo is characterized by constant bi-directional movement. If communication moves soley from the outside to the inside, the daily activities of the villagers movement of the village crisscross. Throughout the film, if a bicycle or other vehicle passes from the right to the left of the frame, a canoe or a donkey cart, or another bicycle will cross from the left to the right. The visual back and forth of the film performs multiple times on a small scale, what Sissako does on a large scale with the form of the film. The initial opening in the French supermarket fades into the large tree (representative perhaps of history?), and then the old man reading the letter from Sissako in Paris. If the film opens with communication pointed toward Sekolo, The rest of the film is an outward response to this initial letter from the outside. The man dictating the letter to his brother in Paris does on a small scale what the entire form is doing: taking the news of Sokolo to the outside.

At the very end of the film, Nana, with a determined set to her face, pedals off on her bike, apparently to the neighboring town she has been trying to call. If she cannot get through on the phone, she will go there in person. This resolve to take herself there is what Sissako has done with the film: he has brought the village, like a letter, into the global discussions of the millennium, where its existence in time can no longer be ignored.

Work cited in addition to the film:
Mbembe, Achille. trans, Steven Rendall. “At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa” in Globalization. Ed. Arjun Appadurai. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.

For more information, see also this interview with Sissako.

Lumumba (2000) directed by Raoul Peck

2007-05-04T14:22:00.000-07:00

The following is on the film Lumumba, a historical film based on the events surrounding Congolese independence and the murder of the first Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba. The film is directed by Raoul Peck, who ten years earlier directed a documentary on Lumumba's life, Lumumba: Death of a Prophet.

(I've reposted this review from my other blog.)

Near the beginning of Raoul Peck’s film Lumumba, as Patrice Lumumba and his political comrades passionately discuss decolonization, the hot-headed Maurice Mpolo exclaims in frustration, “We’ll eat them raw!” “Be careful,” Lumumba replies with an ironic smile, “They’ll take you for an anthropophage.” The idea of cannibalism that Lumumba invokes here is a joke, yet it also provides a potent historical metaphor that is subtly reflected in images throughout the film. These images of “cannibalism” allude to the larger cycle of violence and suppression that is shown as thematic of Belgium’s historical relationship with the Congo.

One of the stereotypes of Africa cultivated by the Europeans for centuries was that of cannibalism—the stock character of the missionary in the large black pot. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness lauded as one of the “greats” of the Western canon, the narrator Marlowe calls the “natives” he sees, as he steams up the River Congo, “cannibals.” When Marlowe asks the “native” headman what they’d do if they caught one of him, the man says “Eat ‘im!”1 However, if the stereotype was used by racist Europeans to indicate the “savagery” of their colonized subjects, it was also deftly turned into a metaphor for the brutality and exploitation characterized by slavery, colonization, and subsequent European meddling in African affairs. The 18th century Igbo writer Oluadah Equiano writes of his fears when taken aboard the slave ship and seeing the large copper furnaces he asks “if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair?”2 In Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel Devil on the Cross, he imagines a grotesque competition of thieves and robbers in which fanged politicians propose creating a pipeline of blood from Kenya to the West. The violence against and exploitation of fellow human beings for economic gain both in the colonial era and the neocolonial era is the cannibalism that they project upon those they exploit.

In the film Lumumba, images evocative of cannibalism are shown in association with the supposedly departing Belgians. Framing the film are images of a celebration over which Mobutu presides; white women in queenly hats clink wine glasses and cut into a slab of meat. This opening celebration is interspersed with old photographs of Congolese enslavement under Leopold II and the Belgians. Resigned eyes in skeletal faces, naked chests. Chained hands. The image of cutting into meat is repeated when the two soldiers pull shrouded corpses out of a shallow grave, chopping into sheet covered flesh, sawing at it like tough meat. This hidden butchery symbolically provides the “meat” for the celebration. Although the celebration takes place several years after “independence,” the Belgians don’t seem to have gone anywhere. They continue to enjoy the “fruits of the land.” Moreover, by invoking Lumumba’s spirit, Mobutu cannibalizes his life and vision—using his death, which he had symbolically participated in, to provide the authorization for his own rule.

Mobutu merely continues in the structures (and cycle of violence) laid out for him by the Belgians. By refusing to allow Lumumba to do more than official “information gathering” until the official handover, the Belgians have effectively hamstrung Lumumba’s government. As the investors note during the meetings in Brussels, the entire civil service was Belgian—the Congolese had been deliberately been kept in inferior positions; with the departure of the Belgians, the system for the operation of the nation collapses. The investors in Brussels seem to delight in these visions of chaos. Not only do they set the newly “independent” state up for failure, the Belgians and their allies continue to undermine the authority of the new government. The outside advisors are patronizing to the new prime minister and president to their face, and behind their backs they make deals that ensure the collapse of the nation—with the leaders of Katanga province, with Mobutu. When Lumumba’s plane is diverted and Lumumba orders the pilot to turn around, the pilot maintains that he is Belgian and defies the prime minister, obeying the orders of his Belgian superiors to land. When Lumumba is being smuggled out of his house, the soldier who inspects the car mentions that he is “smoking American cigarettes.”

