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.