Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers: Beyond Representation 0253066522, 9780253066527

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Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers

Studies in the Cinema of the Black Diaspora

Michael T. Martin and David C. Wall

Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers Beyond Representation

edited by Suzanne Crosta, Sada Niang, and Alexie Tcheuyap INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.org © 2023 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2023 Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-253-06652-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-253-06653-4 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-253-06654-1 (ebook)

CONTENTS Introduction, by Suzanne Crosta, Sada Niang, and Alexie Tcheuyap 1 1. Documenting the Unseemly: Moroccan Women’s Documentaries in the Early Twenty-First Century, by Florence Martin 10 2. Outsiders on the Inside: Rokhaya Diallo’s Les marches de la liberté as Activist Documentary, by Sheila Petty 34 3. Challenging Documentary Practice: A Return to Safi Faye’s Kaddu Beykat, by Melissa Thackway 50 4. Revisiting the “Domestic Ethnography” Approach in Khady Sylla’s Une Fenêtre ouverte, by El Hadji Moustapha Diop 65 5. Tales of Colonels: Auteurship and Authority in Mama Colonel (2017) and This Is Congo (2017), by Alexie Tcheuyap and Félix Veilleux 95 6. Authorizing Reality in Leila Kilani’s Our Forbidden Places (2008) and Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Slasher of Tunis (2014), by Suzanne Gauch 113 7. Documenting Tyranny: The Politics of Memory in Leila Kilani and Osvalde Lewat, by Hervé Tchumkam 129 8. Ecological Representations in African Women Documentaries, by Suzanne Crosta 145 9. Looping the Loop: Rama Thiaw’s The Revolution Won’t Be Televised (2016), by Sada Niang 161 10. Dancing with the Camera: Interview with Nadine Otsobogo, by Suzanne Crosta, Sada Niang, and Alexie Tcheuyap 175 Index 183

Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers

INTRODUCTION African Documentary Film Collective (ADFC): Suzanne Crosta, McMaster University; Sada Niang, University of Victoria; and Alexie Tcheuyap, University of Toronto This collection of essays on Francophone African women and documentary filmmaking in sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb is an in-depth exploration of the historical, political, and cultural contexts in which the cinematic contributions of African women documentarians are exemplified and highlighted. It complements previous scholarship that had limited focus on the subject of women and documentary. In the heady decade of the 1960s, African women’s filmmaking was characterized by a nationalist agenda, just like their male counterparts’. Yet, their particular focus was on documenting everyday life in their respective communities and their struggles to survive, thrive, and build a proud new nation.1 In their respective studies, Beti Ellerson and Olivier Jean Tchouaffé underscore the relationship between nation building and the first generation of African women’s contributions to preserving their cultural heritage through film (Ellerson 2016). This cinematic effort to value popular and collective expressions of art was meant to promote the nation and its values, cultural expressions, and wisdom. Thérèse Bella Mbida, a.k.a. Sita Bella, and Efua Theodora Sutherland, considered the “foremothers” of the French sub-Saharan African film industry in the 1960s and 1970s, were primarily interested in revisiting and rehabilitating African cultural traditions and expression.2 Sita Bella’s first foray in film was a short 1963 documentary she directed, Tam-Tam à Paris, featured at Festival Panafricain du cinéma de Ouagadougou (FESPACO)

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in 1969. It dealt with Cameroon’s National Dance Company and examined the complex relationship between drumming and dance. Efua Sutherland’s Araba: The Village Story was a made-for-television documentary (US network ABC) that came out in 1967 and dealt with the work of the Atwia Experimental Community Theatre Project (Ellerson 2016, 224). Critical reception of their work focused on their respective contributions to a nationalist project with special emphasis on their role as cultural workers in a new visual medium—film. According to Ellerson, these two African women filmmakers’ influence lies in their contributions to preserving their cultural heritage: “The notion of documentary filmmaking practice by African women as intangible culture heritage is worthy of broader exploration, especially in light of the prevalence of this genre in African women’s cultural production. . . . Both foremothers in African cinema, though having only produced one film each, their documentation of African culture and experiences is indicative of the practices of many African women” (Ellerson 2016, 223–24). Sita Bella’s and Sutherland’s films were very much in the style of Les Actualités camerounaises, sénégalaises, or béninoises. Whereas Tam-Tam à Paris might have rehabilitated a much-maligned musical instrument as well as its inventors and practitioners on the African continent, the film talked only tangentially about women and hardly ever addressed female subjectivity or highlighted the marginalization of African women’s issues in the new nation. Such an approach emerges some twenty years later, in the 1980s, and informs many of the chapters included in this collection. Starting in the 1980s, African women filmmakers have favored and continue to relish the documentary form. As a foundational cinematic genre, not only does it inform and instruct but its real/reel time elicits an immediate and direct connection with its subjects and issues. Moreover, on a continent hamstrung by funding challenges, the documentary also lends itself to greater accessibility (Crosta, Niang, and Tcheuyap 2017). Crosta, Niang, and Tcheuyap have shown that virtually all the major African filmmakers of the first generation started their careers with the genre while still planning for their first long feature fictional films. Didacticism reigned supreme in the 1960s and 1970s. More often than not, a male voice-over articulated the meanings of images as local national leaders jetted around the world conferring with other presidents in Europe, cutting ribbons of newly minted buildings, proudly walking on new roads, or nodding and grinning at shining monuments, all to the beat of military bands.3

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The films’ audiences were mainly urban and male: in most Francophone African countries, the ushering in of the new political era had drained large masses of impoverished, unschooled, and hopeful male rurals to urban centers. Cinema entertainment was one of the hallmarks of city life, and these masses would often flock to the Secma or Comacico4 theaters, where these documentaries premiered. They noisily reveled at such images, basked in self-recognition, and uttered shouts of joy at shots of familiar spaces and sounds. In the theaters of Dakar, Abidjan, Yaoundé, and Lomé, these shows provided moments of profane communion, warm solidarity, and lively camaraderie. Yet, one can hardly argue that these creations’ altruistic message was effectively communicated. Didactic documentaries of the period were cast in a unique show-and-tell style, with a voice-over, usually male, flawlessly articulating the newly adopted official language of the nation: French. Yet, given the overall limited, though much desired, competence in this new idiom, one may experience some misgivings about Barlet’s assertion that this was a time for “the re-appropriation of one’s own gaze, one’s own space, one’s own modes of thought” through film (Barlet 2000, 34). Rather, majority male audiences appreciated these films for the technological show as well as their newsworthiness, at a time when very few African households owned television sets. The relative absence of women in these public spaces mirrored the paucity of women documentary producers at the time. The essays in this collection originate from a workshop funded by SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) in January 2019 at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. They highlight major documentary films by Francophone African women and analyze productions dating from 1976 to the present. The films and their producers are mostly from West and North Africa with a few “Afropolitan”5 women adding an accented approach to an already rich array of issues and perspectives. These contributions stand out in two respects. First, they collectively illustrate that within the continent and across specific regions, geography is irrelevant when it comes to women’s conditions or subjection to state violence. Whether the chapters deal with North or West Africa, women documentarians whose films are analyzed here wrap their discourses and the images of their films around female subjectivity. They do so in a manner that is, at times, unembellished, at times subtle and suggestive, and at other times elusive. The resulting films unequivocally explore the marginalization of female bodies, denounce the blatant

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or subsumed violence they are subjected to, and fustigate the failings of the state, the insensitivity of atavistic traditions, and the murderous blindness of most of their practitioners. The second overarching characteristic rising from these chapters is that for most women documentary filmmakers under examination here, the didactic and its rigid codes have slipped into the background. Under their direction, the documentary gains in agility and porosity. It stands as a nimble genre capable of accommodating fiction, autobiography, and description as well as the performance of an action. These productions are not averse to open-endedness and indeterminacy. Silence itself, pregnant with unsaid and unconfessed deeds, is resemiotized as a set of motives to be deciphered by the viewer. It is not surprising that often our filmmakers seek to challenge rather than instruct “their” audiences. To this extent, then, the Victoria workshop allowed its participants to substantiate and explore ways in which Francophone African women documentarians interrogate the genre by creating stories and adopting aesthetics that exceed the traditional boundaries and conventions of documentaries.6 More to the point is the fact that Leïla Kilani’s Our Forbidden Places (2008) amply resonates with Salem Merkuria’s Sidet: Forced Exile (1991), and Osvalde Lewat’s Nigger Business (2008) reverberates with Raoul Peck’s Fatal Assistance (2013). One could well argue that Safi Faye’s pioneering performative style in Kaddu Beykat could be paired with Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1992).7 Furthermore, even though the chapters in this collection and their editors limit themselves to Francophone African women, in none of the contributions is the expression Francophone African women framed in a rigid, exclusionary way. Negotiating the French language in their professional lives and their work, Francophone African women underscore their lived experiences beyond a singular linguistic frame. In fact, most films examined in this collection are subtitled in French, English, other dominant Western languages, Arabic, Wolof, or whatever current idiom the community speaks. The geographical identification of the filmmakers as “Africans” is often tethered to intense and pervasive diasporic experiences. Ellerson goes further and states that African women’s “filmmaking practice is indicative of the diversity of theme they address, using eclectic approaches, autobiographical, experimental, hybrid, consciousness-raising, sociopolitical, as well as within translocal and transnational spaces—some going beyond

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the cultural references of the filmmakers” (Ellerson 2016, 223). For all these reasons, this collection offers a compelling example of the “artistic heterogeneity” of documentaries produced by Francophone African women filmmakers and about African women. The first two chapters of this collection frame the issues and aesthetic approaches further developed therein. For both Martin and Petty, “women’s documentaries are deeply rooted in . . . realities that intersect with the multiple global network.” The films they analyze “act in (specific) locations, while thinking with the world.” In both chapters, not only is the private political, as in the case of Ennadre’s Marokkiates series (2017–18), but their dual focus on migration policies in Morocco-Spain and the French banlieues expose the brutality of an international order built on the exploitation of racialized and sexualized groups, most often former colonials as well. Poverty and the crucible of postcolonial displacement loom large in Ennadre’s I Wanna Tell You (2008) and Rokhaya Diallo’s Les Marches de la Liberté (2013). Petty and Martin respectively resituate their corpus historically and theoretically before drawing conclusions rearticulated in several chapters of this volume. Focusing on one of the earliest female filmmakers in Francophone Africa, Melissa Thackway analyzes how, amid the disillusionment period, Safi Faye’s Kaddu Beykat (1976) challenged most of the rules of the didactic, voice-of-God-in-French style of documentaries so common among her male counterparts and their sponsors at the time. For while several authors have pointed out the relationships between Faye and her participants in the film, few have analyzed the use of Wolof instead of French in it, or the fact that eventually the participants speak on their own without, it seems, the prompting of the filmmaker. Kaddu Beykat has often been referred to as a docu-fiction, but in this case, unlike Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Contras’ City (1963), the oneiric is taken over by the referential, and the voice of God is supplanted by the angry and tired voices of the peasants decrying the vanity of government (in)action. Finally, the embryonic love story hinted at in the film, perhaps a precursor to Mossane (1992), blurs the boundaries between documentary and fiction. In a 1996 interview with Olivier Barlet, Faye acknowledges that she finds “it hard to distinguish between fiction and documentaries” (Barlet 2000, 8). In short, Thackway’s description of Faye as a pioneer is apt. Whether such foresight is attributable to gender identity is still open to debate, but what is not in doubt is that Kaddu Beykat stands as a performative achievement.

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African filmmakers generally have not frequently explored the politics of madness in the Francophone African context. The few characters affected by this condition appear mostly in fictional films. They often bear the burden of truth sayers, pushed at the margins of the group if not totally excommunicated. Momar Thiam’s Sarzan (1963) and Dany Kouyaté’s Sia, le rêve du python (2000) come to mind, but also Nacro’s Tomoto in La Nuit de la vérité (2005) or the silent madman roaming the dusty streets of Colobane in Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyenas (1992). In documentaries, David Achkar’s revisitation of the detention of his father (Marof Achkar) in Allah Tantou (1991) highlights the use of madness as a political weapon against opponents of former Guinean president Sekou Touré. Finally, recently the acclaimed showing of Seydou Coulibaly’s Ils Sont fous, on s’en fout (2013) seems to shed a new light on the social stigma attached to individuals who no longer “own themselves,” as the Wolof saying goes. Ils sont fous, on s’en fout explores the unease, shame, and embarrassment of families and friends of victims of this disease and decries the ensuing vagrancy, confinement, and marginalization. Whether Khady Sylla’s An Open Window (2005) is an autobiographical work is not a concern for Moustapha Diop in this collection. Instead, after analyzing the personal trauma resulting from confinement, ostracization, and indignities attached to this ailment, Diop shows how the filmmaker totally immerses herself with her subjects, to the point of leaving them to decide to keep talking or to turn off the camera at the end of the documentary. Besides, in a feat of utmost cultural sensitivity, Diop excavates the intricacies of the developing deep empathy between filmmaker and subjects as they each bathe in silence, in the company of each other, in profound awareness of the social stigmas that surround them, yet united in their indomitable will to exist in spite of it all. In An Open Window (2005), Sylla crosses the traditional barrier of her role to stress the subjective. In the end, her fate is so tightly bonded with that of her participants that the two become undistinguishable. Even though such fusion does not occur in Mama Colonel (2017) and This Is Congo (2017), Alexie Tcheuyap and Felix Veilleux show how a male filmmaker, Dieudo Hamadi, succeeds in lending voice to women in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mama Colonel deals with the traumatic experience of rape while minimizing the potential gender bias resulting from Hamadi’s position as a male. Using Nichol’s concept of voice, Tcheuyap and Veilleux argue that the fabric of the film, its discourse, and its spaces, gaze,

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and actions are determined by the main character, Mama Colonel, and not Dieudo Hamadi. In contrast, they oppose This Is Congo, where Mama Romance acts more like a mouthpiece for essentialized patriotism, thus paying lip service to the particular types of violence meted out to women caught between feuding parties in the recent DRC civil war. The confinement of rebellious and questioning bodies is further taken up by Suzanne Gauch and Hervé Tchumkam. While the former investigates documentaries in North Africa, the latter bridges the geographical gap to link repressive practices of the Mahzen starting with the dark period of the “Commandement opérationel” in Paul Biya’s Cameroon. Taken together, Gauch’s and Tchumkam’s chapters highlight the constant, almost inevitable interplay between fact and fiction, performance and representation, exposition and theoretical or philosophical musings. Gauch deftly analyzes the linkages between state-defined “transparent representation” and the need for a detour of such repressive constructions through fiction. In addition, much like Thierno Monenembo’s experimental novel L’Aîné des orphelins (2000), Our Forbidden Places (2008) suggests (rather than describes) the effects of the years of lead by leaving it to the viewers to imaginatively reconstruct the sufferings of the victims and the callousness of their torturers. Gauch unveils how Kilani, a former journalist turned documentary filmmaker, creatively translates into images what could not humanely be imaged, either because the footage is not available or because it would test the viewers’ sensitivity beyond any bearable limits. Dealing with Osvalde Lewat’s Nigger Business (2007), Tchumkam takes on the philosophical underpinnings of such monstrous and systematic killings. Calling upon Agamben’s theory of bare life, he shows how for both Kilani and Lewat, the Mahzen and Paul Biya’s regimes had turned their victims into disposable trash. Their lives, for reasons that still have to be specified, were unworthy of mourning, their killing a trivial event that calls for no remorse or, least of all, justice. In her study of African women documentaries, Crosta underscores the growing interest and concerns about the health and sustainability of their communities. She contends that African women directors tend to bring to the screen everyday lived experiences in seeking to foster self-knowledge to initiate change and safeguard their environment. Crosta’s chapter also documents the growing body of films on the environment (deforestation, poverty, ignorance) and the various ways in which they address and treat

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environmental concerns (nature-culture continuum, social justice, human rights). The appended interview with Nadine Otsobogo further intertwines the linkages between art, dance, and the environmental threat faced by populations on the coast and in the hinterland of Togo. Such an ecological approach underlining the necessary connections between nature and human survival also informs Sada Niang’s analysis of Rama Thiaw’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (2012). Landscapes may be absent from the images crafted by Thiaw, but the intensity of the political struggle and the doggedness of the opponents to Abdoulaye Wade’s policies rest on a rupture of a lost sacred covenant: the former president of Senegal had broken the popular trust and floundered the relationship he enjoyed with the impoverished youth of the seedy suburbs of Dakar, which guaranteed his electoral victory in 2000 and 2007. Our research trajectory on Francophone women and documentary filmmaking in sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb continues to expand and extend our knowledge of the continent’s historical and contemporary struggles and triumphs in their everyday lives. Traversing geographies, promoting inclusivity and tolerance, mobilizing solidarities to protect and respect fundamental human rights—these are some of the ways in which African women filmmakers connect with their communities and their audiences, always exploring and deepening their specific aesthetic practices to convey their dreams and aspirations for a healthier and better world.