General Janssens maintains that the army will always be under Belgian control and tells the soldiers that any indication otherwise were merely the lies of politicians. The discontent of the soldiers ripple out from this scene: the rape and killing of Belgians who had remained behind, the invasion of the government house, the massacres carried out under Mobutu’s leadership, and the final abduction and murder of Lumumba and his comrades. The Belgian soldiers who beat Lumumba in prison before independence are echoed in the soldiers who beat him on the plane and the leaders of Katanga who beat him in prison right before he is murdered. But behind this seeming “native” unrest are Belgian “puppeteers.”3 Janssens boasts seem calculated to rankle. The American CIA agent meets with Mobutu to assure him of American support. Belgians are present at the execution sight, and it is Belgian soldiers who saw into the bodies and dispose of them in fire. Just as the feast at the beginning was interspersed with photos of those who had been exploited by Belgium, Mobutu’s speech at the end of the film is interspersed with the images of the Belgian soldiers burning the bodies of the murdered leaders. In their prison cell before they are murdered, Lumumba and Mpolo laugh desperately together over Lumumba’s old joke about the “anthropophage.” They understand the futility of their own protest and the way in which they are being used—as Lumumba told someone over the phone before his arrest; they are “a sacrifice for the people of Congo.”

At the end of the film, Mobutu’s call for a moment of silence to remember Lumumba is metaphoric for the silence that was imposed upon the people of the Congo. However, the focus of the camera in the end upon the soldier indicates that though silenced, the truth is not forgotten. The soldier in the final shot resembles the soldier who took Lumumba into custody by the riverside. Lumumba had told him that he would regret participating in his arrest; and the soldier in the final scene stares at Mobutu with the knowledge of the truth in his eyes. The narrative device of Lumumba’s posthumous voiceover indicates that his voice cannot be silenced. Although the evidence is burned and Mobutu has “cannibalized” Lumumba’s memory to lend credence to his own rule, the people know the truth. And as the final voiceover indicates, “one day we will have a new history, not one written by Belgium, Paris, (etc), It will be our history.” The fire that the Belgians use to cover up the evidence of the murders can also be read as the fire of the communal imagination. The narrative device is self-reflexive. If there is to be a new history, then the telling of that new history has begun. The photos taken as trophies of Belgian occupation are used as accusations; the story of Lumumba’s murder is told; the “moment” of silence is over.

Footnotes:
1 Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness. Planet PDF p. 82 Downloaded 8 February 2007
2 Oluadah Equiano. Interesting Narrative. “Boarding a Slave-ship.” Downloaded 8 February 2007.
3 There are a series of repeated images that mirror pre-independence with post-independence. A recently beaten Lumumba looking out over the airfield as he descends the plane in Brussels for independence negotiations; and a recently beaten Lumumba looking out over the airfield as he descends the plane into captivity. The Belgian soldiers beat him in prison; then the Congolese soldiers beat him in the plane and in prison.

Image Credits: Zeitgeist Films

Afrika-Vereniging van de Universiteit Gent

Le Déclin de l'empire américain directed by Denys Arcand (1986)

2007-03-26T11:25:00.000-07:00

I could not admit this in the reaction paper I wrote for this film, but I walked out of the first half of the film (which our professor stopped early because he had to be at a meeting) reeling. Walking home, I kept being afraid that the people I passed would leap up to make some bizaare sexual confession. When I stopped off at the bank, I expected the teller to burst into a confidance of an orgy. The film leaves you in a bit of a fog, especially since it is set in a university. Seeing it, one starts to madly wonder if this sort of hedonism actually occurs regularly, and somehow one has just been blind and naive. Hopefully not. Set in a Montreal university community, gender roles are switched as the men stay at home to cook a gourmet meal, while the women work out at a local gym. The subject of conversation among both parties is unrelentingly about sex: promiscuous sex, S&M sex, wild orgy sex, interspersed by brief comments about the contents of the refrigerator or the well done-ness of the fish pie, which inevitably turn out to be sexual innuendos. The men are boastful: the history professor gleefully relates picking up “two American girls” one night and then taking the drugs they gave him when he sleeps with his wife the next; the women are ironic: Remy’s wife Louise tells of being stuck with a somewhat lethargic partner at an orgy that Remy persuaded her to go to, and Dominique tells of a under-endowed Italian policeman she once bedded. In both sets, there are innocents who are being educated in the hedonistic ways of their more sexually-experienced friends. The young male PhD student, who initially seems somewhat askance at the confessions of his professors, begins to test out his own dirty stories and ends up laying the recently published chair of the history department, Dominique. The somewhat naïve housewife, Louise, who knows her husband has affairs but has no idea the extent has a more upsetting night when Dominique reveals that not only has she slept with Louise’s husband Remy, but that Remy is the most sexually voracious and promiscuous man in the department. She seeks refuge in the arms of her gay friend Claude, a “cruiser” and art history professor who is worried about the blood in his urine. Claude holds her all night, and the ménage all join each other for breakfast again the next day. Fortunately for a squeamish viewer like me, most of the sex is talk; there are a few flashbacks to illustrate the sexual tales, but they aren’t as alarming as they could be—in fact most of them are rather funny, in a disturbing sort of way. The film is remniscent of Boccaccio’s Decameron—in which a whole party of men and women sit around eating, going on walks in the countryside, and telling bawdy stories.

