Review of Yeleen (1987) directed by Souleymane Cissé

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

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

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.

The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga

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.

Les Saignantes directed by Jean-Pierre Bekolo

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

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

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