Notes 1. Under these difficult conditions, documentary filmmaking in Francophone Africa filled a collectively defined political imperative. Filmmakers, their funders, and the budding film institutions were not dissociated from the nationalist project: stereotypes of the colonial archive had to be counterimaged, local altruism encouraged, and a sense of belonging fostered among various groups of peoples unceremoniously assembled into artificial borders. The films produced were short and to the point, authored, more often than not, by recent male graduates of European film schools and shown to enthusiastic urban audiences. Thus, Diawara argued, the various editions of the “Actualités sénegalaises, béninoises, ivioriennes” supported the nation and its leaders and sought to “educate the public in view of various nationalist agenda.” 2. Thérèse Bella Mbida was born in 1933 in Southern Cameroon and died in Yaoundé on February 27, 2006. Efua Theodora Sutherland was born in Cape Coast, Ghana, on June 27, 1924, and died on January 2, 1996, in Accra, Ghana. 3. One of Moustapha Alassane’s first animated films, Bon Voyage Sim (1966), satirized this practice. NPI, “Bon Voyage Sim (1966)—Moustapha Alassane [Niger],” video, 4:48, March 26, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SmIo-28mBw; Beti Ellerson, African

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Women in Cinema Blog, “The African Women in Cinema Blog Spotlights Nneka Onuorah and Her Film ‘The Same Difference’ during Women’s History Month,” March 9, 2016, http://africanwomenincinema.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-african-women-in-cinedma -blog.html; Sarah Bouyain, Les Enfants du Blanc [Children of the White Men], video, 1:00:00, 2016, https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3puc6w. 4. In 1926, the Compagnie Africaine Cinématographique Industrielle et Commerciale (COMACICO) was created. Almost a decade later, a rival emerged: La Société d’Exploitation Cinématographique Africaine (SECMA). For decades to come, these two French distribution companies built and supplied local theaters in former French West African colonies (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, and Togo) with European, American, and South Asian (India in particular) B movies. 5. The term afro-politan gained currency with writers such as Leonara Miano and filmmakers such as Amandine Gay. It refers to Africans of the European diaspora and their descendants. 6. Sada Niang and ADC, Conference on Women and/in Documentary Practice in Africa, Victoria, City Studio, January 24, 2019. This workshop invited specialists in African cinema to share their research, insights, and close readings of films by Francophone African women filmmakers. 7. One could also add Khady Sylla’s The Silent Monologue (2008) and Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (1966).

Bibliography Barlet, Olivier. 2000. African Cinemas: Decolonizing the Gaze. Paris: Zed Books. Crosta, Suzanne, Sada Niang, and Alexie Tcheuyap, eds. 2017. “Documenting the African Experience; Documentary Filmmaking in Africa.” Special Issue, Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture 11 (3). http://www .tandfonline.com/toc/rcin20/11/3. Ellerson, Beti. 2016. “African Women and the Documentary: Storytelling, Visualizing History from the Personal to the Political.” Black Camera 8 (1): 223–239.

1 DOCUMENTING THE UNSEEMLY Moroccan Women’s Documentaries in the Early Twenty-First Century Florence Martin, Goucher College

1. Women’s Documentaries in Morocco: The Lay of the Land The pioneering Moroccan women documentarians, much like their colleagues in the rest of the Arab world, started shooting film in the wake of two manifestos: the Third Cinema manifesto (1969), which recognized the role of the documentary as “the main basis of revolutionary filmmaking” (Solanas and Getino 1970–71, 11); and the New Arab Manifesto (NAC) in 1968 (written in the wake of the 1967 defeat of the Arab nations by Israel), which opened the door more widely to Arab women as both film subjects and filmmakers (Van de Peer 2017). Furthermore, the films they made answered Tunisian filmmaker Nouri Bouzid’s call to all Arab filmmakers for a “cinema of intervention,” in which viewers were invited to become active participants in the process of decoding the film’s references off-screen and to intervene in society outside the movie theater to redress social injustice. Women filmmakers deviated from their male colleagues in the discourse and focus of their documentaries. The former were situated at the intersection of several crucial needs in the late 1960s: to define a postcolonial identity as Moroccan; to express their acute political consciousness of neocolonial practices and discourses; to tell “herstory”—that is, the part that is systematically omitted from the official history of Morocco, especially women’s role in resisting the colonizer—and to fashion a strong image of Moroccan women away from Eurocentric (neocolonial) forms of feminism.

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However, while these concerns were front and center in their work, their access to the fledgling film industry of freshly independent Morocco was limited. Most colonial institutions left behind by the French in 1956 remained in place in the newly independent kingdom, including the Centre Cinématographique Marocain—the Moroccan Cinema Center (CCM), which delivered authorization and legislated filmmaking in the kingdom—and the Souissi studios where films were produced.1 Both institutions generated short newsreel films until 1964, shot mostly by foreign technicians who had stayed behind. Meanwhile, the makhzen (Moroccan monarchical system) needed voices and images to recast Morocco’s narrative not only as an enduring Arab and Muslim nation (the makhzen boasted hundreds of years of leadership in Morocco before the French and the Spanish invaded it) but also as a developing nation aspiring to modernity. Accordingly, the CCM was tasked with producing short films dealing with state priorities (Armes 2005, 20) throughout the 1970s and sent a first generation of young Moroccan students on scholarships to study film abroad.2 On the students’ return, the CCM hired them to direct short documentary pieces shot all over the kingdom designed to inform the people, the vast majority of whom were illiterate. Some of the films were didactic and focused on new laws, health care, hygiene, and infrastructural projects; others highlighted Moroccan traditions throughout the kingdom, to celebrate the country’s cultural richness. The CCM would wait until 1968 to produce its first two feature films and until 1980 to create a Support Fund for Moroccan filmmakers, which was fine-tuned throughout the 1980s.3 That is when three pioneer women filmmakers entered the scene: Farida Bourquia, Fatema Jebli Ouazzani, and Farida Benlyazid. The three of them were educated abroad: Farida Benlyazid studied literature and film in Paris; Farida Bourquia studied theater and stage direction in Moscow; and Fatema Jebli Ouazzani, who already lived in Amsterdam, studied screenwriting and film directing at the Dutch Film School there. Becoming a woman director required determination and enormous strength to overcome family resistance as well as the social stigmas already attached to being female in the world of filmmaking. They also had to navigate a second set of challenges, as they started to document women and women’s lives. Farida Bourquia produced a series of documentaries on women in Morocco for television in 1975.4 Across the Mediterranean, Benlyazid filmed

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her very first documentary for French television (FR3), Identités de Femmes (Women Identities, 1978), on Maghrebi women immigrants in French cities. It would take nine more years for Fatema Jebli Ouazzani to make her intimate and autobiographical documentary In My Father’s House (1987), with Dutch funds. Preferring to focus on women’s lives and conditions, none of these documentaries corresponded to the makhzen’s official narrative of Morocco—and none was supported by the CCM. Since then, the number of Moroccan women directors of documentary films has risen exponentially, including a variety of transnational directors (Armes 2015). Whereas Farida Benlyazid, Farida Bourquia, Izza Genini, and Fatima Jebli Ouazzani had been the only women to produce documentaries in Morocco between 1975 and 1987, a new generation of women joined their ranks and made dozens of short and feature-length documentaries and docu-fictions between the mid-1990s and 2018, including Dalila Ennadre and Tala Hadid. In spite of the advances in film technology that have made documentaries less costly and easier to produce over the past two decades, funding has remained a major issue for women directors.5 Given the scarcity of professional production companies in the kingdom, the pioneer directors would often produce their documentaries via the Radio-Télévision Marocaine or their own production companies and occasionally with foreign funds linked to development. (Farida Benlyazid’s Aminata Traoré, a Woman from the Sahel [1993] was produced by Judithe Bizot, who worked for the United Nations, with support from Canal + in France.) Furthermore, the CCM reserved its state aid for fiction films from the 1980s to 2012. Although documentary filmmakers have always applied for funds outside Morocco, members of the new generation have been much more willing to experiment with creative models of international coproduction across multiple borders. This is in part due to the status of some of them as cinéastes de passage—directors who often have dual citizenship, who are based both in Europe or North America and in Morocco, and whose presence in either location depends on their ability to produce or their need to promote their films, as well as on the political, economic, and creative conditions for each project (Higbee 2013). Whether they are cinéastes de passage or more permanently (re)located in Morocco, they have obtained funds from European and Middle Eastern production companies and TV channels in Morocco, Europe, and the Gulf. To wit, Dalila Ennadre’s Walls and People (2013) is

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a Morocco-UAE-Algeria-France-Qatar coproduction, while Tala Hadid’s Narrow Frame of Midnight (2014) is a Morocco-UK-US-Qatar-France coproduction.6 As a result, the women directors have an outsider/insider approach that combines bird’s-eye views and close-ups on current Moroccan sociopolitical issues. Theirs is a political cinema of intervention at both the national level and, given the global system of social injustice brought on by late capitalism, the transnational level.

2. A Cinema of Intervention in Morocco In their politics and aesthetics of a cinema of intervention, the documentary directors have provided filmic responses to the political issues that have rocked the kingdom since the late 1990s. Some of these issues are long-standing, such as the question of Moroccan identity, with its silent exclusion of the kingdom’s Amazigh and Jewish populations.7 Often, such films are made by cinéastes de passage or by Moroccan filmmakers living abroad continuously. Among the latter, Tala Hadid created a visually stunning, award-winning documentary titled House in the Fields (2017), which follows intimate close-ups of sixteen-year-old Khadija and her sisters in a remote Amazigh village in the Atlas Mountains. The language is Tamazight (not Arabic), and the subjects documented here are part of a disenfranchised group left out of the makhzen’s narrative of national identity rather than a minority—Imazighen, like women, make up at least half of the Moroccan population (Cornwell and Atia, 259). The film evokes questions about the education of girls, the discrepancies between the progressive transformation of Moroccan society (in particular women’s recent access to more equal rights), and the traditional way of life in the village, as well as the tensions between individual and collective alternatives. The director’s choices to spend months in a remote village in the Atlas, to immerse herself in the culture, and to make a film in Tamazight and on an Amazigh topic signal a strong political stand. Addressing a subject historically marginalized within Moroccan identity, Hadid creates room on-screen for the Imazighen, the indigenous population doubly colonized by the Arabs in the seventh century, then again by the Spanish and the French in the twentieth century.8 Arabic and French are still the official languages of Morocco; Tamazight became recognized as an official language only in 2011 and is still not taught everywhere. Hence Hadid intervenes at the intersection of

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gender, ethnicity, class, and even linguistics, as the film’s soundtrack contains not one word of Arabic. The Jewish people of Morocco were the second community to be filmed by outsiders—in particular, Izza Genini and Simone Bitton, who both live in France, and Kathy Wazana, who lives in Québec. The first two have filmed the Jewish heritage present in the nation’s culture, thus once again correcting the official narrative of the monolithic Arab-Muslim identity of Morocco. Izza Genini directed Morocco: Body and Soul (France), a series of documentaries shot between 1987 and 1992 on the different strains of Moroccan musical culture, including its strong Jewish components and the Andalusian tradition of the nûba, shared by Jews and Muslims.9 Simone Bitton’s current introspective film project, Ziyara (France, Morocco), is a documentary on the Jewish traces of a bicultural past in today’s Morocco: “I want to know what Jewish element is left in people’s imagination. There will be very few Jews in the film. Most characters will be Moroccan Muslims. I am looking for the Jew in them” (my translation).10 In For a New Seville (Canada, US, Morocco, Israel, 2012), Kathy Wazana, for her part, is concerned with documenting the painful uprooting of Moroccan Jews to Israel or France along the various aliyahs that have emptied the kingdom of its Jewish population since the 1960s; They Were Promised the Sea (Canada, US, Morocco, Israel, 2013) is a nostalgic, intimate documentary inspired by her family’s history, about the separation and exile that ended centuries of peaceful coexistence in former Jewish Amazigh villages in the Atlas.11 In their films on Moroccan Jews, women directors carefully weave back the frayed strands of Muslim and Jewish cultures that used to create the fabric of Amazigh Jewish identity. In doing so, they occupy a political position that stands against official narratives from the makhzen and Israel. Women documentarians also respond to current events that have a profound impact on women in Morocco. Hence, they have made films addressing how three significant components of the recent history of the country have affected the disenfranchised, including women: the liberation of political prisoners from Hassan II’s prisons, the Mudawwana (the reform of the Personal Code in 2004), and the ongoing emigration of Moroccan citizens to Europe. This period corresponds to the end of the Years of Lead over the decade after the end of the Cold War.12 In the last decade of his reign, Hassan II, who died in 1999, freed leftist or Islamist political prisoners who had survived years of torture and ill treatment in secret penitentiaries such as

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Tazmamart. Hassan II’s son, Mohammed VI, created the Instance Équité et Réconciliation (Equity and Reconciliation Commission, or ERC, 2004–5), which investigated twenty thousand cases of disappearances, arbitrary arrests, and torture between 1956 and 1999 and attempted to reconcile the victims, including the families of the disappeared, with the state—although it never actually named nor prosecuted the perpetrators (as opposed to, say, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission after apartheid). The ERC has been seen in some circles as an instrument to shore up an official narrative about democratization and human rights rather than a means to render justice to the survivors of detention (Vairel 2004, 193; Desrues 2004). At that time, however, the makhzen unclenched its iron grip on freedom of expression slightly, and directors started to make films (fiction and documentaries) on the Years of Lead. As an example, cinéaste de passage Leila Kilani filmed Our Forbidden Places (2008), a documentary focused not so much on the haggard-faced released prisoners or on their now vacant cells as somber lieux de mémoire (Nora 1999), but on the Moroccan sitting rooms at home where bewildered family members—mostly women—had been waiting for years for their loved ones’ hypothetical return.13 Her film thus records the marks left by the oppressive regime on the families of the victims. In this, Kilani’s film stands out in the Moroccan filmic treatment of the Years of Lead, as she records the impossibility to “reach genuine truth and reconciliation over the recent past and to do justice to the true victims of the Years of Lead, particularly women” (Bouthier 2018, 237). Although she films the process of the ERC and its unsatisfying outcome obliquely, her focus is clearly on what the characters reveal of their own individual agony. In order to elicit spontaneous testimonies or dialogues, she took the time to build trust and filmed them regularly in their homes over three years, gradually lightening the presence of the camera so it would no longer lead to any artificial behavior on the part of the protagonists. Through her patient approach and careful editing, she reaches a candid tone and intimacy much like Hadid in House in the Fields. At the same time, Kilani, having inscribed her filmic treatment of collective traumas and state-sponsored injustice in a global documentary tradition, gives the Moroccan political issue a universal aura beyond the nation’s borders. This dimension was not lost on the international community, as the prizes garnered by the film at festivals across the world can attest.14 By moving her camera away from the

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expected subject (the returning male victim of the regime) to the families (wife, mother, sister, children), Kilani flips the script of her male colleagues’ treatment of the same topic in fiction.15 She also intervenes in Moroccan society as she opens a debate for her viewers on the damage of the Years of Lead beyond its recognized first-row victims. Directors also responded to the revised version of the 1958 Family Code, the Mudawwana, signed by Mohammed VI in 2004.16 Although the text of the decree, strictly speaking, concerned the family rather than women, it expanded the rights of the latter significantly.17 But how would illiterate women ever be apprised of their newly bestowed rights? Women directors started to make films with a view to publicize and explain the content of the Mudawwana to the illiterate sections of the population. In an ironic loop of cinematic history, their intent thus mirrored that of the (male) emergent Moroccan cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, when the CCM produced information films designed to educate the population around the country. Hence women created several intricate documentaries and fiction films for women viewers. To wit, Dalila Ennadre’s I Wanna Tell You . . . (2005), a sixty-minute made-for-TV documentary, was intended to reach the widest audience of women possible. The film opens on a rally in the slums of Sidi Moumen, in Casablanca, organized by the Democratic League of Moroccan Women a year after the Mudawwana was signed. Women and men have lined up to receive free medical care and are being informed about the content of the law. The free-ranging discussions that ensue reveal a total ignorance of the reform as well as a woman-centered view of human rights that starts with the right to work (women declare that, unlike their men, they “enjoy” that right). The league’s attempt to publicize the text of the law frames the film’s explanation of the Mudawwana in a mise en abyme that boldly underscores the amount of implementation work left to do after the law was passed. Ennadre carefully examines the conditions of poor women in the larger context of the entire country as she takes her camera to urban environments such as Casablanca and Marrakesh and to rural locales such as a remote carpet-weaving hamlet in the Atlas and a sardine-packing factory on the coast. The images strongly suggest that this law is only the beginning of a long overdue process.18 The soundtrack includes both the official accounts (the radio announcements, the Women’s League speakers’ explanations) and the women’s candid reactions (about their work and