And perhaps this Boccaccio connection is a good way to open my reaction paper since neither my queasy prudery or my summary of the film will be of interest to my professor. So, here is what I turned in:

The Decline of the American Empire directed by Denys Areand (1987)
The medieval Italian writer Boccaccio opens his collection of tales the Decameron with a reference to the black plague, “…in the illustrious city of Florence, the fairest of all the cities of Italy, there made its appearance that deadly pestilence, which, whether disseminated by the influence of the celestial bodies, or sent upon us mortals by God in His just wrath by way of retribution for our iniquities, … had spread into the West.”Boccaccio’s reference to the Black Plague invokes the end of an epoch—the death of an “iniquitous” society. Fleeing the plague a group of young people seek refuge in the country and spend ten days together eating, going on walks in the countryside, and telling bawdy stories. There are echoes of the Decameron in Denys Areand’s film The Decline of the American Empire, which opens with a long tracking shot that finally focuses on the chair of the history department Dominique being interviewed, by the graduate student Diane, on tape about her new book. Dominique’s interview sets up the philosophical underpinnings of the rest of the film; she speaks of a society in decline, later positing that Marx and Freud based their theories on guilt and jealousy over sex. When their grand theories don’t pan out then, people have nothing to base their lives on. In the face of doom, the reigning order seems to be to eat, have sex, and to, as Louise puts it, intellectualize their misery. The wild sexual tales the groups of men and women tell are devices to combat a “suburban” boredom—the meaninglessness of growing into old age, of pursuing an academic career when there are “17,000 scholarly articles published a day.” The household of bawdy storytellers in the Decameron is reflected in the household of intellectuals who seem to belong to a type of commune, living in neighboring houses and eating meals together. The apocalypse, which has already struck in the Decameron, has not yet occurred in The Decline of the American Empire, but it hangs over the Montreal party like a dark cloud. In the first half of the film as the characters carelessly relate tales of casual group sex and S&M, there is an impending sense of doom. The gay character Claude laughs along with the other men about the STD’s their wives and lovers complain about (“Disease is a part of sex”), but privately agonizes in fear over the blood in his urine. When Claude tells of how he is often robbed while “cruising,” and a little later Dominique tells how she has also been robbed in foreign countries after sex with strangers, I felt uneasily that these intellectuals are living dangerously—that something is bound to go terribly wrong. But then, they know they are living dangerously—the uncertainty is part of what gives them pleasure. Diane, who is experimenting with sado-masochism with her brutish boyfriend, says of their connection, “We could kill each other.” When the sinister boyfriend shows up outside the house and eavesdrops on the men’s dirty stories, it seems as though the “real” thing has showed up and caught them at their game. He embodies the sense of foreboding I felt through the first half of the film. The characters seem so caught up in their dangerous pursuit of pleasure that they have lost any connection to each other. The women sneer at men’s small penises and their obsession over them. The men scoff at women’s desire for romance before sex. Remy delights in “knowing the dinner is on and stopping off on the way” or in “not mixing his sex life with his marriage.” The characters seem to constantly act out of disdain for each other.

However, Dominique’s revelation to the group of friends that she has slept with Remy and Pierre is somewhat of an anti-climatic moment---apocolypse has not happened—she’s just burst what she calls Louise’s self-delusional attempt to find happiness. The reappearance of the sinister boyfriend, ends not in a murder but in a cutting through all the pretence: “They were talking about sex all day. I was expecting an orgy, but now the big deal is a fish pie. When I want sex, I fuck.” His declaration opens up the way for more confessions. Although in the segregated bravado found in the reversed role chatter (the men at home cooking while the women work out at the gym), the men and women seem to joy in putting down their spouses or lovers, glorying in the details of abstract sex, when the party comes back together, we see that there actually are strong emotional connections between them. Suddenly, the sexual talk becomes intellectualized and sentimental confessions are made. Pierre confesses that these friends are his family. Dominique confesses that she has slept with Louise’s husband. Alone with the young PhD student Alain, Dominique confesses that she resents women with “cute little husband and cute little children, who don’t live in reality.” Pierre, who has spent all day boasting about his sexual exploits and his emotional disconnect from his lovers, confesses to his young companion Danielle that he loves her but that he is too tired for sex. The suddenly disillusioned Louise weeps herself to sleep in Claude’s arms, and Claude confesses to Diane that he is worried about the blood in his urine. Even Diane’s rough lover unexpectedly pulls out an absurd gift wrapped in heart-covered wrapping paper, attached to a bobbing heart-shaped balloon. The tough exterior bravado conceals a vulnerable desire for intimacy. The bluster of the day before fades away to reveal connections so deep that even after feeling betrayed, Louise finds herself unable to leave the house, instead joining Danielle to play a stormy piano duet. It was at this moment, that I realized what the piano music bursts at intervals throughout the film reminded me of. It reminded me of Jane Austen films—of those repressed stories of society and manners and the search for love—the house parties of young people who fight boredom by playing piano duets and proposing, as in Mansfield Park, bawdy plays to wile away the time. Perhaps the boredom that the characters express isn’t so new but is, in fact, built into the structure of the American/ European empire.