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men); clearly, the road is going to be long to empower the humble, illiterate women in factories, markets, and farms to stand up for their rights—or, as they vow, for their daughters’ rights. The documentary here once again clearly diverges from the official propaganda about the immense benefits of the Mudawwana for women and intervenes in Moroccan society as it hands the microphone to the traditionally silenced women who now talk—even sing!—back to patriarchal authorities, yet still face numerous obstacles to equal rights. What underlies their initial assumption—for instance, that they have the right to work and men do not—becomes clear in the end when Ennadre shows a group of women in a sardine-packing factory in the north: women have access to menial, extremely low-paying jobs in Moroccan factories or in the free zone of Tangier with which the country’s plants are trying to compete. Men are not hired in these positions, just as they are not hired in free zones in Jamaica. Ennadre thus highlights how gender inequity, amplified by the global neoliberal economic order, pushes women into underpaid jobs in factories in Morocco on the one hand and men to risk their lives to cross the Strait of Gibraltar on the other. Women documentarians intervene in the global community as they explore the underside of illegal migration and the underbelly of global capitalism exploitation in the developing world through carefully drawn portraits of individuals, using a double lens once again. Here, too, they flip the expected script: instead of zooming in on the men leaving on fragile pateras, they depict the trembling dreams and exhume the unspoken truths about illegal migration to Europe. In When Men Weep (2001), Yasmine Kassari films subjects who have made it to southern Spain and now find themselves hostage to the social and economic globalization that has pushed them away from their families and out of Morocco. They are reduced to hiding doubly: from the authorities as illegal immigrants and in shame as they prove unable to provide for the folks back home. The film thus starkly exposes a deep crisis in masculinity: undocumented men can no longer stand tall, and traditional breadwinners can no longer support their families. Similarly, Leila Kilani’s Tangiers, the Burners’ Dream (2002) follows three migrants (a Ghanaian man, a Moroccan man, and a Moroccan woman) and shows their dreams, their patience, and their dangerous crossing from Tangier, all the way to Portugal where many “burners” land—or don’t.19 Kilani is careful to remind her viewers that illegal migration multiplied after Spain,

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Fig. 1.1 Bouchra Khalili. The Mapping Journey Project.

as a member of the Schengen border system, enacted a law in 1991 requiring visas for Moroccan citizens. In short, the issues in women’s documentaries are deeply rooted in Moroccan realities that intersect with the multiple global networks with which the kingdom is entwined, making them always/already transnational. The Mapping Journey Project, by filmmaker and creative visual artist Bouchra Khalili, is a vivid visual illustration of such networks that blurs the lines between art installation and documentary. In it, as she shows the hitherto unseen convoluted loops, fits, and starts of the migrants’ journeys, she questions the very act of mapping through the compression of temporal and spatial scales, as an unsteady hand remembers and maps out the dangerous zigzagging journey of each migration.

3. A Transnational Cinema of Intervention: Dalila Ennadre The recent increase in documentaries by women is due, in part, to both the CCM’s recent decision to grant aid to their production and the documentary grids in place on Moroccan TV.20 However, Moroccan women filmmakers have also been seeking outside funding for a variety of reasons

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having to do with the subjects of their documentaries (e.g., prostitution, a red line in Morocco) or with changes in the Moroccan modes of documentary production outside the CCM. Navigating the bureaucratic maze of official authorizations required to shoot a documentary film in Morocco is difficult. The French establishment used to offer a solution in the form of TV production, which has by now grown fairly infrequent (Bouthier 2017). In their quest for ways to narrate the stories of individuals and communities that have been overlooked, free-spirited women filmmakers have resorted to sources of funding outside the official channels on both sides of the Mediterranean, thus securing relative freedom in their filming. One of these free agents is Dalila Ennadre, the director of I Wanna Tell You. Born in Morocco, she grew up in France and was trained by practice as a production assistant to various filmmakers in different countries before she made her first two documentaries in Montréal, By the Grace of Allah (1987) and Idols in the Shadow (1994) (Armes 2015, 79). Hence, when Dalila Ennadre chose to film Fadma, hired by the French army as a comfort woman for the Tabor soldiers recruited to fight in Indochina, she did not ask for money from Morocco to support I Loved So Much . . . (2008). Yet, although shooting a film about an Amazigh prostitute engaged in a colonial war breaks most cultural and social rules in the postcolonial Arab world, she nonetheless secured support from an Arab transnational organization, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), based in Beyrouth, Lebanon. The documentary received serious accolades outside Morocco.21 I Loved So Much . . . is groundbreaking in both content and form. The filmmaker furthers women documentarians’ disruptions of male documentary filmmaking in terms of voice-over (Bruzzi 2000) and the creation of a tripartite empathetic intersubjectivity between author, subject, and viewer (Van de Peer 2017). Ennadre also shares the direction of the film with her subject. In this, the filmmaker redefines the very notion of documentary direction and proposes a feminist filmic language of inclusiveness and equality never seen before in Moroccan documentary filmmaking. Fadma is an old Amazigh woman who stands tall, proud of her life, even as she is now reduced to begging. She was hired as a prostitute for the Tabors recruited by the French colonial army to fight the Indochinese. Her service to the French army lasted for twenty-four months, during which she moved from Africa to Asia, and then locally in Vietnam, following the

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troops. In the end, she was hit by a Chinese mortar and evacuated to a hospital via helicopter, then sent home. Her then husband burned her French army papers and later divorced her. As a result, she has no written evidence of her service to France and cannot apply for the pension Moroccan military personnel are entitled to receive from the French state (as meager as it is: sixty euros a month, we are told). The documentary sets out its agenda from the very first minute: the film opens with a male voice (the narrative starts with a war story, hence a man’s oral recollection), that of irate Haj Ali, shot frontally, who declares to the camera, “They recruited women supposedly to motivate us and to forget our home so we would better fight for their interests. But we couldn’t stand that they took our women. We couldn’t bear it.” His anger is compounded: first, as a pious Muslim, he strongly disapproves of prostitution. But second, he also still feels the burn of the French army’s racist treatment of its colonial troops: the authorities’ fear of the soldiers’ claims for equal treatment was so deep that they would not have French prostitutes cater to the Tabors in the army brothels on the front (what would happen once the soldiers returned to the colony?)—hence the hiring of Moroccan prostitutes. The film then cuts to a series of zooms on old black-and-white photographs of anonymous Maghrebi women’s faces, reminiscent of French colonial postcards, while the soundtrack moves to a Gypsy piece (“Cand Erai A mea lubita”), suggestive of women’s dances and marginalized communities. The story thus briefly exposes the French male Orientalizing gaze on the women of Morocco and Haj Ali’s explanation before it fades into Fadma’s powerful voice-over (a woman now grabs the microphone!) and the camera zooms in on her wrinkled face. The film cuts to a medium shot of Fadma, seen from behind, talking to her reflection in the mirror and looking at the camera—the voice is now female, as is the gaze. The extra-diegetic viewer now listens to a woman’s strong, self-aware voice and follows her introspective gaze, which will not allow for the intrusion of a man’s gaze. “My face looks so old,” Fadma declares. The mirror no longer reflects the fairest of us/them all: “There is no more honey in this beehive!” The double image of Fadma the speaker/gazer and Fadma the listener/seen also signals that the distribution of roles is starting to shift. Fadma is the subject, the protagonist, and the one whose gaze, voice, and eventually direction we, the viewers, will follow.

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Fig. 1.2 Fadma’s mirror scene (Dalila Ennadre, I Have Loved so Much).

These first three minutes of the film efficiently set the stage for the entire documentary: the voice-over will not be a masculine commentary or an omniscient narrator; neither will it divulge the inner thoughts of the protagonist. Instead, it leaves open a “negotiation between the film and its subject” (Bruzzi 2000, 48)—a subject who, in this case, also becomes her own diegetic viewer, thus reconfiguring the gazing game on-screen. Most shots of Fadma are frontal, at eye level, establishing her as an equal. Yet at times, Ennadre shoots her at a slightly low angle, to underscore her majesty. The portrait of a former sex worker for the French colonial army is painted with no moral brush outside Fadma’s own moral compass. A free spirit, she is not afraid of sharing her views on power relations: “I’ve always been free. Ever since I was a child. I have never let anyone ‘colonize’ me. When a man tried, I put him back in his place and continued on my way. I would flee as soon as I felt the trap closing in on me.” The protagonist claims an independence that even her country did not have! Her clear-sightedness on her need to protect her own autonomy reflects her deep sense of self and her strong ethics that resist the moral prejudice against comfort women.

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Fig. 1.3 Fadma and El Haj (Dalila Ennadre, I Have Loved so Much).

She asserts with regal flair, “In front of God, I have not sinned. I have not killed or hurt anyone.” The film carefully narrates how a young Amazigh woman from a poor farm in the country was caught in the crosshairs of colonialism and war and, from there, affirmed her own agency. “People think I am just an old Berber beggar, but there is more to me than that: I have seen the world!” she exclaims with a proud smile. To highlight her status as a veteran in the shots that she shares with Haj Ali, both subjects occupy the screen at the same level, in perfect visual gender equity, as the two veterans of the French army that they are. Yet, Fadma is slightly closer to the camera, making her appear bigger than Haj. Fadma will not be a victim. A free woman (a true Amazigh), she stands tall in a field to declare, “This is why I wanted to make this film. The French army took me to Indochina with the Moroccan soldiers of the First French battalion. I was hired to motivate them to fight the Indochinese. Today I’m asking France to recognize my rights, since I am old and penniless.” Fadma is looking straight into the camera—into the extra-diegetic viewer’s eyes—as she states that she is the one who wants to make this film. We are to relate directly to Fadma on Fadma’s terms. Here, Ennadre starts to establish the intersubjectivity Van de Peer describes: the opening of a

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space that invites director, subject, and viewer to the emotional sharing of a story—that of a woman imbued with dignity, who knows her rights and stands by her past. The extra-diegetic viewers are brought into a space shared between the director and the protagonist that is even more intimate than the one Kilani shot in Our Forbidden Places or Hadid in House in the Fields. Fadma’s initial powerful posture recurs several times over the course of the film. She first joyfully positions herself as an equal interlocutor to Dalila Ennadre: “I’m so happy to be with you. Today is a great day and this moment is a great moment. Just because we’re together.” The complicity the director shares with her subject is one of the trademarks of Ennadre’s documentaries: “In my approach, what is crucial is that I cannot stand being in demand, setting my camera and telling my subjects: give me! . . . I need for them to feel that the film is a necessity for them as well . . . The film is then shared.” As Ennadre herself puts it, she nurtures her relationship with her subject until “the camera disappears between [them].”22 Consequently, Fadma trusts the director completely and “gives herself” to her. For instance, when Fadma talks about lovemaking expertly and with ebullient frankness, her low smoker’s voice breaks into a spontaneous cackle. Such directness about sex, expressed with clarity and glee, coming out of a woman’s mouth has never been seen or heard in Moroccan cinema—let alone in a Moroccan documentary. Yet, the genuine abandon with which Fadma expresses herself on-screen, in her own words, songs, and even snippets of dance, opens the door to yet another transformation in the film, as is clear at the very end of the film. The film contains an epilogue titled “Two Years Later,” in which Fadma is filmed reacting to the film (hence, to what the extra-diegetic viewer has just seen). At this point, the intensely egalitarian film blurs the line between author and subject as Fadma reflects on their shared experience of the documentary and thus cosigns the film: “This adventure was sent to us by God. Your love and mine met by chance and were joined without warning. This is Dalila and this is Fadma, daughter of Salah of the Hassan tribe, Azilal precinct. We met and it was perfect.” By the time the end credits roll, the viewer no longer knows who actually made the film: the camera zooms out of the photographic portraits seen in the opening credits, revealing the full body of each woman in the series of erotic postcards shot by the French, reminiscent of Malek Alloula’s series

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contained in his Colonial Harem. Alloula’s project—ostensibly to denounce the objectification of the colonized female body for French consumption— has been interpreted as dubious in several ways. It was criticized as an invitation to renew the consumption of pornography through re-eroticizing the bodies of the silent women portrayed (Lazreg 1994) under an academic gaze, this time with a warning that the latter prolongs the (post) colonial masculine, heterosexual gaze of domination on Maghrebi women. But also, as Laura Box reminds us, the setup of these colonial images was entirely made up: no photography was ever taken in a harem, a place that always remained outside the reach of the male settler. The relationship of the postcards’ subjects to the viewer is that of prostitute to customer. The subject is commodified, but the subject also has at least partial control over the commodity. Since the “scenes and types” portrayed have little or no relation to reality, it can be argued that they are cheap theatrical tricks, and their consumers are dupes. To paint the subjects as victims robs them of the agency they obviously had (Box 1998, 142). Ennadre’s documentary does the exact opposite! By inviting the former sex worker to tell her own story on her own terms, the director operated a series of interlinked revelations in the film. First, Fadma’s individual narrative emblematized that of scores of Moroccan women during the colonial wars led by the French occupier. It thus unfolded the meaning of the racist, macho perceptions of Maghrebi women by the French authorities, as it denounced a largely unspoken practice apparently reviled by Moroccan men and put the question of equitable pensions front and center. Rather than re-eroticizing Fadma’s body and commodifying it, the film gave the subject a voice and a stage to assert herself as an agent of her own sexuality. It crossed a serious red line in Morocco—women and sex—by putting onscreen a female character usually kept off-screen and giving her a space to claim her political rights. In handing over such agency to Fadma, the documentary achieves something miraculous: it gives the subject complete power to codirect the documentary. The film thus presents a “perfect” meeting between Fadma and Dalila, a shared womanly experience (without once showing Dalila) that, eventually, reveals Fadma to be its author. Hence, after having shown how to change the rules of the documentary gazing game in I Loved So Much . . . , Dalila Ennadre even more radically models how to relinquish

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her role as director. She opened a path for an even younger generation of trailblazing documentary makers, such as Sonia Terrab.

4. From Adaptation to #MeToo! In Morocco: Sonia Terrab’s Projects Sonia Terrab came to documentary filmmaking through writing. Born and raised in Morocco, she studied in France, where she wrote her first autobiographically inflected novel, Shamablanca (2011). She then moved back to Morocco, where she wrote her second novel, La Révolution n’a pas eu lieu (The Revolution Did Not Happen, 2015), about the February 20 movement that started in 2011 in Morocco in the wake of the Arab Spring. Her first film thus starts with a nod to one of the most revered literary canonical figures in the world: Shakespeare el Bidaoui (Shakespeare in Casablanca, 2016). The impetus behind the documentary, however, came from a question she could not find any answer for: why is there no equivalent to the phrase “I love you” in darija?23 What could an absence of words, as she described it, say about the concepts of love, of sexual intimacy, and of cultural norms? What is so difficult to articulate in the realm of affection? Her investigation led her to a theater troupe in Casablanca. The film, coproduced by Nabil Ayouch (Ali’n Productions) and Moroccan TV channel 2M, was one of the ten documentaries in a series on love, El Hob, and was aired on television in 2016. In it, the camera follows a theater director and the (mostly nonprofessional) actors through the streets of Casa as they prepare the production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to be shown at the end of the summer. At first, the documentary can be seen as a “making of” of the play structured in three acts (beginning of summer, midsummer, night of the show), but it does more than document the various stages of its production. It delves into the creative responses to the multiple challenges posed by the very notion of “adaptation”: how to adapt a text from English into darija (how do you translate Shakespeare’s amorous language into today’s Casablancan darija?); how to make a multileveled fantasy play relevant to an audience often unfamiliar with theater, removed in time and in space from the Shakespearean drama, often illiterate, and facing the stark realities of today’s impoverished sections. The troupe engages in a call and response dialogue with the audience they gather on street corners and in plazas to gauge their reactions to the fate of the star-crossed lovers of the play, have them talk about love, and have them appropriate the translated love terminology of the British bard.

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Fig. 1.4 Call and response (Sonia Terrab, Shakespeare in Casablanca).

To do so, the “making of” film adds news twists to the traditional performance of oral tales known as the halqa (the circle) in Morocco. The stories of the play are discussed with the public and the play and its language rehearsed with input from the public. In the century-old halqa, the taleteller draws a line with water around him and calls to passersby to come and form a circle along the line in order to listen to a tale that he performs to an audience in a call and response pattern. The documentary integrates the improvised responses of listeners on street corners (some of them quite moving, others hilarious!) as part and parcel of the narrative, thus giving its changing diegetic audience a crucial part to play in the film, while also reproducing the Shakespearean play within a play structure in Dream. In a beautiful loop across cultural borders, Terrab thus succeeds in adapting a classic British play to Moroccan film via a return to a premodern mode of Maghrebi performance that gives agency to an audience caught on camera to share in the performance, thus completely breaking the fourth wall. Walking in Ennadre’s footsteps, her next experimental documentary would become even more explicit in making room for her protagonists and giving them a voice. The second phase of her next project, Marokkiates, is ongoing at the time of writing. Originally, it was conceived as a web experiment for a digital talent incubator called Jawjab, a subsidiary of Nabil Ayouch’s Ali’n Productions. Jawjab invites young, talented digital filmmakers to use its filming and editing equipment, workshops, and other resources to

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develop and produce their web-based projects, and sell them to a variety of customers. Inspired by the interview format of Humans of New York, Marokkiates (Moroccan Women) first took the shape of a series of twelve episodes (2017–18), each one featuring an individual woman who “stands alone and says what she has to say, as she appropriates the traditionally masculine, misogynistic space of the street. As you know, in Morocco, public spaces do not belong to us, women.”24 To obtain women’s testimonies, Terrab launched a call on Facebook and was surprised by the overwhelming number of responses she received from women from all walks of life and all ages, eager to participate. Clearly, there was a growing need for women to express their views openly and, perhaps just as importantly, a novel fearlessness to be seen on-screen doing so. To highlight this crucial aspect of her series, Terrab chose a genuine Casablanca street (complete with trash cans, traffic, passersby, peeling walls, and graffiti) to frame each interviewee. The power of such affirmation out in the open is striking, for women suddenly are no longer silently looking down to duck various forms of harassment but looking straight at the camera as they speak out in steady voices. Opening up the space of the traditionally male street to women was just the first step: conquering the public sphere also included other venues. “We realized that Moroccan women do not express themselves on the web, so we also worked to open the web to women: [Moroccan producer] Rita El Quessar and I developed the female side of Jawjab called Jawjabat and we launched Marokkiates from there, as a way to publicize the program.”25 The use of Jawjab can thus serve as a model for other women documentary makers to work with a feminist agenda outside the institutional circuits of cinema production in Morocco—in particular, outside the purview of the CCM’s authorization and funding schemes, and its ability to censor the representation of women and sexuality on-screen. Each vignette (ninety seconds or so) offers a distinct zoom on one particular aspect of being a woman in Morocco. Young Salima describes the responses of people to her tattoo; middle-aged Meriem movingly confides the lack of tenderness that has accompanied her entire existence; young Selma complains about the social strictures put on dating; Rihab explains her difficulties in defining her own sexual orientation since there is no word in darija for bisexuality.26 Only their first names are revealed. After the initial twelve “capsules” posted on Facebook, Terrab started to develop a documentary project that she is currently in the process of

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trying to produce. However, given the speakers and the nature of what they reveal (the sexual harassment they have been subjected to, their own bisexuality in a culture that officially and legally condemns homosexuality, sexual freedom that is culturally frowned upon), she has been looking for funding solutions abroad. If successful in her attempts, her project would then become the transnational production of a local film (shot in Casablanca). Several things are happening simultaneously in the Marokkiates project, beyond its conscious attempt to reclaim some of the common urban space and cyberspace for women. By using social media to recruit the interviewees and to share their performances online, Terrab has invited her speakers to participate in the global movement of #MeToo! (ana aydan!) right there in Morocco, where women are not supposed to unveil their emotions and intimate truths publicly. For the time being, she has also given free access to the circulation of daring women’s words and narrative fragments on the web, and in so doing has bypassed the traditional exhibition circuit for audiovisual material as well as its rating in Morocco. Yet, Marokkiates is still a documentary project in the making as the women of Morocco are eagerly awaiting its completion and screening. In conclusion, although women filmmakers in Morocco have documented the world of women beyond the boundaries of patriarchal and political propriety in their documentaries since the mid-1970s, the newer transnational generation dares to break taboos more frontally in their work. In the process, as is clear in Dalila Ennadre’s or Sonia Terrab’s work, they propose a new form of egalitarian documentaries: films that show and interrogate not only the world of women and other exploited groups but also the rules of the documentary. In the end, women directors reconfigure these rules and relinquish their authority as directors to hand it to their subjects. By documenting the unseemly, women subvert the power relations that used to govern the CCM’s ethnographic didactic documentaries of yore.

Notes 1. Created in 1944 under the aegis of the Ministry of Information and the Ministry of the Interior (during the infamous Vichy years of the occupier), the CCM has remained under the Ministry of Information ever since. 2. Some went to Paris, France (Mohamed Abderrahman Tazi at IDHEC); Łódź, Poland (Mostafa and Abdelkrim Derkaoui, Abdelkader Lagtâa); and Moscow, USSR (Abderrahmane Mouline).

Documenting the Unseemly | 29 3. The feature films were When the Dates Are Ripe by Larbi Bennani and Abdelaziz Ramdani and Life Is a Struggle by Ahmed Mesnaoui and Mohamed Abderrahman Tazi. In 1980, the makhzen launched the Support Fund (Fonds de soutien à la production cinématographique), administered by the CCM, to keep controlling the work of directors. This aid increased the rate of annual productions significantly. In 1986, the scheme was made more selective and split the budget into pre- and post-production grants. 4. The UN declared 1975 the year of women, and it certainly was productive for Maghrebi women documentarians: Assia Djebar shot Nuba of Mount Chenoua in Algeria, and Selma Baccar shot Fatma 75 in Tunisia. 5. For example, it is easier to shoot a film with light digital cameras and cheaper to rent a drone rather than a helicopter for aerial views or to use computer-assisted programs to edit a film. 6. Walls and People received funding from the CCM in Morocco; the Dubai Entertainment & Media Organization in the United Arab Emirates; Djinna in Algeria; and Label Vidéo, Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, and the CNC in France, as well as a grant from the Doha Film Institute in Qatar. Narrow Frame of Midnight received funding from the CCM in Morocco, the British Film Institute in the United Kingdom, and the Sundance Institute in the United States as well as grants from the Doha Film Institute in Qatar and the Fond Francophone de Production Audiovisuelle du Sud in France. 7. Amazigh (“free man”; plural: Imazighen) people are the indigenous population of the Maghreb. The West used to refer to them as the Berbers. 8. With the first came Arabic and Islam, which molded Morocco’s myth-history. To wit, the Arab king, from the Alawite dynasty, is “the leader of the believers” in Morocco (contradicting the prophet’s known democratic view on leadership). With the second came French and Spanish as the languages of the oppressors. 9. See Shafik 2022. 10. “Je cherche à savoir ce qui reste de juif dans l’imaginaire des gens. C’est un film où il y aura très peu de juifs. La plupart des personnages seront des musulmans marocains. Je cherche le juif en eux.” Quoted by Ameskane (2017, 61). 11. In that, it joins a series of films on the topic in Morocco, such as Kamal Hachkar’s Tinghir-Jerusalem: Echoes of the Mellah (2012) and Hassan Benjelloun’s Where Are You Going, Moshe? (2007), Mohamed Ismaïl’s Farewell Mothers (2007), or Jérôme Olivar Cohen’s L’Orchestre de Minuit (2015). 12. The Years of Lead (1961–mid-1990s) is shorthand for Hassan II’s reign of terror (1961– 99), during which the makhzen imprisoned thousands of political prisoners in secret detention centers, some of them in the desert, where they were tortured for decades. 13. Our Forbidden Places was produced with funds from the film establishment both at home and abroad, ranging from the CCM and the Instance Equité et Réconciliation (and the Ministries of Culture and Foreign Affairs) in Morocco to the CNC, Fonds Sud, Fonds Francophone de la Production Audiovisuelle, and Région Ile-de-France in France. 14. She described Our Forbidden Places as “a project on the representation of trauma” rather than a denunciation of what had gone on, citing as her influences documentarians faced with national traumas such as Claude Lanzmann, Rithy Panh, and André Van In. The film was awarded Prix du Cinquantenaire (National Film Festival, Tangier, 2008); First Prize for Documentary (Milano Film Festival, 2009); Prix Micheline Vaillancourt

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for best documentary (Festival PanAfrica International, Montreal, 2009); Grand Prix du Documentaire (FESPACO, Ouagadougou, 2009). 15. For example, Ahmed Boulane’s Alia, Rabia and the Others (2000), on a prisoner coming out of jail into a changed Morocco; Abdelhaï Laraki’s Mona Saber (2001) and Kamal Kamal’s Nizar’s Spectrum (2002), on investigating political assassinations; Hassan Benjelloun’s The Dark Room (2004), a screen adaptation of Jaouad Mdidech’s memoir; Saad Chraibi’s Jawhara, Prison Girl (2003), on the detention of one of its youngest victims; and Jillali Ferhati’s Memory in Detention (2004), on the difficulty of speaking about the prison trauma. 16. Human Rights Education Associates (2021). 17. Among other dispositions, the dahir (royal decree) set the minimal age of marriage at eighteen (article 19), inscribed a woman’s right to enter a monogamous marriage, put limits on polygamy (articles 40–46), and legislated on divorce, repudiation, and the obligation to pay alimony (article 45). 18. It is reminiscent of Selma Baccar’s documentary Fatma 75 (Tunisia, 1976): while it celebrated Bourguiba’s 1956 Code Personnel, it also pointed out that much more needed to be done. 19. Un brûleur (a burner) is an illegal migrant who crosses the Mediterranean and burns his ID papers so that, once in Europe, he cannot be deported to his native country. 20. Coproduction schemes with 2M (a Moroccan TV channel) opened up grids for documentaries (usually sixty-two minutes). Under the program Des Histoires et des hommes (Of Stories and Men), for instance, 2M and Ali N’Production launched a series on love (el hob) in December 2016, with ten documentaries by confirmed Moroccan filmmakers: five men (Daoud Oulad Syad, Faouzi Bensaïdi, Jamal Hachkar, Jawad Rhalib, Hakim Belabbès) and five women (Zakia Tahiri, Dalila Ennadre, Laïla Marrakchi, Narjiss Nejjar, and a newcomer to the camera, Sonia Terrab). 21. It was nominated for a Muhr at the DIFF in 2008 and awarded the Best Documentary Award at the African Film Festival in Tarifa, Spain. 22. Interview with the author, June 25, 2018. 23. Instead, the common phrase is kambrit: I desire you, I want you. 24. Interview with the author, June 25, 2018. 25. Jawjab literally means “he came and he brought back,” and jawjabat means “he came and she brought back.” Sonia Terrab, interviewed by the author, January 26, 2018. 26. As examples, Meriem, https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=926024090881763 (link active on September 7, 2021); and Salma, https://www.facebook.com/jawjabma /videos/vb.646093598874815/948742691943236/?type=2&theater (link active on September 7, 2021).

Bibliography Ahmida, Ali Abdullatif, ed. 2000. Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghreb: History, Culture, and Politics. New York: Palgrave. Alloula, Malek. 1987. The Colonial Harem. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Ameskane, Mohamed. 2017. “Simone Bitton: La femme à la caméra . . .” Challenge, October 6–12, 2017. Armes, Roy. 2005. Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2015. New Voices in Arab Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Association Marocaine des Critiques de Cinéma, eds. 2013. “Le Cinéma marocain: Enjeu de l’industrie, enjeu de la création.” Special issue, Revue marocaine des recherches cinématographiques no. 1 (November). Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bouthier, Marie-Pierre. 2017. “Des créateurs et des curateurs aux frontières des arts visuels et du cinéma documentaire. Maroc-Tunisie (2011–2016).” Remmm 142 (December). https://journals.openedition.org/remmm/10092#text. ———. 2018. “Documentary Cinema and Memory of Political Violence in PostAuthoritarian Morocco and Tunisia (2009–2015).” Journal of North African Studies 23 (1–2): 225–45. Box, Laura. 1998. “Women Playwrights and Performers Respond to the Project of Development.” In African Theatre for Development: Art for Self-determination, edited by Salhi Kamal, 141–52. Bristol: Intellect. Bruzzi, Stella. 2000. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. Carter, Sandra Gayle. 2008. “Constructing an Independent Moroccan Nation and National Identity through Cinema and Institutions.” Journal of North African Studies 13, no. 4 (December): 531–59. ———. 2009. What Moroccan Cinema? A Historical and Critical Study 1956–2006. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Cornwell, Graham H., and Mona Atia. 2012. “Imaginative Geographies of Amazigh Activism in Morocco.” Social & Cultural Geography 13, no. 3 (May): 255–74. Desrues, Thierry. 2004. “De la Monarchie exécutive ou les apories de la gestion de la rente géostratégique.” L’Année du Maghreb 1 (1): 243–71. Gabara, Rachel. 2015. “War by Documentary.” Romance Notes 55 (3): 409–23. Gugler, Josef, ed. 2015. Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———, ed. 2011. Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence. Austin: University of Texas Press. Higbee, William. 2015. “Merzak Allouache: (Self-) Censorship, Social Critique, and the Limits of Political Engagement in Contemporary Algerian Cinema (Algeria).” In Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique, edited by Josef Gugler, 189–212. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2013. Post-Beur Cinema: Maghrebi-French and North-African Emigré Filmmaking in France Since 2000. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Higbee, William, Florence Martin, and Jamal Bahmad. 2020. Moroccan Cinema Uncut: Decentred Voices, Transnational Perspectives. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hjort, Mette. 2010. “On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism.” In World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, edited by Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman, 12–33. New York: Routledge.

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Human Rights Education Associates. n.d. “The Moroccan Family Code (Moudawana) of February 5, 2004.” Accessed on September 7, 2021. http://www.hrea.org/programs /gender-equality-and-womens-empowerment/moudawana/#11. Lazreg, Marnia. 1994. The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question. New York: Routledge. Lebbady, Hasna. 2012. “Women in Northern Morocco: Between the Documentary and the Imaginary.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 32, 127–50. Limbrick, Peter. 2015. “Vernacular Modernism, Film Culture and Moroccan Short Film and Documentary.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 56 (2): 388–413. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8vg5z0c2. Marks, Laura U. 2010. Enfoldment and Infinity. An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. Cambridge: MIT Press. Martin, Florence. 2018. “Sexes, masques et vérités sur les écrans des Maghrébines.” AFKAR/IDEES (Spring): 71–73. ———. 2016. “Cinéma-monde: De-orbiting Maghrebi cinema.” Contemporary French Civilization 41 (3–4): 461–76. ———. 2015. “Paroles et musiques: Les audaces des documentaristes maghrébines.” Diogène 245, no.1 (May): 142–54. ———. 2011. Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women’s Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Martin, Florence, and Patricia Caillé. 2017. “Reel Bad Maghrebi Women.” In Bad Girls of the Arab World, edited by Nadia Yaqub and Rula Quawas, 167–84. Austin: University of Texas Press. Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exile and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nora, Pierre, ed. 1999. Rethinking France: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Saeys, Arne. 2009. “Imag(in)ing the Global City. Postnational Filmmaking in Brussels and Amsterdam.” In The New Urban Questions—Urbanism Beyond NeoLiberalism—4th Conference of International Forum on Urbanism, edited by Lei Qu, Chingwen Yang, Xiaoxi Hui, and Diego Sepúlveda, 345–54. Rotterdam: International Forum on Urbanism. Shafik, Viola, ed. 2022. Documentary Filmmaking in the Middle East and North Africa. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Shohat, Ella. 2006. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Solanas, Fernando, and Octavio Getino. 1970–71. “Toward a Third Cinema.” Cinéaste 4 (3): 1–10. Terrab, Sonia. 2015. La Révolution n’a pas eu lieu. Casablanca: La Croisée des Chemins. ———. 2011. Shamablanca. Biarritz: Atlantico. Vairel, Frédéric. 2004. “Le Maroc des années de plomb: équité et réconciliation?” Politique Africaine 96 (December): 181–95. Van de Peer, Stefanie. 2017. Negotiating Dissidence: The Pioneering Women of Arab Documentary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Documenting the Unseemly | 33 ———. 2012. “A Transnational Feminist Rereading of Post-Third Cinema Theory: The Case of Maghreb Documentary.” Journal of African Cinemas 4, no. 2 (October): 175–89.