Edward Said has noted that the genteel life Jane Austen describes in Mansfield Park would have been impossible without the slave plantations that Fanny’s uncle owned and the profits made from a budding British empire.[2] Patricia Rozema has further explored Austen’s references to the Caribbean in her film adaptation of the novel, delving into the wounded psyche of the eldest son Tom who has witnessed and sketched slaves being raped on his father’s plantation. Throughout The Decline of the American Empire are similar sexualized references to the “other”—which conceal objectifications of different races similar to that statement Fanny’s uncle makes in Rozema’s film that “mulatto women are like mules. They cannot reproduce.” Remy opens the film with leering references to a Vietnamese girl in his class. He catalogues the distinct pleasures and scents experienced when sleeping with women of various ethnicities. When the young Alain good-naturedly accuses him of being racist, Remy laughs that “there is no better friend to the Negro,” relating a time when he took a distinguished visiting professor from Burkina Faso on the hunt for prostitutes and tried to haggle the price down by claiming it would be “aid to Africa.” On the women’s side, Dominique smirks at what she sees as the social climbing of the two Martiniquean men she paid to sleep with her, and Diane maintains that she likes the “African blacks” better. These distinguished professors speak knowledgably about oppression and racism in South Africa; yet their academic concerns seem merely a sham (as Dominique theorizes on Marx and Freud) to cover their ravenous sexuality. That their racist sentiments slip out along with their tales of sexual escapades indicates that perhaps their identities are as much caught up in the ideologies of superiority, as Jane Austen’s characters. Since these characters are Quebecois who are themselves postcolonial figures, in the struggle against being incorporated into an “American empire,” their “colonial” language is doubly ironic. Even more than the unihibited sex talk, this need to define oneself against the “other” marks the fundamental weakness in their society.

[2] Edward Said. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993

translation of chapter 1 from Kaico! by Ado Ahmad Gidan Dabino

2007-03-11T18:05:00.000-07:00

The following is a working translation of chapter 1 from Ado Ahmad Gidan Dabino's novella Kaico! The novel is originally written in Hausa. Although I cannot change the trajectory of the story or the paragraph order, I welcome feedback on wording and minor editorial issues. For example, I don't know whether I need to keep all the to-ing and fro-ing--descriptions of people kneeling and rising etc, that is in the Hausa original (but then maybe it is important to preserve cultural values). My translation process is to do a handwritten metaphrase--translating pretty much word for word on my first round. Then when I type it up, I pretend as if it is my own story and I take more liberties with changing sentences around, deleting redundant phrases, and reworking wording--and occasionally adding an explanatory detail (trying to keep it as unobtrusive as possible). Because I'm trying to stick as close to the original as possible, especially the use of proverbs and colloquial language, I think that what in the original is rich and mellifluous, sometimes comes across as stiff in translation. (Case in point being the first three or four paragraphs of the chapter--also sections of conversation between Kabiru and Baba.) I'd appreciate any feedback on sections that sound particularly stiff and any suggestions on how to improve them. Also, I've tried to keep quite a few Hausa words in the translation with the intention of having a glossary in the final version. However, I'd like feedback on where the Hausa might be distracting. For example, would it be better to just say "prayer beads" rather than "carbi"? Is it ok to intersperse "Allah" with "God," or should I be consistant with one or the other? How many stock phrases like "God protect you on the road" should I translate or just leave in the original?

When I finish the translation, I will likely delete these working sections from my blog before publication.

T-C

Kaico! [1]

By Ado Ahmad Gidan Dabino
Translated by Talatu-Carmen

Original Publication information:
Ado Ahmad Gidan Dabino. Kaico! Gidan Dabino Publishers: Kano, 1996.