Florence Martin is Dean John Blackford Van Meter Professor of French Transnational Studies at Goucher College. She has published articles, chapters, and volumes internationally on French and Francophone cinema. Her authored books include Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women’s Cinema (2011) and Moroccan Cinema Uncut: Decentred Voices, Transnational Perspectives, coauthored with W. Higbee and J. Bahmad (2020).

2 OUTSIDERS ON THE INSIDE Rokhaya Diallo’s Les marches de la liberté as Activist Documentary Sheila Petty

Since the advent of documentary media production, filmmakers have used the medium of film (and later video with the introduction of the camcorder) as a platform to probe social and political issues and encourage audiences to participate in social change. Daniel Marcus has argued that “filmmakers have had a long but tenuous relationship with political movements and activist organizations” and cites Dziga Vertov and his Kino-Pravda group as an early example of how documentary newsreels were produced to educate audiences and incite the will for political, social, and economic change in the Soviet Union (2016, 187). According to Marcus, the “ideal” in “political and social documentary” involves an audience who responds to “their newfound knowledge” (190). Conditions of exhibition and reception are paramount here, where the “ideal” involves filmmakers screening their work and “contextualizing” it for audiences, much like the Lumière brothers and the Kino-Pravda group in the early twentieth century, and filmmakers today when they present their work at film festivals (190). Marcus contends that “the single biggest factor in the ability of documentary makers to move viewers toward an activist response is the political context of reception” of a particular production (190). Creating “pathways to activism” for audiences is often part of a larger political and social project on the part of activist filmmakers (190). These pathways are frequently configured as journeys with goals often only reached (or not) after a culmination of

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several journeys. These create a means for activists to re-examine issues of location, identity, nationality, historical memory, human and civil rights, and citizenship. Such is the case with Rokhaya Diallo, a French journalist, author, filmmaker, and activist for racial, gender, and religious equality whose activism for human rights and racial equality extends to debates on the very nature of contemporary French identity. Born in Paris in 1978 to Senegalese and Gambian immigrant parents, Diallo grew up mostly in La Courneuve, a Paris suburb, and earned degrees in international and European law as well as business and marketing. She now works mostly in broadcasting but has published numerous books and articles, including: Racism: A Guide; A nous la France / France Belongs to Us; France: One and Multicultural; and How to Talk to Kids about Racism, and Afro!, which deals with the issue of Afro-Parisians and natural hairstyles. Diallo is considered one of the most influential Black figures in Europe. A tireless advocate for human rights throughout her youth and adulthood, in 2006 Diallo founded The Indivisibles association, whose mandate is to campaign against stereotypes and to end the practice of assigning French citizenship on the basis of physical appearance and geographical origin. Using the slogan “Français sans commentaire,” the association draws inspiration for its name, Les Indivisibles, from the first article of the French Constitution, which stipulates that France is a secular and indivisible republic (Kassa 2011). It is through this activist vein that I wish to consider Diallo’s 2013 film, Les marches de la liberté / Steps to Liberty—her first film, produced for the television network France Ô, which won Best Documentary Film at the Regional and International Festival of Guadeloupe (FEMI) in 2015. My goal is to analyze the ways in which Diallo cinematically portrays identity construction and complex relationships with French society, culture, and history. I am interested in the possibility of exploring frameworks for understanding the complexity and “combinatory poetics” of being French in present-day France (Reed 2013, 120). To that end, I will look at how Diallo frames the exclusionary practices at work in French nation and identity building but also deconstructs stereotypes and creates an innovative process of authorship that is really less about conclusions and more about journeys of construction (Reeck 2011, 144). This mode of engagement pertains to several other Afro-French women filmmakers who have set about to reclaim the narrative (Gay 2018) of what

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it means to be a Black woman in France today and who are concerned with reconnecting French Republicanism to reality, thus creating a counterarchive (to mainstream accounts) of lived realities. In her 2015 hour-long autobiographical documentary Trop noire pour être française / Too Black to Be French, Isabelle Boni-Claverie, a French-Ivorian who grew up in upperclass French society (she was a playmate of the current king of the Netherlands), unpacks how socioeconomic privilege doesn’t mean protection from racial discrimination in France. She weaves threads of her family history in through the history of French colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa, creating a narrative frame steeped in irony, and counters, through her testimonial narration, official accounts of immigration histories with her personal family experiences. In 2016, Franco-Senegalese literature professor Mame-Fatou Niang directed the documentary Marianne noires with one of her students, Kaytie Nielsen. The film was meant to test theories studied in class—namely, that Black French women are always perceived to be from elsewhere, and never from France. The film is structured through interviews of seven French women artists, entrepreneurs, and academics of African and Caribbean descent (Boni-Claverie is among them) discussing their hopes, dreams, and struggles. The common denominator among them is that their Frenchness always seems to be subsumed by their “blackness” in the eyes of the republic, which is supposed to be color-blind but is not really at all. AfroFrench feminist filmmaker Amandine Gay is also concerned with the issue of what it means to be a Black woman in contemporary France. In 2018, she directed the documentary Ouvrir la voix, in which her interview subjects speak about their experiences of discrimination tied to their double identity of being both woman and Black in Francophone European societies such as France and Belgium. Les marches de la liberté is a precursor to these films, foregrounding many of their concerns about identity, but Diallo frames them within historical moments that depict movement, journeys, and struggles for civil and civic rights. Diallo compares the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which ended with Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, to the 1983 Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme, which began in Marseille and ended on the steps of the Élysée Palace in Paris. By comparing the two marches/journeys, she also compares African Americans’ “American dream” to the “French dream” of

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equality for all within the republic. The 1983 march is a historical moment for France, a turning point in the long struggle against racism. It was a peaceful march, inspired by and conceived on the same nonviolent premise as the 1963 march in the US. The American march is embedded in American and world history and still resonates today with rallies in support of voting rights held annually on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The French march is little-known, even in France, as though deliberately occluded from official archives. Diallo claims that the demands of the 1983 march have not yet been fulfilled by French society and that youth need to learn about this history. As an activist text, the film falls within the performative mode of documentary, through which Diallo plays a self-reflexive role via voice-over, which shapes the material (Nichols 1994, 100). She anchors the film in a historical frame and intercuts close-up shot interviews of youth and other experts with archival footage of key moments in human rights activism and archival photographs of the interviewees, which then act as reference points and historical support to the content of the interviews. They act as bards, remediators, and remixers of personal and political histories, working toward a form of reclamation of “art-action,” to use the term coined by Moroccan photographer and painter Majida Khattari, who uses Orientalist art as a point of departure from which to reclaim Arab women’s “personhood” from their fantasized image of slave status in Western eyes (Behiery 2015, 254). Thus, images and representation must also be about an activism of action and movement—from silence and invisibility to voice and visibility. Conceptually, it is useful to look at the film through theories such as “accented style” or accented cinema, coined by film theorist Hamid Naficy to describe exilic and diasporic cinema and the subject position of filmmakers who identify with and inhabit the exilic, diasporic, and postcolonial “interstitial spaces and sites of struggle” (2001, 12). This has occasionally been evoked to describe the films of the generation of directors who have grown up in the banlieues or are descendants of immigrants to France, like Diallo. This style arises from feelings of displacement and an inherent sense of memory of “the traditions of exilic and diasporic cultural productions that preceded them.” The filmmakers acquire two sets of voices from their heritage and lived experiences (Naficy 2001, 22). Such an approach is driven by aesthetic and narrative ingenuity, including “selfreflexivity and autobiographical inscription, historicity, epistolarity” and

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“multilinguality” and “resistance to closure” (Naficy 1999, 131). Naficy extends the meaning of being interstitial as “being located at the intersection of the local and the global” (1999, 134). Naficy writes that the very structure, organization, themes, and visual style of accented filmmakers’ works transform “displaced subjects into active agents” capable of forging their own identity constructions (2001, 98). More recently, Beti Ellerson has used the theoretical frame of “accented cinema” to investigate the “cinematic imaginary” of African women filmmakers born or raised in “the host country of their immigrant parents” (2017, 273). Ellerson argues that a common trope in “the works of first-gen filmmakers is the desire to integrate and become part of the society in which they were born and/or raised” (276). This is rooted in a sense of “inherited exilic” identity from their “parents’ deep experiences of ‘deterritorialization’” and explains the sense of in-betweenness felt by the first generation such that identities are often forged within interstitial spaces (273). Rokhaya Diallo claims that she feels much more French than Senegalese, which is natural given that she has spent almost all her life in France. Integration does not quite describe the level of inclusion that Diallo is advocating in her work. If born on French soil, why would one have to integrate into a society one is already a member of by right of birth? The whole premise of Les Indivisibles, which she helped found in 2006, was to dispense with categories of French identification and interrogations of one’s level of “Frenchness.” Diallo has explained that in 1983 she was only five years old but became interested in the history of anti-racism in France from an early age, and today considers her generation the inheritors of the march’s legacy and responsible for keeping its memory alive in a context of “amnésie organisée/ organized amnesia” (Bocandé 2011, 61). The French colonial conquest of African territories began in the seventeenth century; most expansion occurred during the nineteenth century with the 1885 Scramble for Africa, when France claimed a major portion of western Africa. By 1912, France had colonized Morocco and then, by 1916, Tunisia, creating what were known as “protectorates” (Abderrezzak 2016, 2). During its occupation of the Maghreb, and following World War II, “France encouraged the immigration of young and fit local men” to help rebuild the war-ravaged nation (2). Although the French Revolution introduced the principle of equality of newcomers alongside the established populations of the national

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community, this did not always pan out with civic rights and civil rights (succession), which were often denied to the very newcomers France relied on to rebuild its industries following World War II (Gourévitch 2000, 103). France’s rapidly changing population has increasingly challenged the longheld myth of universal Republicanism and neatly packaged social, cultural, and political integration (Wihtol de Wenden 1991, 98). Following World War II, immigration from France’s former colonies resulted in the creation of large minority populations in France whose descendants would be “French by birth and external cultural situation and North African by heritage and family ties” (Levine 2008, 43–44). Alison Levine has argued that the housing policies employed by many cities in France have resulted in a form of “topographical segregation” that has slowed the process of assimilation “onto mainstream (French) society” (2008, 42–43). Generally housed in outlying suburban areas, and “designated by various French euphemisms such as ZUP (zones à urbaniser en priorité) or ZUS (zones urbaines sensible),” these developments concentrated immigrants in specific areas, creating a seeming separation between racial groups but also enforcing a strong sense of self-identification within such immigrant groups (42). Carrie Tarr supports such an interpretation, suggesting that the second generation found themselves negotiating the space between their French education (and inculcation of French cultural values) and their elders who “continued to practice their own language, customs and religion (Islam)” (2005, 27). Plagued by high unemployment and systemic racism and raised with “higher expectations than their parents of their future role in French society,” this generation would produce activists, writers, artists, and filmmakers prepared to challenge the French status quo in pursuit of more equitable treatment (27). Fed up with mounting police violence and racist attacks, the new generation organized what is considered France’s “longest and largest [nonviolent] demonstration march” (Reeck 2011, 2–5). La Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme, a five-hundred-mile march from Marseilles to Paris modeled on 1960s American civil rights peaceful activism and Gandhi’s treatise of nonviolence, was organized to awaken France to the racism and discrimination in its midst, and it marked a turning point for the country in the sociopolitical consciousness and cultural production for the new generation. The goal of the march was the utopic ideal of different communities living together in harmony and happiness. This ideal was short-lived

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because it was never clearly determined by anyone if this would necessitate a multicultural model or if this meant full membership within the French Republican model. La Marche is also significant because it engendered other cultural production (Reeck 2011, 9). Diallo created Steps to Liberty within an activist space of journey and movement. In August 1963, African Americans marched on Washington for equal rights, ending in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. The film begins with the chanting and singing of “We Shall Overcome” as the opening credits roll. The image track shows a montage of black-and-white archival footage of a truck moving quickly down a street, adorned with “Freedom Now” posters and information as a voice-over via megaphone exclaims, “Freedom Now Movement—hear me! We are requesting all citizens to move into Washington . . . to go by plane, car, bus . . . any way that you can get there. Walk if necessary. . . . We are pushing for jobs, housing, desegregated schools. . . . This is an urgent request. Please go to Washington.” The images of masses of people marching with placards and moving toward the Lincoln Memorial gain speed. There is a frantic sense to the pace of the editing as Diallo begins her own voice-over narration in rapid French, explaining the march’s goal of equal access to jobs, education, and voting rights—a monumental moment in the history of African Americans. Twenty years later in France, thirty children of immigrants decided to march for equal rights, with the same commitment in spirit and a “solid faith in equality” and nonviolence, explains Diallo’s voice-over. Diallo juxtaposes the goals and outcomes of the two marches to demonstrate how, in her opinion, Americans are capable of integrating their major historical moments into their popular history. Diallo argues that the March on Washington was organized in a militaristic and strategic fashion by Martin Luther King, a well-seasoned activist with over ten years of experience in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which had been founded at the beginning of the twentieth century. MLK, as leader, was always front and center of the movement and march, and its principal spokesperson—an African American demanding rights for African Americans (Bocandé 2014, 64). By contrast, the 1983 march in France was much more spontaneous, and the marchers had little to no political or activist background. Christian Delorme, a white French priest and coorganizer of the march, was the spokesperson once the marchers reached

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the Élysée Palace, successfully negotiating the ten-year work permit for North African immigrants (which, ironically, Mitterrand ended up granting to all immigrants across the board) because he knew it was an ongoing concern of immigrant worker associations. For Diallo, the fact that a white French person was the instrument of a successful negotiation for something that did not concern him directly is a major difference between the African American and French marches (64). As Martin Luther King intones “I have a dream today,” the black-andwhite medium long shot of him with his arm raised dissolves into a color medium close-up of Thione Niang, the young Senegalese founder of the Give 1 Project in the United States and a onetime member of Barack Obama’s election campaign, encouraging the youth vote. He is filmed in front of the Capitol building as he asserts that he is a testimony to the American dream, having arrived in America as an African immigrant twelve years previously with the equivalent of twenty dollars in his pocket and very little English skills. As part of his Give 1 Project, Niang accompanies ten young African Americans who visit France to glean their own ideas and learn about a struggle for equal rights that is much less well-known than that of the American civil rights movement. Niang wants African American youth to see what is behind French “decor” and begins the tour at the Élysée Palace, where the 1983 march ended. They visit the Palais de Justice and meet the Guyanese-born Minister of Justice, Christiane Taubira, the author of the Taubira Law, which called for the slave trade to be recognized as a crime against humanity. Footage depicting Taubira discussing the issues with the group is intercut with archival footage of the minister presenting the proposed bill on February 18, 1999 at the National Assembly. This is followed by reaction shots of some of the young women in the group, describing how thrilled they were to meet a Black woman of influence in the government (in a country in which they weren’t aware there were Black leaders) and who wore her hair in braids (a normally unacceptable presentation style in the United States). Diallo deftly weaves an ironic commentary into her montage: the footage that follows Taubira presents then-president François Hollande in the Jardin de Luxembourg giving a speech on May 10, 2013 to commemorate the eighth National Day for Remembering the Slave Trade, Slavery, and Their Abolitions. Hollande declares that for the first time, the French republic has recognized the reality of the slave trade, and the

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triumph in his voice and his phrasing of the importance of this event turn the spotlight back on the French as good people who have made a landmark discovery about themselves. The event thus becomes a photo opportunity to highlight France as the beacon of reconciliation and reparation with its former colonies. In her work on the French republic and slavery reparations, Nicola Frith has outlined how, since 2006, May 10 has fulfilled one of the criteria outlined in the (first) Taubira Law (May 21, 2001), which declared the slave trade a crime against humanity and, as a measure of reparation, specified that the abolition of slavery be commemorated annually. Frith argues that in 2013, Hollande’s odd quoting of Aimé Césaire’s phrase “impossible réparation” was, in fact, a not so subtle rebuttal “to the demands of African descendants for recognition and revalorisation within the Republic” (Frith 2015, 214). The film functions as a “decolonization tour.”1 The group walks the land where tragedies and activism occurred—social, political, cultural, and artistic spaces—and meet some of the people involved in activism and human rights and the 1983 march itself. For example, they meet up with Toumi Djaïdja, the originator of the march, at a café. In a very emotional scene, he explains the rise in racist attacks and murders of Maghrebi immigrants and youth in the early 1980s. On June 20, 1983, during a street riot in the ZUP des Minguettes suburb of Lyons, Djaïdja, the son of an immigrant Algerian family, was shot by a police officer while attempting to shield a young boy being attacked by a police dog. During his recovery in hospital, he began to plan a peaceful march to “symbolically” re-create the same route taken by immigrants arriving in southern France and making their way north during the 1950s and 1960s (Reeck 2011, 5). The small group of about thirty marchers grew to some one hundred thousand supporters by the time it reached Paris, with left-wing newspaper Libération headlining the marchers’ arrival in Paris in December at the Élysée Palace to meet with President Mitterand, who promised (but never carried through) to make development of the ZUP and ZUS a national priority. While the marchers were progressing northward to Paris, on November 14, 1983, Habib Grimzi, an Algerian youth on holiday in France, was beaten to death and thrown out the window of the Bordeaux-Vintimille train by three new recruits to the French Foreign Legion, while all the other passengers watched without lifting a finger to stop them. This crime drew added attention to the march and the growing racism in France. In an interview with Anne Bocandé and

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Rokhaya Diallo, activist historian Pascal Blanchard contends that this murder was the turning point of the march because it illustrated the depths of systemic racism in a nation that, with impunity, deliberately ignores and excludes its own citizens, even when they are being murdered (Bocandé 2014, 61). The march helped spawn a similar march in 1984 (Convergences) and the organization SOS Racisme, but by the late 1980s the movement splintered into factions due to differing opinions on the best model to follow: French Republican integration or multiculturalism. But Diallo is still disappointed in the incapacity for autonomy of activism that should have emerged directly from individuals targeted by racism (2014, 65). The juxtapositioning of Martin Luther King (globally—everyone knows him) and Toumi Djaïdja (no one knows who he is) serves to illustrate Diallo’s point about collective “organized amnesia” and the denial of memory (2014, 61). One of the young women on the tour exclaims that it’s too bad more people don’t know about him—they could use him as a resource because he is still here. He helped change the course of history, and knowing your history is so important. Here, Diallo is acknowledging his role as knowledge keeper in the community who could be transmitting ways of knowing to the next generation as a source of empowerment. What she might not yet realize is that by listening to his story and acknowledging its importance, she becomes a link in the chain of transmission of this history and must assume this responsibility in transnational time and space. A useful construct to consider in this context is Laura Marks’s theoretical model of enfolding (forgetting or hiding) and unfolding (remembering) knowledge. According to Marks, “The past persists, enfolded in virtual form, and some of its facets may unfold to some degree in the present” (2015, 11). Stefanie Van de Peer takes Marks’s idea further by suggesting that “sensitive information . . . can be revealed and liberated, or unfolded through the act of ‘listening’ and ‘seeing’ in the audio-visual art of documentary” (2018, 25). This model helps cut across binarisms, showing how knowledge can transcend time and space constraints and journey through transnational and global mediascapes. Ways of thinking and being in two different geographical locations (India [Gandhi] and United States [Martin Luther King Jr.]) and across time periods (early twentieth century and 1960s) are enfolded into another time and space (France, 1980s) and then further enfolded across time and space to contemporary contexts (African-Americans in France, 2013). Unfolding the knowledge reveals global, rhizomatic links

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to philosophies of nonviolent resistance and constitutes a necessary step in the path to activism. The tour group next meets with Bariza Khiari, then-vice president of the French Senate and currently an adviser to President Macron, who describes how she is an example of individual success, having been born near Constantine in Algeria before Independence. She explains that equality is so ingrained in the nation-state’s genes that it is not real; it is not reality. She maintains that individual successes need to be taken to a larger scale, but the political will is not there (this was filmed during the Hollande presidency). She explains to the group that her generation refuses to be renounced and repudiated by the nation like their parents were. They just want to be French. Her generation would also challenge the nation’s myth of universal Republicanism and social, cultural, and political integration disrupting social categories in a system ill-equipped for census reporting or vocabulary descriptors beyond the two categories of “French or foreign” (Reeck 2011, 3). Khiari describes the labels given to immigrants, which range from “beur” to “terrorist.” These categories, argues Caroline Trouillet, are constructed according to specific historical, social, and economic contexts and the politics of hospitality (2014, 84). These categories or labels are built to be static and fixed, with spaces and distances set up in Manichean fashion between “French” and “not really French” and “immigrant” and “not really immigrant.” The spatial and social segregation created by these polarities forces occupants back into static spaces of ethnic origin and sets up the desired category of belonging (“appartenance” as a “Français de souche”) to the French nation as the immigrant’s (“Français issu de l’immigration”) ultimate achievement (2014, 86–88). Issues of citizenship and belonging are always tied to immigration and all related to French colonial history, explains African American writer Jake Lamar, who lives in Paris and meets up with the tour group at a souvenir shop in the Montmartre area, where a quartet of white musicians are playing jazz. He points out that the French discovered African American culture during World War I, when African American soldiers were stationed in Paris and brought jazz with them. He further muses on the power of global flows by indicating that it is ironic that a French quartet is playing their music back to them. He singles out a Banania poster and explains its significance to the group. Five hundred thousand sub-Saharan and North African soldiers fought and died for a land they didn’t know

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anything about, yet their valor is memorialized through a caricature linked to an energy drink.2 Members of the group do not seem overly shocked: one young woman explains that although she had never heard of the Banania brand before, it reminded her of Uncle Ben’s rice and Aunt Jemima pancake mixes. She then reflects that the shocking aspect of this discovery is that in 2013 France, the image is still for sale on the streets of Paris. Lamar explains to the Americans that unlike in America, where racism is very much about skin color, in France racism is much more subtle and complicated. When he is stopped by police in the streets and asked for ID, he is immediately released when they realize he is American. It is not that easy for his African and Caribbean friends because everything is related to France’s colonial history and the cultural baggage that accompanies it. In France, and Europe in general, racial questions are always linked to immigration. They agree that the current situation of Latinos in America is more akin to that of minorities in France than that of Black Americans. One member of the group expounds that because of their work and activism in civil rights, they have a sense of the parallel, but he is interested to hear the opinion of Lamar, who has been a long-standing activist for social justice. He explains that there was a major change in France in 2005 following a series of riots that began in the impoverished Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis) and spread to all minority communities throughout France. It was a real trauma for the nation and the end of the denial. The camera tilts and pans to orient our gaze in the direction of Clichysous-Bois, a mere fifteen kilometers away from the idyllic, romantic scenes of Paris, explains Diallo in voice-over. The camera movement yanks the viewer out of a reverie, out of complacency. As viewers, we are compelled to participate in the history lesson. We are introduced to Fatima Hani, spokesperson for AC Le Feu in Clichy-sous-Bois, who explains to the Americans how on October 27, 2005, two teenagers of North African and sub-Saharan African origins were returning home from a football match and were frightened by police who pursued them. Taking refuge in an Eléctricité de France transformer, they were electrocuted. Outrage spread across France for days as protests mounted. Enough was enough. But from the ruins of burnedout cars and gutted buildings came hope and the collective desire to build a better future for the next generation. The French were forced to acknowledge, at least momentarily, “the presence of the banlieues, to which they had been largely indifferent” and were suddenly confronted with issues of

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racism, unemployment, and police brutality that they had ignored for years. Civic action and voter registration drives ensued, but once the emotion of the events dissipated, collective indifference and denial once again set in (Lapeyronnie 2009, 21). Some of the Give 1 group members build parallels and discuss with their French comrades how in Black America, public, private, and nonprofit sectors work together for the benefit of the whole community and, in the process, carve out new articulations of space. Topographic articulations of space, as evidenced through journeys and movement in accented cinema, are structuring metaphors that are staged through the mise-en-scène of poetic realism or the frantic camera of montage aesthetics to depict changing identity positioning of sub-Saharan or Maghrebi-descended cinema within the larger parameters of French cinema. The pacing of Diallo’s film, for example, often embodies protest movement style as she juxtaposes streeter handheld camera shots with archival footage and static interview close-ups. The film opens up a space of activism, protest, and dialogue. Diallo’s voice-over explains how it is often the case that French citizens “d’origine étrangère” must prove themselves abroad in order to be taken seriously at home. The Give 1 group meets Professor Maboula Soumahoro, associate professor in the English department at the Université François-Rabelais-Tours, who lived and worked in America for ten years before returning to France. She launched Africana History Month in France in May, to honor the Taubira Law, and explains near the end of the film that “when people ask you where you are from, it is to reassure them that you are NOT French, NOT from France.” The question remains, then, can French Republicanism ever be connected to reality? If home is France, then the social, cultural, and political reality needs to be about “a French population at home within France’s borders” (Reeck 2011, 150). I contend that Les marches de la liberté demonstrates what Nigel Reading describes as the “fusion format” of exhibition and display (Allen 2012, 5). Multiple connections of similarities and distinctions function as in a conversation and create a personal relationship between filmmaker and spectator, thus demanding an active audience. Yet, who gets to speak and in which context still seems to be an ongoing struggle in French society, and thus Diallo, via activist film and video, challenges audiences to think about issues of race relations, citizenship, and belonging in contemporary France. The film is a journey of resistance, and just like in the accented context, the journey is more than just “physical and territorial” but is also

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“psychological and philosophical” (2001, 6). Naficy maintains that a significant aspect of the journey is the quest for identity, sloughing off the old one and forging a new one. Identity is an ongoing process of becoming—a performance whereby “each accented film may be thought of as a performance of its author’s identity” (6). Diallo, as an activist filmmaker, is a “permanent Marcher,” just like the denominator espoused by many in the 1983 Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme—always in movement, because stasis means cultural death.

Acknowledgment Special thanks to Sada Niang, Suzanne Crosta, and Alexie Tcheuyap for hosting the brilliant “Women and/in Documentary Practice in Africa” colloquium in Victoria, January 2019. Thanks also go to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for sponsoring the research for this chapter.

Notes 1. I am indebted to Emily Grafton for making this suggestion. 2. In Too Black to Be French (2015), Isabelle Boni-Claverie examines the Banania trope in even more detail. For example, her grandfather, Alphonse Boni, arrived in Angouleme from Ivory Coast in 1924, acquired French citizenship, married a French woman, and became a successful judge. This thread of personal history is intercut with images of Sarkozy delivering his infamous speech in Dakar on July 26, 2007, where he situates Africans outside of history, as though they are the objects of and not the subjects of history.

Bibliography Abderrezzak, Hakim. 2016. Ex-Centric Migrations: Europe and the Maghreb in Mediterranean Cinema, Literature, and Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Allen, Chadwick. 2012. “A Transnational Native American Studies? Why Not Studies That Are Trans-Indigenous?” Journal of Transnational American Studies 4 (1): 1–22. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/82m5j3f5. Behiery, Valerie. 2015. “Contemporary Views: Three Women—Three Artists, Interview with Majida Khattari.” In Benjamin-Constant: Marvels and Mirages of Orientalism, edited by Nathalie Bondil, 254–55. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Bocandé, Anne. 2014. “La Marche de 1983 a une histoire: entretien croisé de Anne Bocandé avec Rokhaya Diallo et Pascal Blanchard.” In Africultures 97: La Marche en heritage, edited by Anne Bocandé, 60–73. Paris: L’Harmattan. Diallo, Rokhaya. “When Will France Admit That Police Racism Is Systemic?” Guardian, International Edition, March 2, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree /2017/mar/02/france-police-racism-hashtag-activism. ———. 2012. A Nous la France! Neuilly-sur-Seine: Michel Lafon.

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Ellerson, Beti. 2017. “African Women in Cinema Dossier: Traveling Gazes: Glocal Imaginaries in the Transcontinental, Transnational, Exilic, Migration, and Diasporic Cinematic Experiences of African Women.” Black Camera: An International Film Journal 8 (2): 272–89. Frith, Nicola. 2015. “Saving the Republic: State Nostalgia and Slavery Reparations in Media and Political Discourses.” Modern & Contemporary France 23 (2): 213–32. Gay, Amandine. 2018. “Director’s Note.” “Speak Up” Screening and Q&A with Filmmaker Amandine Gay. SUNY Purchase College. https://www.purchase.edu/live /events/15532-speak-up-screening-and-qampa-with%20filmmaker. Gourévitch, Jean-Paul. 2000. La France Africaine: Islam, Intégration, Insécurité: Infos et Intox. Paris: Le Prés aux Clercs. Grafton, Emily. Conversation at University of Regina. January 21, 2019. Hathroubi-Safsaf, Nadia. 2013. 1983–2013, La Longue Marche pour l’égalité. Paris: Points sur les i. Kassa, Sabrina. 2011. “Les Indivisibles, Français sans commentaire ! Entretien avec Rokhaya Diallo, fondatrice de l’association.” Africultures, September 26, 2011. http://africultures.com/les-indivisibles-francais-sans-commentaire-10417/?utm _source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=446. Lapeyronnie, Didier. 2009. “Primitive Rebellion in the French Banlieues: On the Fall 2005 Riots.” Translated by Jane Marie Todd. In Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France, edited by Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom, 21–46. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Levine, Alison J. Murray. 2008. “Mapping Beur Cinema in the New Millennium.” Journal of Film and Video 60 (3–4): 42–59. Marcus, Daniel. 2016. “Documentary and Video Activism.” In Contemporary Documentary, edited by Daniel Marcus and Selmin Kara, 187–203. Oxford: Routledge. Marks, Laura U. 2015. Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image. Boston: MIT Press. Naficy, H. 1999. Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. Edited by H. Naficy. New York: Routledge. ———. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nichols, Bill. 1994. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Reeck, Laura. 2011. Writerly Identities in Beur Fiction and Beyond. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Reed, Anthony. 2013. “After the End of the World: Sun Ra and the Grammar of Utopia.” Black Camera 5, no. 1 (Fall): 118–39. Tarr, Carrie. 2005. Reframing Difference: Beur and Banlieue Filmmaking in France. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Trouillet, Caroline. 2014. “Les dérives sémantiques de l’immigration.” Africultures: La Marche en heritage, no. 97, 83–93. Van de Peer, Stefanie. 2018. Negotiating Dissidence: The Pioneering Women of Arab Documentary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Wihtol de Wenden, Catherine. 1991. “North African Immigration and the French Political Imaginary.” Translated by Clare Hughes. In Race, Discourse and Power in France, edited by Maxim Silverman, 98–109. Aldershot, UK: Avebury.

Sheila Petty, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Regina. She has written extensively on issues of cultural representation, identity, and nation in African and African diasporic screen media, and has curated film, television, and digital media exhibitions for galleries across Canada. She is author of Contact Zones: Memory, Origin and Discourses in Black Diasporic Cinema (2008). She is coeditor of the Directory of World Cinema: Africa (2015). Her current research focuses on transvergent African cinemas, new Maghrebi cinemas, and interpretive strategies for analyzing digital creative cultural practices.

3 CHALLENGING DOCUMENTARY PRACTICE A Return to Safi Faye’s Kaddu Beykat Melissa Thackway

Addressing the theme of “Women and, or Women in Documentary Practice in Africa” offers me the interesting and timely opportunity to return to the origins of women’s documentary filmmaking on the continent, and notably to the work of one of its pioneers, Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye. Faye’s work continues to challenge prevailing documentary forms and practices as much today as it did when she started making films in the 1970s. From what is considered her first feature documentary, Kaddu Beykat (Letter from My Village, 1975) to her fiction feature Mossane in 1996, Faye has documented life—and often specifically women’s lives—in her family’s rural Serer region of Senegal and beyond. Her corpus of works include her fiction short La Passante (The Passerby, 1972), her other feature-length docu-fiction Fad’ jal (Grandfather Recounts, 1979), and her shorter docu-fictions Goob na nu (The Harvest Is Over, 1979), Man Sa Yay (I, Your Mother, 1979) Les Ames au Soleil (Souls in the Sun, 1981), Selbe et tant d’autres (Selbe and So Many Others, 1982), Ambassades nourricières (Nourishing Embassies, 1984) and Testito (1989). Here, nearly forty-five years after it was made, I wish to revisit her first feature film, Kaddu Beykat, which, from the outset, departed in many fundamental respects from the classical documentary filmmaking conventions of the time, setting precedents that can still be witnessed in the work of contemporary filmmakers. In so doing, I shall consider Faye’s pioneering role as an African woman filmmaker and draw attention to the overtly militant nature of Faye’s work.