CHAPTER 1

Anya jama’a, how can we keep living like this, as the very life is being squeezed out of us? Every day, prices climb higher and higher. Times have changed, so that now it is every man for himself. We struggle so for money that now everyone just looks out for himself and his children. No one bothers to help his relatives or neighbors anymore. The rich no longer pity the poor. Although Allah has placed on us the duty to give alms to those less fortunate, now people give alms only if they are bothered. Others fly into a temper and energetically refuse to give anything, so that their wealth keeps increasing to no end. On the other side, the poor man has become envious in his heart; he doesn’t want to get up and find work for himself. He prefers to keep hanging around the houses of the wealthy, begging. When he sees beautiful houses or cars, he bites his fingers and says, “If only they were mine.” After he’s gone on like this for a while, you’ll hear him lose hope and say. “Kai, I could never hope to own any of this.” Kaico! What a disaster it is! He who puts his hope in the Merciful Father will enter Heaven. When will he stop loving the things of the world if he doesn’t stop thinking about them? [CK]
Then, too, see how the education and public health systems have collapsed. The government schools don’t have enough qualified teachers. They don’t have enough supplies or work materials. The government hospitals don’t have enough medicine or qualified staff. Most of those who can do the job leave government work and go back to private businesses. Why does this happen? Why is the government less concerned about making things work than those in the marketplace?
Really, there’s nothing left for us to do but pray, because thugs and robbers and thieves and con-men—that is 419—those the government thieves who steal with the pen get away with it easily. If you own a nice car and a lot of money, you can’t sleep at night for fear that robbers will come in the dark and steal them from you. If you are a trader, whenever you travel to another city with money, you can’t rest in peace until you see that you’ve arrived safely and that no armed robbers have attacked you. It’s as if all the stories we’ve heard of other countries are now happening here. The things we’ve seen happening in foreign films have become a part of our own lives.
“Thief! Thief!! Thief!!!” The shouts woke me from a deep sleep. I quickly jumped out of bed, still half asleep, and stumbled to open the door of my room. Outside, people were shouting.
“Just now we followed him, but he disappeared down that ally. Shi ke nan. We looked up and down, but he’s gone. The bastard! It’s as if he had a disappearing charm.”
“What did he steal?” I asked rubbing my eyes.
“He stole a video from Alhaji Sadi’s house.”
“He got away with it?” I asked.
“Since! Ai, it’s easy to take off with a video.”
“God help us,” I said, going back to my room.
Even after I closed the door, I could hear their animated discussion. “Can you believe the brazenness of this thief? It’s only 10:20. It’s not that late yet. We only just got up from watching the video. And he didn’t even break in. The door was still open when he came in. The children saw him when he took it.”
Thoughts buzzed around in my head. It hadn’t been long since I’d emerged from a dream about our country’s problems. So I began to think to myself. “Now after the worries I’ve been having about thugs and robbers and 419 con-men and larceny, it’s happened right here! Yet, all the same, people aren’t bothered by it?” I lay in my bed, listening to the chattering of the voices outside my door until sleep carried me away. I didn’t wake until sahur, the breakfast that we do during Ramadan. After I finished eating, I went to the mosque with Alhaji do the early morning prayers. When we came back to the house I picked up the holy Q’uran to read. At 6:30, I prayed and went back to bed.
“Baba! Baba!! Baba!! Come Hajiya is calling you.”
This summons pierced my sleep. I looked at my clock and I realized that it was past 8:00. Sitting up, I saw my junior sister Bilkisu at the window. When she saw that I was awake, she said “Baba. Come on. Hajiya is calling.”
“Ok, I’m coming now now.” I got up and rinsed out my mouth before going into the house to greet my dad, Alhaji. Then I went into my mom’s room to greet her.
“Here I am, Hajiya.”
“Hurry up and get ready. I’m sending you to Malam Buhari.”
“I don’t need to get ready. I can go like this.” I told her.
Hajiya looked me up and down. “Oh, so you don’t need to get ready, do you? Get out of here and go wash your face. It looks like you just woke up. And put on a hula and babbar riga.”
I looked down at myself and said. “Ok, I’m going.” I went to wash my face and then went into my room to put on a babbar riga and hula. I came out and locked the door. When I arrived back in the house, I found Hajiya sitting on the couch. I sat down and said. “Here I am, I’ve come back, Hajiya.”
Hajiya gave me the message, and said that when I got there I should greet Hajara. I left and got on my Vespa motor bike and headed for Malam Buhari’s house.
While I was on the way to his house to fulfill Hajiya’s errand, I met with a terrible accident that made me weep with pity. A car had run over a little boy and crushed his head. It was an awful thing to see. Everyone who saw it was weeping.
In this state of mind, mulling over the terrible accident, I arrived at the house. “To, God preserve us from disaster.” I thought to myself, “These days, people are always dying in accidents.”
After I parked the bike, I went into Malam Buhari’s shop. We greeted, and I bowed down as I gave him the message from Hajiya. Out of respect I bent my head and averted my eyes.
“I’ll go inside the house and greet them,” I told Malam, as he fingered his carbi.