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Faye’s first encounter with filmmaking came from her well-documented meeting with the French ethnographic filmmaker and precursor of cinema verité Jean Rouch at the World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar in 1966.1 At the time she was a primary school teacher with, as Faye herself has described, no particular interest in making films (Haffner 1982, 63–64). Rouch asked her to be in what would become his 1969 film Petit à petit, which Rouch shot in Paris from 1966 to 1969 during the school holidays when Faye was free from teaching. Much has been made of this encounter and of Rouch’s influence on Faye’s later film work, especially as Faye went on to study ethnography in Paris. However, Faye has repeatedly downplayed this influence. Not only did Faye claim not to have liked Petit à petit, which, in her interview with Pierre Haffner conducted in 1978, she called “naïve” and “silly,” but she also went on to insist that “after Rouch’s film, nothing happened. I went back to being a schoolteacher; I went on living my life as I saw fit” (64).2 She has also criticized what can only be described as the “white mentor complex,” or many critics and scholars’ paternalistic desire to identify a guiding Western figure behind many an African filmmaker, as if, in Faye’s own words, “Africans were incapable of doing anything without being overseen.” She added, “That is reductive for Africa” (Faye 2010, La Leçon).3 Indeed, after moving to France in 1970 for her own personal reasons and, as Faye described during a master class at the 2010 Créteil International Women’s Film Festival, feeling frustrated at not being able to answer people’s questions about Africa as she had received a Western education in a colonial mission school, she decided to learn more about Africa’s cultures. She thus enrolled at the Sorbonne to study ethnography, the field in which Africa’s cultures were then taught, before doing a doctorate at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, where her research focused on Serer religion and its relationship with the spirits/ancestors. During the course of her studies at the Sorbonne, once a week, Faye and the other students were required to start exploring ethnographic filmmaking using the university’s film equipment. It was this familiarity with filmmaking tools, she claims, that not only gave her the desire to pursue filmmaking herself but also made her bold enough, as the first African woman candidate, to apply to study cinema and photography at the Louis Lumière film school in Paris, then still very much a white male preserve (Faye 2010, La Leçon). Despite Faye’s academic training in ethnography, which undeniably left a trace on her later film work, what is more fascinating in Kaddu Beykat,

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which literally translates as “the word of the farmer,” is actually its divergence from the agendas and style of ethnographic filmmaking of the time. The very emergence of Africa’s own filmmakers after Independence necessarily disturbed and challenged the underlying principles, assumptions, and approaches of an ethnographic cinema born out of the colonial encounter and Europe’s directing of its gaze at racialized and supposedly exotic Others. As previously suppressed African viewpoints and voices such as Faye’s emerged—along with other formerly excluded silenced and marginalized peoples and groups, including women, who also came to documentary filmmaking across the world in the 1960s and 1970s—they naturally questioned and subverted existing hegemonic voices and representations. Notions such as cinema verité notably begged the question of whose truth, or whose reality. By virtue of their very existence, these alternative voices also posed the question of who is speaking and of authority, and, in the process, exploded notions of documentary objectivity and partiality, forcing the recognition of the importance of situated speech, thinking, and knowledge. But coming more specifically to Faye’s first feature-length film, Kaddu Beykat was shot in her family village in the rural Sine-Saloum region of west-central Senegal. Featuring Faye’s relatives as they go about their daily existences or sometimes enact their own roles, it focuses on the lives, preoccupations, and often arduous farming conditions of this Serer farmerherder community hit by drought and the difficulties induced by the imposition of a peanut monoculture. Capturing the villagers’ quotidian activities in finely composed and contrasted, aesthetically beautiful black-and-white shots, the structure of the film follows the cyclical rhythms of the days, including the sounds that mark the passage of time, from the crowing of the cockerel at dawn to the muezzin’s call to evening prayers; the seasons and their respective labors; and even the cycle of life, from the shots of breastfeeding babies to the poignant final freeze frame of Faye’s grandfather, who, we learn, died just eleven days after the shoot. Filmed during the rainy seasons of 1973 and 1974 with a small crew of technicians from the Louis Lumière film school using bits and pieces of film stock gleaned here and there, and shot always with just one take, the film captures collectively organized farming activities, domestic chores, healing rituals, sacrifices, and celebrations in real time. Woven into this more classical documentary material, however, is a fictionalized romance between two real young villagers, Ngor and Coumba.

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Faye has explained, “In ’74, we realized that a story was necessary based on the villagers’ living conditions. The story of Coumba and Ngor needed to be thought up” (Faye 2010, trans).4 Lending cohesion to the film and providing an overall thread and motor to the narrative, then, this fictionalized romance also enabled Faye to introduce the then-pressing question of rural exodus, imposed by the difficulties of surviving in the village and, in this specific case, by Ngor and his family’s need to raise the money to pay for Coumba’s dowry. The film thus follows Ngor as he goes to work in Dakar, allowing Faye to weave the urban space into the formerly rural film, which henceforth tos-and-fros between the two. It also allowed Faye to introduce and explore the conditions of unqualified urban workers and to address the difficult impact on those left behind by the rural exodus—namely, the girlfriends and wives; Coumba, for example, is seen to fall into a state of depression after Ngor’s departure. This is a theme that Faye developed further in her 1982 documentary Selbe et tant d’autres, and one that also allowed Faye to shift Kaddu Beykat’s focus more specifically onto its female protagonist.5 More than an ethnographic film, then, Kaddu Beykat is better described as a “docu-drama,” which Faye herself has defined as “re-enacted documentaries” but with very little mise-en-scène (Faye 2010, La Leçon).6 Faye has indeed always refused frontiers between film forms, describing everything she has made, including her first fiction film, Mossane, as being based on her lived experiences, her values, her education—in short, on the real. Mise-en-scène, or reconstitution, has, of course, been present in documentary cinema ever since Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North in 1922, yet this blurring of boundaries in Faye’s work may also be seen as characteristic of the lack of compartmentalizing divisions in African cultures and belief systems, and of local oral narrative structures and codes, in which tales frequently shift between registers. Ngor’s journey to the city, whose various stages are filmed at length, and later return to the village is indeed reminiscent of oral literature’s recurrent quest tales and the circularity of their structures, with protagonists returning to their point of departure but changed by the events they experience on the way. Faye’s style, then, like her gaze, as shall be seen later, appears firmly rooted within and infused by the culture of the community that she films. At first view, Kaddu Beykat’s chronicling of village life and its rituals, community-based social organization, mutualized work practices, and

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complementary gender roles appears to be strongly infused with the codes and feel of 1960s/’70s ethnographic film. The film opens as the day begins in the village with a sequence of characteristic static observational long shots of various villagers, documenting their actions as they set about their morning activities: a young man milks a goat; a woman serves steaming rice from a cooking pot; a mother ties a baby to her young daughter’s back; a man washes his face; another mother breastfeeds a toddler while sieving flour. This focus on the quotidian, on the repetitive daily gestures and chores in the domestic space, resonates with the work of other women filmmakers of the 1970s, for whom the personal became political, as they constructed other subjects and realms deemed worthy of filming; the protagonist’s repetitive quotidian domestic gestures in Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (France, 1975) come to mind, for example. But the departure from typical ethnographic film is in fact already established before these seemingly ethnographic images unfold. Immediately before this sequence—and thus right at the beginning of the film— Faye adopts a letter form to directly address the spectator in voice-over, her own voice stating in French, “Je vous écris cette lettre pour vous demander de vos nouvelles. Quant à moi, je me porte bien, Dieu merci. C’est ainsi que commence les lettres chez nous quand on s’écrit” (“I am writing this letter to inquire how you are. As for myself, I am well, thanks be to God. Where I come from, that is how letters begin when we write.”) By adopting this epistolary first-person “I,” Faye positions herself at the start of the film, where documentaries of the time habitually adopted an unsituated, omniscient, and always male authoritarian narrative voice—the so-called voice of God. She also embraces her subjectivity, thereby eschewing documentary/ethnographic filmmaking’s then-purported scientific distance, objectivity, and noninvolvement with the subject—even if subjectivity had, of course, always been present, just simply unavowed. This first-person “I” is, furthermore, as is seen as the film unfolds, a radical prise de parole, or speaking out, in a medium that hitherto erased African subjectivity and silenced both African and women’s voices. It is radical too in the rural Serer culture in which, as Kaddu Beykat shows, women do not assume a public voice—which does not mean, however, as the film again shows, that they have no voice or role in decision-making processes at all. Indeed, as shown in the scenes of both Ngor’s and Coumba’s parents discussing their respective children’s marriage—both scenes are frontally framed, the couples sitting together in

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close proximity, united in the same shot—the women’s opinions and voices are on an equal footing to the men’s in important issues. Faye’s narrative voice positions not only where she is speaking from but also positions her as belonging to this community, her extended family; this is her family home, even if she herself grew up in Dakar. This privileged position of familiarity, which she claims even as a returnee— the connection and identification with a family’s place of origin being very strong in many West African cultures—also breaks with early ethnographic filmmaking, which turned its lens to study other societies and cultures. Fully immersed in the family home village, her gaze, as Matthias De Groof rightly points out, is neither voyeuristic nor detached (De Groof 2018, 431). In situating herself within the community she films, Faye also, unlike many ethnographic filmmakers of the time, importantly establishes in a nonhierarchical relationship with her filmed subjects, whom she clearly respects as equals. Hers is a collaborative approach, as she herself has described: “Even though I may write the script . . . I basically leave the peasants free to express themselves in front of the camera and I listen. My films are collective works in which everybody takes an active part” (Pfaff 1988, 117). Her frequent description in interviews of her “listening” is interesting, for Faye, as a member of this community, speaks its language and is thus actually capable of truly listening/hearing without an interpreter, shifting the intimacy and the power dynamic of the relationship between the person filming and those filmed. In an oral culture too, in which transmission and learning—another key theme in the film, seen, for example, when elders teach youngsters about farming—often come through listening and watching, Faye places herself in the position of the one who listens to and learns from the villagers, who are knowing subjects in their own right, rather than as the all-knowing/knowledgeable filmmaker who gazes at her filmed objects from a position of power. This redresses somewhat the asymmetry characteristic of ethnography’s looking relations—what Paula Amad describes as “the right to look without being looked at” (Amad 2010, 50). Moreover, throughout the film, the villagers repeatedly address Faye’s camera directly or overtly acknowledge the filmmaking process—for example, in the opening sequence as Faye’s voice-over relates her relatives’ reproach: “le spectateur va se moquer de nous parce que nous sommes mal habillés, parce que nous sommes toujours en train de travailler” (“the spectators are going to laugh at us because we are poorly dressed, because we

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are always working”). This self-awareness and reflexivity undermine any passivity on the part of the observed and filmed villagers as they look back into the camera, an action that Amad describes as a form of agency (Amad 2010, 50). Throughout the rest of the film, Faye only parsimoniously assumes the omniscient narrator position when absolutely necessary to give information to contextualize or to guide the spectator, helping them understand certain practices or rituals as they take place on the screen through minimal factual statements, rather than explanatory interpretations. The rest of the time, she leaves the speaking to the villagers themselves, allowing them to express themselves in their own words, rather than speaking in their place. Indeed, in the closing lines of Faye’s letter that ends the film, again conferring on it the structure characteristic of local cyclical conceptions of time and life-state—“La lettre est de moi. Tout le reste est de mes parents agriculteurs. Je les remercie.” (“The letter is by me. All the rest is by my farming relatives. I thank them.”)—Faye insists on the collective nature of her work, rather than positioning herself as an individual creator in the Western tradition. Faye’s collective approach, of course, resonates with the collective social organization that the film foregrounds. Throughout the film, whether in the village family compounds or urban living quarters, family members or friends are seen to come together to eat or sit and discuss important life issues, the camera in proximity and level with them, and thus often low when they are seated on mats or crouching. Faye also frequently films instances of mutual assistance, such as young men and women helping their elders till a field, or young men of the same age group working together to clear a friend’s future father-in-law’s land. Here, the frequently static camera systematically frames people in group shots, set within, and thus as part of their environment, their actions or words unfolding in real time in still frames. At other moments, the camera moves gently with the working villagers, following their gestures. At one instance, for example, the camera first frames, in long shot, a line of younger women helping till an elderly woman’s field; then, gradually moving closer, still always framing the group in lengthy fixed shots, it finally homes in on one or two women in medium/medium close-up, the camera gently espousing the singing women’s rocking movement as they toil in unison, as if in osmosis with them, like a heartbeat accompanying the rhythmic thudding of their hoes, capturing

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both the arduousness of the task and the dynamism of the gestures, plunging us into the moment. Faye’s camera remains unobtrusive throughout the film, not overtly directing or controlling our gaze but leaving our attention to focus, rather, on what is taking place or being said. This allows the villagers the time and space to speak and discuss their reality; the exchanges are indeed often lengthy and captured in their entirety. Rather than simply observing and unveiling “reality,” then, Faye—and by extension we—listen as the villagers speak, bringing to mind André Gardies’s observation that in such films, “Speech is not a short cut, nor can it be cut short. On the contrary, it demands our attention” (Gardies 1989, 137).7 This giving of voice to hitherto ontologically denied and silenced filmed subjects—not only as Africans but also as rural folk—is inherently political, of course. As bell hooks describes, “By identifying themselves as subjects, by defining their reality . . . telling their story,” the oppressed resist and counter dominant forces (hooks 1989, 43). The voice of the filmed villagers is indeed frequently one of protest. Poor, nonliterate, far from the centers of decision-making and power, their discussions nonetheless reveal great clarity and knowledge of the intricacies and injustices created by the introduction of a capitalist model, with its exploitation and commodification of life—frequent mention is made in the film of the relative cost of items, from the price of a pair of shoes (500 CFA francs), to the price obtained for 1.8 kg of millet (40 FCFA), to Ngor’s (never-paid) monthly wages in the city (3500 FCFA), to the farmer’s average annual wage (20 000 CFA)—placing this monetary model in contrast with the repeated instances of local mutual support and aid. Sharp criticism of Senegal’s farming policy, of the problems created by its ongoing peanut monoculture, and of the mechanisms of the villagers’ pauperization and oppression is also voiced. Seen on several occasions convened under the village’s central arbre à palabre, or village agora, where a ritualized form of social and political discourse is articulated, the menfolk’s discussions expose how the transition from their past sustainable subsistence farming to a cash crop monoculture, originally imposed by the colonial powers in the late nineteenth century, and still imposed by the state in the early decades of Independence, has created a productivism system that has damaged the soil, left the farmers dependent on loans from the government or the European Development Fund, and at the mercy of drought and fluctuating world prices, indebted and unable to pay their taxes, critically fragilizing their

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livelihood and undermining their social structures. Faye’s camera again privileges group shots of the men before focusing on individual speakers in close-up, and then again cutting back to medium or long group shots that always situate the individual as part of a group again. The camera again predominantly films in fixed shot, low down at the sitting men’s level as they talk together. Their overt criticism of the government’s policy reaches its apogee when the Western-dressed schoolteacher who has joined them— but who sits on a chair, not on the mats or tree branches with the farmers, indicating his different social status—reads the newspaper aloud at their request; in it, the government is cited as repeatedly stating, “Notre politique est généreuse” (“Our policy is generous”). Exasperated, the men abruptly cut him off, one by one refuting the claims of the article, their words creating an anaphor—“Ma politique, c’est . . .” (“My policy is . . .”)—as they in turn describe their difficulties. The sequence ends on a frontal close-up of Faye’s grandfather, the elder of the group, who directly addresses the camera: “Tout ça, ce n’est pas notre politique. Ma politique, c’est que six mois par an, je ne mange pas à ma faim” (“None of that is our policy. My policy is that six months a year, I don’t have enough to eat”), directly challenging the government. Elsewhere, too, other phrases, such as “L’arachide nous tue” (“Peanut-growing is killing us”), repeat like a leitmotif. And the images of Faye’s late grandfather’s direct question—“Si elle [l’arachide] épuise le sol, à quoi sert-elle ?” (“If it exhausts the soil, what good is it?”)—is repeated in the final moments of the film over a freeze frame of him looking directly into the camera as Faye’s voice-over emphatically concludes, “Ceci est la parole du paysan. Kaddu beykat” (“This is the word of the farmer”), leaving no doubt as to this word or voice’s political charge. In giving the men this space to speak, Faye also captures their role as active agents of their own change. They are filmed, for example, discussing instigating drought reduction measures, crop diversification, and whether they should take political action again as they did in 1970, when they refused to grow as much peanut crop, halving production and thereby forcing prices up and making the government cancel their debts. Faye thus highlights their agency, valorizes their own local knowledge, and allows them their dignity. Faye uses her film to reveal and denounce the impact of state policy on the lives of rural communities like her own; Kaddu Beykat thus clearly diverges from the purportedly apolitical nature of most ethnographic film work, whose claims to objectivity and neutrality never, of