“Ok, fine,” he said.
I went into the house and found Hajara sitting on a plastic mat. I kneeled down and greeted her.
Tugging her dankwali modestly over her head she called out, “Hindatu, bring a mat for Baba to sit on.”
“Ok,” I heard a voice respond.
Hindatu immediately came out from the room with a mat in her hand. She spread it out for me beside the wall. After I sat, Hindatu kneeled down and greeted me. After she went back inside the room, I continued my greetings with Hajara.
“Hajiya sends her greetings.”
“Ok, tell her I answer,” said Hajara. “When you greet Hajiya Binta, tell her thank you,” she said as I prepared to stand.
“Greet everyone in the house,” Hindatu called. “Allah protect you on the road. Greet Bilkisu for me. Tell her I’ll come soon.”
Since I had finished what I came to do, I said goodbye to Hajara, and I went back out to tell Malam goodbye. He sent me off with a greeting for Hajiya.
I got back on my motor bike and headed home. Exactly at 11:00am, I got back. I went in and told Hajiya that Malam Buhari and his wife Hajara sent their greetings and that he answered the message. Hajiya was very happy to hear Malam’s answer. I also gave Bilkisu the message from Hindatu.
After I finished talking with my mother, I went in to bathe and get ready. I put on a long riga, a cap, and white shoes. Then I went in to Hajiya and told her I was going to the market. She blessed me, praying that God would give me luck and protect the road. After I had gone out and gotten on my bike, my little sister Bilkisu came out and said, “Baba, don’t forget my message.”
I stared at the sky without saying anything, trying to figure out what Bilkisu was talking about. After a minute I looked back down and faced her. “I forgot what you told me. Which message was it again?”
Bilkisu bent her head, showing signs of embarrassment.
“Oh, come on, tell me. What do you mean. Don’t be shy,” I said, revving the bike.
She pressed her hands against the bike and stared at her fingers. “Shoes and a bag like we talked about two days ago,”
“Oho, I forgot. That’s it then. Is that what you were embarrassed to tell me? God willing, I’ll bring them for you today.”
I revved the bike again and headed for the market. She went back into the house, her face covered in smiles to hear that I would bring her what she had been wanting.
As I sped along on my bike, I thought to myself. “What kind of sillyness is this, Bilkisu? You’re embarrassed to remind me of my promise to bring you something you need? Since you’re the baby of the family, is there anything you want that we won’t give you? Unless we don’t have it… but we won’t ever say that since our dad, Alhaji Abdu has lots of money and houses and rental cars and imports clothes like shadda and boyel and waxprints and the rest.”
There were five of us children, two boys and three girls. Zainab and Hadiza were now married. Out of the girls it was only Bilkisu who had not yet married. Of the boys, the elder one of us (Umar) had married. Alhaji Umar lived in a different neighborhood, and he had his own business. I hadn’t married yet, so there was no one left in the house but me and Bilkisu. All five of us had the same mother, same father. And of all five of us, there was none whom my father favoured like me, since he had named me after his father, Muhammadu Auwalu. That’s why the people in our house call me Baba, so as not to say my name. Now, I run the family business with my father. From time to time, when there is travel to buy goods abroad, I go along with him. When my older brother got married, our father let him go into his own business, but I don’t know whether it will be the same for me if I get married. Also, my sisters didn’t stay long after secondary school before they were married. It’s only us boys who stay to do all the study we need before we go into business. My senior brother got his degree before entering business. I got my diploma, but now I’ll continue. Bilkisu is now in senior secondary 5, so she only has one year before she finishes. She is at the same school as Malam Buhari’s daughter, Hindatu.
I gathered my thoughts as I arrived at the market and entered our shop. I greeted Alhaji before sitting down in my accustomed place.
As was our habit, if I was around, he didn’t handle the money. I was the one who did that. In this way we continued with our business until closing time was near. Then, I went to buy Bilkisu the things I’d promised I’d get her. I also got her a few things she hadn’t asked me for and I hadn’t told her I’d get. After I finished up, we left the market.
After drinking water and praying asham prayers, I sat down in my mother’s parlour to watch television. When Bilkisu came in to sit on the couch, she kneeled and greeted me. I answered.
“Go to my room and bring me the large black plastic bag that is close to the door,” I said to her, while she stared past me at the television.
“Ok, (to)” Bilkisu got up cheerfully and excused herself.
She came back holding the bag and kneeled slightly as she gave it to me with both hands. “Here it is.”
I opened the bag and brought out the shoes and handbag and gave her. “Look, here are your things.”
She grinned and put out her hands to collect them. “Thank you,” she said gazing happily at the bag and shoes.
I put my hand back into the bag and brought out a necklace, earrings, bracelets, and a ring and another kind of cloth that women like to wear and gave her. “Here you go, add this to the rest.”
“Oh thank you! God bless you!” She got up excitedly and headed for our mother’s room calling, “Hajiya, look at what Baba bought me.”
They came out of the room together, and Hajiya said, “Thanks be to God who meets all of our needs.”
“Amin,” I answered her. Hajiya and Bilkisu sat down, and the three of us continued to chat.

**

On Monday, the 23rd day of Ramadan, my good friend Kabiru visited our house, after a rain. I saw him as he came into the room, and I quickly got up and grabbed his hand.
“Kai, look who we have here in town today. Kabiru, ashe, are you around? Long time no see!” I said, holding on to his hand.
As we sat down, Kabiru said, “I traveled for a week, that’s why you haven’t seen me. You know that if I hadn’t traveled, it would have been hard to go for seven days without seeing you.”
“I was thinking maybe the fasting was keeping you from going anywhere,” I answered. “You know how the fasting wears you out when the sun is beating down.”
“Well, the sun may be hot, but there’s no sun at night. I was told that you came to my house looking for me while I was gone. Have you forgotten?”
“Oh, I know. I just asked to see what you would say.” We both smiled.
Kabiru looked at me. “Oho, so you want to cross examine me do you?”
“Oh, you know me. If you take the bait, it’s not my fault.”
“Ok, well, jokes aside. I have something important I want to talk to you about.”
“I’m listening. What’s up?”
Kabiru was quiet for a minute and then he turned and looked at me. “You know that if a man’s parents are still living, it is good if he keeps improving and keeps following their commands to the utmost and does not avoid their laws. If he does this, he will find blessing and live in peace with everyone. If his parents give him their blessing or if they die happy with him, all that he attempts in this world will find the greatest success. Most people if you see them fighting against an evil life, you can be sure that they have followed the example their parents have shown them. Then there are others, who don’t respect their parents. They don’t listen to anything they tell them. They don’t consider what they want. It’s because of this I came so that we could discuss what’s going on in my house. While I was on this trip to my senior sister’s place, she told me that they have been discussing with my parents, saying that I should get married since I’ve finished all the things I need to do before marriage. I’ve finished school. I’ve gotten my diploma. I’ve entered the world of business. So, there’s nothing left for me except to marry. At the time, my sister was talking to me about one girl, but I told her I didn’t trust that girl.”
I looked at Kabiru in surprise. “Why didn’t you trust the girl?”
Kabiru smiled. “There is a cause for alarm. The first is that I’m always seeing her with all kinds of different boys, rascals as well as respectable ones. She has no shame. If she quarrels with a boyfriend, you will hear her abusing him and insulting him, and saying all kinds of disrespectful things. Then, too, this girl really wants to enjoy her life. She craves a rich man who has a beautiful house and the latest car. She’s as greedy as a fly. She’s also full of lies; she tells one after another. And, she is not clean. Kai, if you see how slovenly she is. They say a man shouldn’t marry a woman like that. And finally, the parents of this girl are not respectable. They say one thing and do another. One time, they set the date for her to marry one boy. About three months to the marriage another one came along who had more money, so they sent back the kaya the other one had brought. In the end, the girl wound up quarrelling with the second boy. She abused him so much that he picked his things and left.”
“E gaskiya, this definitely is not someone you want as your wife. A man of good character wants to marry a woman of good character. So what did you tell your sister?” I asked.
“What I told her was that she should stop talking about this girl, that I’d look for another one that I liked and I approved of. Then I told her if they discussed the issue again, she should explain to my parents what I told her. Since they didn’t talk to me about it, it’s not me that should talk to them. No matter how far up you throw something, it will still come down. Since they didn’t talk to me now, they will talk to me later. My sister was just clearing the path for me. So, I want to think through my course of action before they come back to the conversation. When they come back to it, you know, I’ll know what I will say to them. We know the direction to face for prayer."
“Everything you say is true, and I think you are thinking things through wisely. So now, since you don’t want the one they picked out for you, who do you love, or maybe I should ask who have you chosen to talk to them about.”
Kabiru laughed and shook his head. “I give you one thing, and you keep begging. Ai, every fool who rushes in will wait to find out. Habba, Baba, you know that I know how you spoil things when you are reckless. Since we were children together, we’ve been lucky that we’ve always gotten along. As the Hausas say, you’ll be close friends only if your personalities mesh. You know as well as I do that there is no girl who can go around beating her chest and saying that I am her boyfriend. I know that you, too, are in the same boat, because we don’t have girls on our mind, we are to busy with other business.”
Before he was finished, I interrupted him, “Daman, what’s the use of going to girls’ houses if you aren’t ready to get married? Two wrongs don’t make a right. You waste your time and you waste the girl’s time. Then also if you play the trickster—today you go to this place, tomorrow you go to that place, you’re always in a different girls house, ai, then you’ll lose respect. It’s better for a man to look for someone to marry when he is ready for marriage. If it is not the proper time, or if he doesn’t know how to settle down with one and be faithful, he shouldn’t keep running around between lies and truth.”
“That’s true, Baba. This is why I don’t want to get mixed up in looking for a girl until I’m ready. So, now, since talk of my marriage has been brought up, what do you advise me to do?”
“My advice?” I think you should tell them the one you love, if there is one. If there isn’t anyone, let’s start looking now. Also, when we go looking, we mustn’t just think about her looks. No, there’s only beauty if there is good character. If she doesn’t have a good character, then her beauty is like a snake. There are other things that we should look for. In the first place, religion and education, knowledge and a good upbringing. Also, we should make sure that she has family who keep their promises and parents who are pleasant and respectable and humble. If we find all these things, then we can talk about other things we may want. If we do not find these things, nothing we search for will please us. So anything else we look for should come after these—it should just be 10 out of a hundred. The attributes I have added on top are 90 out of 100. If a man finds 90 out of 100, he has done well on the exam. If he gets only 10 percent, then he fails.”
“I agree with you. And actually, I’ve got to tell you… There is a girl who I am in love with. I’ve completely lost my head over her.”
I grinned. “Ai, it’s all falling nicely into place. Since there’s one that you love, why not tell them about her if they start talking of marriage again.”
“Yes, yes, I will,” said Kabiru. “But there is one thing I want to be careful of. I don’t want to rush into things because I don’t know if she’ll agree or not.”
I turned and looked at him. “What would keep her from accepting you” I asked.
“Well, there’s a certain relationship that I think might complicate things and keep her from accepting me. On the other hand, if you think about it in a different way, this same relationship could also make her accept,” said Kabiru.
“Who is this girl, and what type of relationship are you talking about?” I asked him.
“It’s a friendship,” Kabiru answered. “Her senior brother is my friend. This is what I think might cause trouble. Since she thinks of me as a brother, she might not be able to think of me as a lover, as well.”
“Oh no, Habba. This type of friendship won’t prevent anything, unless she has been promised to someone else, or if you aren’t equally attracted to each other. But how many times have people in the same situation gotten married, and you see how strong and trusting the relationship is?” I smiled reassuringly at him.
“The girl I love is Bilkisu,” Kabiru blurted out.
“Which Bilkisu?” I asked.
“I mean, your Bilkisu,” said Kabiru.
I didn’t say anything for a minute, as if I were waiting for him to say something else. After a moment, I looked at Kabiru and smiled. “Don’t think anything of it. This is an easy thing. Give me two days and I’ll let you know what she thinks.”
Kabiru’s face showed his delight at my words. “Ok,” he said “Shi ke nan. Everything in God’s good time.”
As we finished up, Bilkisu brought me food. She sat down and greeted Kabiru and saluted us on the breaking of the fast. After we answered her, she looked at Kabiru and said. “So, here you are, now. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you.”
“Oh I’m around. It’s business that kept me away.”
After we chatted with her for a while, she went back into the house, and Kabiru told her to greet Hajiya for him.
“To,” Bilkisu said and went back into the house. We chatted as we ate, and around 12:15 we said our goodbyes. Kabiru got on his motor bike and went back home.
The next morning, I went into the house and greeted Alhaji in his room and went into Hajiya’s parlour to greet her. After greeting, I went to my chair and sat. Before I could say anything, Hajiya said, “Yesterday, Kabiru came but he refused to come in and greet. He just sent Bilkisu in to greet me.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that he refused to come in. We were talking, and before we knew it, it got late. When he left, you were already asleep; that’s why he didn’t come in to greet you. He was intending to come in, but when he saw how late it was, he said that I should apologize and tell you the reason.” I told Hajiya this so she wouldn’t be offended with Kabiru since she knew that usually every time he came for a visit, he would go in and greet her. I knew what kept him from going in. It was this talk of Bilkisu.
“Hajiya, I was talking with Kabiru and he told me that his parents are pressuring him to get married. It’s gone so far that his elder sister proposed a certain girl, but he told me he wasn’t happy with the girl for a lot of very good reasons. In truth, I agree with all the reasons he gave me. So, now his family is pressuring him to find another one that he likes, since he didn’t like the first girl. At the end of our discussion, he told me who he really likes.”
After I told her this, I stayed quiet and didn’t say anything else.
“So, who does he like?” Hajiya asked me.
“He’s in love with Bilkisu.”
“Which Bilkisu?” asked Hajiya.
“Our Bilkisu.” I said, watching Hajiya’s face. Her face showed signs that she was agreeable to talk of Kabiru.
“Ai, shi ke nan. This is no problem. If she is sure that she also likes him, then he’s already one of the family. Let me talk to her and hear what she says. If luck has it that she’s interested, then we’ll discuss it with Alhaji.”
“To, shi ke nan. I told him if he gave me two days, he’d hear what was going on. He was doubtful about whether or not she’d love him, since he’s my friend.”
“Habba, friendship does not prevent marriage. It happens all the time,” said Hajiya.
Since Hajiya was showing all the signs that she supported the matter, it was only left for Bilkisu to tell us her mind.
After I finished discussing with Hajiya, I got on my bike and headed for the market.

**

On Wednesday, the 25th of the month of Ramadan, in the morning, Hajiya told me that Bilkisu was agreeable to the intentions of my friend Kabiru. Hearing this put me into an excellent mood. It would be no small problem if your best friend said that he loved your sister and she said that she didn’t love him. As the Hausas say, “it’s a lucky find, if you come across leftover chicken in the bowl.” Others also say, “It’s a lucky find if your neighbors pay for your wife to go to Mecca.”
I left the house, and headed straight for Kabiru’s house. I called out my greetings as I entered his room. When he saw me, he got up quickly and extended his hand. After we sat, he asked me. “Where are you going from here? I see signs that you have somewhere else to go.”
“I’m going to the market from here. But I came this way to tell you that I’ve passed on your message. And all is set. Hajiya has already told Alhaji, and he is very happy to hear the news.” I grinned as I saw his expression.
Kabiru burst into happy laughter. “Alhamdu lillahi. Allah has assured me his blessing. Now that I’ve found a strong support to lean on, I need to tell my seniors. It’s important that nothing is started until they know. Since the negotiations have already gone far, I’ll inform my senior sister. Once we discuss, then I’ll tell the others.”
After Kabiru and I finished this discussion, I went in to greet the house. From there I came out to say my goodbyes and left.
No doubt about it, I was filled with happiness about the union we were plotting to build between my little sister Bilkisu and my best friend Kabiru—if not for anything else because I know his character.
Kabiru and I had been friends since we were children. We had gone to primary and secondary school together and also to the College of Education, where we both got our diplomas. He is an extremely religious man, putting nothing before his devotion to God. Worldly things have no place in his life. Our friendship had connected our parents in friendship because when we were children, I’d go to Kabiru’s house and spend the night, and he’d come to our house and spend the night. His father Alhaji Sani was a businessman. His mother’s name was Hajiya Nafisa, and her co-wife was Hajiya Habiba. He had lots of brothers and sisters. In fact, there were ten of them in the house.
On Friday, the 27th of Ramadan around 9pm, Kabiru came to our house. He came into my room, and we greeted as he found a place to sit. We talked for a while before I went into the house and sent Bilkisu out to him. Before Bilkisu finished preparing to go out, Kabiru came in and greeted Hajiya. Then he went back to my room. Bilkisu finished getting ready and went out to Kabiru, while I kept on talking to Hajiya.
Around 11 o’clock, Bilkisu came back into the parlour. “Baba, go, you’re being called.
Bilkisu sat down and I got up and headed to my room where I found Kabiru. We chatted until around midnight, then we said our goodbyes. Kabiru went back home, and I went to bed.

END OF CHAPTER 1

[1] Kaico translates something like “Disaster!” Or “Alas!” But I think it would be better to keep the title the same in the English and Hausa version, and put a footnote in the introduction about the meaning.

Purpose of Abubuwan da nake rubutawa

2007-02-24T17:32:00.000-08:00

Abubuwan da nake rubutawa: things that I am writing

I decided to create this second blog in order to post longer things that I am writing. I don't like to bog down my everyday blog with long posts, but this one will be specifically dedicated to things that I am working on: short stories, film/book reviews, poetry, maybe even a few photos. We'll see... All comments welcome.