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course, stopped it from often being an ideologic vehicle and reproducing the coloniality of looking relations, as already discussed. Faye’s film clearly goes well beyond the simple observational documentary mode, then, to analyze and to embrace critique, making it a means of communication and consciousness-raising in a largely nonliterate society, as was commonly the case with other African filmmakers of her generation. Finally, in documenting and studying societies and their cultures, in recording their practices, ethnographic filmmaking has, by its very nature, long tended to focus on what ethnography problematically deemed “traditional,” or unchanging, cultures, often with a desire to capture and document these before they disappeared.8 Its gaze, then, has often been turned to the past. Faye’s film, however, despite its focus on the rural space, culture, and life was, particularly if one remembers that at the time of its making approximately 70 percent of Senegal’s population was rural, very much a film about the present, in all its syncretism and dynamism. At first, the film does appear to construct a sharp contrast between the rural and the urban spaces, reinforced by the contrast in the way in which they are filmed. When, for example, a traveling salesman passes through the village, stopping before the arbre à palabres to offer the men his wares, the fixed camera films the group frontally in a wide long shot as the men exchange lengthy salutations and amiabilities, welcome the stranger, and offer him kola nut. This contrasts directly with a scene approximately two-thirds of the way through the film, when Ngor goes to work in Dakar. In the urban space, where the ambient soundtrack is considerably noisier, the pace more frenetic, and the rhythm of the montage edgier, he, the stranger, enters a rich woman’s compound looking for work. The reception the women give him is immediately more hostile; they do not return his salutations and berate him for not knocking—something he is unsure how to do, there being no gates to knock on in his village—introducing contemporary hierarchical class/ power relations into the equation. In the urban space too, the film veers more into reconstruction, blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction more freely. While in the village the camera is predominantly static and films at a level with the villagers, in the city Faye frequently adopts extreme high angles or moving shots of Ngor endlessly walking and looking for work, the overbearing angle appearing to crush him, accentuating his oppressing isolation at this point. At other times, the camera adopts his subjective point of view, notably when he enters the unfamiliar wealthy

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district with its wide empty streets and gated villas, itself a contrast to the bustling, noisy, labyrinthine alleys of tightly packed wooden constructions in the working-class district he lodges in; here, the camera’s movement augments our identification with his alienation in this space. Similarly, on arrival in the city, Ngor nearly gets hit by a car as he crosses the busy street without looking, yet the camera’s position in the car itself confirms that this is a reenactment. The first time Ngor leaves his new boss’s house after negotiating his position and wages, the negotiation continues off-screen as he walks off down the street, creating another rupture with the real-time capture. Looking more closely, however, Faye goes well beyond this binary opposition to, on the contrary, reveal the complexity and embeddedness of the film’s different spaces and the circulations between them. Multiple traces of the so-called outside world are seen to be present in village, where manufactured enamel and aluminum bowls sit side by side with locally produced calabashes; where the villagers keep up with the news and politics on the radio and in the newspapers; where the teacher and Western-dressed youths, presumably students, speak French; where Ngor’s returnee uncle recounts his former life in France, reeling off the names of the cities in which he lived; where Ngor returns from the city, now smoking, and introduces his friend to cigarettes. The village—whose geographic remoteness is felt in the lengthy filming of the different stages of Ngor’s journey to Dakar on foot, by cart, then by intercity bus—is not a static, cut-off place, then; it is both connected to the world and a site of circulation. Not only have the local farming practices and lifestyle been changed by the introduction of capitalism and monoculture, but people’s circulation too: the traveling salesman comes and goes; the students have clearly returned from studying in the city; Ngor and his uncle travel further afield and return again, all bringing their experiences and other knowledge back with them to share. Similarly, Faye also undoes the enduring cliché of an unchanging, rural space.9 Even if the pace of life and of change is of course different to that of the city, the villagers are not as conservative as often imagined. Their discussions demonstrate that they keep abreast with contemporary reflection, understand international relations, and are more than willing to adopt improved farming practices, just as, even if constrained to do so by economic circumstances, they adapt ritual practices to the times—for example, Ngor’s family consenting to sacrifice a goat, rather than the normally required cow to celebrate the young

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couple’s wedding. Elsewhere too, the film reveals mutations in wider Senegalese society that come with urbanization. This is perhaps most striking in the inversion of the gendered yet complementary distribution of chores witnessed in the transition from the village to the city. In the village, the women are indeed seen to be in charge of cooking and washing, while only the men gather to discuss affairs under the tree. Similarly, as Faye’s voice states over images of women sowing seed, rice growing is reserved for the women and peanut and millet growing for the men, the two genders laboring separately in their fields. In the city, however, the lengthy fixed shot of Ngor sitting on a low stool in his boss’s yard handwashing her clothes in a metal tub before him on the ground directly mirrors that of the early fixed shot of Coumba sitting in an identical position in her village compound doing the laundry. Not only is Ngor doing a task here that in the village is assigned to the women, but the slightly high angle of the shot contrasts with the level shot of Coumba, perhaps in a suggestion of the power/class dynamic at play here too between Ngor and his unscrupulous employer, played by Faye’s aunt. Even more interestingly, perhaps, the film also reveals how traces of village life, organization, and practices are transposed to and survive in the city space, albeit in adapted forms. Ngor and the young men he lives with in a shared room, itself a perpetuation of a communal lifestyle, are indeed several times filmed in group conversations, effectively re-creating the collective discussion space of village arbre à palabre in the alleys of their working-class neighborhood. Their discussions of their difficult work conditions in the city, their exploitative bosses, and their desire to return or not to the village echo those of the village men discussing their farming difficulties. While life in the city is undeniably more oppressive, Ngor and his contemporaries to a degree overcome the isolation and the individualistic environment by re-creating these communal spaces. And the ties with family members in the city and back in the village remain unbroken, as Ngor is seen several times visiting his Dakar-based uncle, to whom he also entrusts money to take back to his parents, demonstrating the flow of capital between the spaces and the unbroken system of mutual support. More than a dichotomic rural/urban opposition, then, Faye portrays a complexity of interlocking concentric circles in and between which her characters freely circulate, from the village family compound, to the communal village spaces, to the fields, to the wider countryside that Ngor travels through,

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to the intermediary town, to the capital, Dakar, with its own interweaving spaces, to the far-off France evoked in his uncle’s words. In conclusion, this analysis of Kaddu Beykat has sought to foreground some of the many ways in which Safi Faye’s pioneering documentary filmmaking adapted, but above all boldly diverged from, the prevailing conventions and practices of documentary, and more specifically ethnographic filmmaking of the time. Situated, subjective, and analytical rather than simply observational, the political subversiveness of Kaddu Beykat’s committed message, which was far from documentary’s then habitual claims to objectivity or impartiality, certainly did not escape the Senegalese authorities, who, at the request of the Minister of Agriculture, President Senghor’s nephew, immediately censored the film. This deliberately committed stance situates Faye’s work very much within the broader vein of politically engaged cinema of her contemporary African filmmakers. Obviously a woman filmmaker, it seems fitting to describe Faye as a “womanist” one too, to borrow the term Alice Walker adopted to describe Black feminism, its centering of the perspectives of Black women, its viewing of their experiences in relation to both sexism and racism, but also its theorizing of these experiences in connection and in solidarity with Black men (Walker 1983). Like many African feminists too, Faye has indeed frequently insisted on the central place of women in the Serer matrilineal society, on their independence of mind and self-sufficiency, and their active participation as partners to the menfolk. This complementary, as opposed to oppositional, nature of male-female relations is indeed manifest in Kaddu Beykat, as Faye focuses on the village women and men’s shared oppressions. Women’s determination, resilience, and lack of submissiveness in the face of patriarchal domination is something that Faye continued to develop in her subsequent works, and notably in Selbe et tant d’autres and Mossane, increasingly foregrounding women’s experiences and voices. Positioned within both women’s and African filmmaking, then, Faye’s cinema remains above all one of challenge.

Notes 1. Developed in France in the late 1950s to early 1960s with the introduction of new handheld 16 mm film cameras and portable synchronous sound equipment, cinema verité, named after Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda, was originally theorized by sociologist Edgar Morin in a January 1960 article in France-Observateur entitled “Pour un nouveau

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‘cinéma-vérité,’” and first applied in the film he codirected with Jean Rouch, Chronique d’un été (France, 1961). Morin and Rouch strove to move away from the idea of simply documenting reality on film. They thus embraced mise-en-scène, the direct implication of the filmmaker and filmed protagonists, and cinematic reflexivity, and advocated using the camera and montage to reveal the “vérité profonde,” or the deep and hidden truth in the situations filmed. 2. Unless otherwise stated, all French citations are translated into English by the author. The original shall also be provided for French speakers: “Après le film de Rouch, il n’y a rien eu, je suis redevenue institutrice, j’ai continué ma vie comme je l’entendais.” 3. “L’Africain ne peut rien faire sans être chapeauté. . . . C’est réducteur pour l’Afrique.” 4. “En ’74, on s’est rendu compte qu’il fallait une histoire autour de la condition de la vie des paysans. Il fallait imaginer l’histoire de Coumba et de Ngor.” 5. For further discussion of Selbe et tant d’autres, see Thackway (2007, 153–54). 6. “Des documentaires rejoués.” Faye went on to add, “Autour de ces éléments, converge une petite histoire, et souvent c’est une histoire d’amour, qui fait le lien, qui est le fil conducteur.” (“Around these elements converges a little story—often a love story—which functions as the link, as the narrative thread.”) 7. “La parole ne sert pas à écourter, pas plus qu’elle ne saurait être écourté. Au contraire, elle demande à être écoutée.” 8. The familiar description of African societies, cultures, and practices as “traditional” and unchanging is a construction, as Terence Ranger argues in his seminal chapter “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.” Here, Ranger describes the processes by which European colonialists and Africanists invented African traditions for Africans, transposing their own models and references to practices that did not necessarily have an equivalent. Frequently misreading local customs, multiple identities, and belongings, which, in the nineteenth century tended to be flexible and changing, Europeans “set about to codify and promulgate these traditions (partly through a desire to document, partly through a desire to control), thereby transforming flexible custom into hard prescription” (Ranger 2012, 598). 9. Who can forget French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s infamous speech at Cheick Anta Diop University in Dakar, July 26, 2007, in which he stated, “Le paysan africain, qui depuis des millénaires, vit avec les saisons, dont l’idéal de vie est d’être en harmonie avec la nature, ne connaît que l’éternel recommencement du temps rythmé par la répétition sans fin des mêmes gestes et des mêmes paroles.” (“The African villager, who, for thousands of years, has lived with the seasons, whose ideal is to be in harmony with nature, knows nothing but the eternal recommencement of time rhythmed by the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words.”)? For the full French transcription, see https:// www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2007/11/09/le-discours-de-dakar_976786_3212.html.

Bibliography Amad, Paula. 2013. “Visual Riposte: Looking Back at the Return of the Gaze as Postcolonial Theory’s Gift to Film Studies.” Cinema Journal 52, no. 3 (Spring): 25–48. De Groof, Matthias. 2018. “Ethnographic Film’s Relation to African Cinema: Safi Faye and Jean Rouch.” Visual Anthropology 31 (4–5): 426–44.

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Ellerson, Beti. 2004. “Africa through a Woman’s Eyes: Safi Faye’s Cinema.” In Focus on African Films, edited by Françoise Pfaff, 185–202. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Faye, Safi. 2010. “La Leçon de cinéma de Safi Faye.” Festival International de Films de Femmes de Créteil et du Val de Marne (April 2–11,). https://www.dailymotion .com/video/xcmkn9. ———. 2010. Trans-Europe-Afrique Gala Opening Speech, Festival International de Films de Femmes de Créteil et du Val de Marne (April 2–11). https://www.dailymotion .com/video/xcukme?fbclid=IwAR3hN9lcxlgMHmgrkPk9ah0YySEPiMg1I5lA5mZcg 0yuxdlHDcaAXZ7Li_o. Gardies, André. 1989. Cinéma d’Afrique noire francophone: L’Espace miroir. Paris: L’Harmattan. Haffner, Pierre. 1982. “Jean Rouch jugé par six cinéastes d’Afrique noire.” In “Jean Rouch, un griot gaulois,” edited by Réné Prédal, special issue, CinémAction 17 (February): 62–76. hooks, bell. 1989. “Feminist Scholarship: Ethical Issues.” In Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, 42–48. Boston: South End. Pfaff, Françoise. 1988. Twenty-Five Black African Filmmakers: A Critical Study with Filmography and Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Ranger, Terence. 1992 [1983]. “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 211–59. Cambridge: Canto. Thackway, Melissa. 2003. Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Walker, Alice. 1983. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt.

Melissa Thackway lectures in African cinema at Sciences-Po and the Institut des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) in Paris. She is author of Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Representations in SubSaharan Francophone African Film (2003) and coauthor, with the filmmaker, of Reel Resistance: The Cinema of Jean-Marie Teno (2020).

4 REVISITING THE “DOMESTIC ETHNOGRAPHY” APPROACH IN KHADY SYLLA’S UNE FENÊTRE OUVERTE El Hadji Moustapha Diop In the wake of her untimely death in October 2013, Khady Sylla’s work is increasingly commanding serious attention among scholars in African and Francophone studies. Reviews and essays attest to a newly prevailing critical consensus that Sylla is a complex documentary filmmaker fully deserving of her place among an elite group of women documentarists such as, inter alia, the late Assia Djebar (Algeria/France), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), Monique Agénor (France / Island of Reunion), Isabelle Boni-Clavérie (Ivory Coast / France), and Yaba Badoe (Ghana), who, from their positionality as Africans or diasporic minoritarians of mixed heritage, shuttle with disconcerting ease the liminal space separating literature and filmmaking.1 Incidentally, this renewed interest in and posthumous recognition of Sylla as a prominent auteur also signal a second wave of reception of her work as a whole, given that greater attention is now paid to her dual status as writer and documentarist. Thus, Françoise Pfaff, in charting her atypical artistic itinerary, deems it to be highly significant that Sylla was “a writer before she became a filmmaker” (Pfaff 2013, 224), while Odile Cazenave evinces an acute sensitivity to the “echography” inhering in Sylla’s films and literary texts, or resonating with other African films (Cazenave 2018, 50–52). A new critical gaze comes into its own, then, with a clear, easy to deploy interpretive spectrum: from a diachronic standpoint, some seem to take it for granted that Sylla crossed to the other side of the fence, while others are more concerned with Sylla’s continuous experiments with old

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media (video), as in her debut short Les Bijoux (1997), and new media (digital video), as in Une Fenêtre ouverte (2005), and her exploration of the affinities between new and traditional forms of oral expression, as with taasu in Colobane Express (1999) and spoken word poetry / slam in Le Monologue de la muette (2008).2 Yet the sharp contrast between the meandering networks of signification at play in the literary texts and the straightforward, far less convoluted pathways of meaning of the documentary works is, I believe, cause for a more balanced approach. As Jean-Marie Volet rightly pointed out in a rare review of Sylla’s oft-overlooked debut novel, Le Jeu de la mer (1992), one is grappling with a text wherein “the plot is situated at the intersection of the detective novel and the fantastic” (Volet 1995, 376), with a highly ambivalent narrative that starts out in the strong, cocksure strides of rational discourse but gradually overlaps with the marvelous and the supernatural, so that in fine the codes of the detective novel, the marvelous, and the folktale cancel each other out. In a similar vein, Valérie Orlando rightly alerts to the fact that “[Les Bijoux] reflects Sylla’s background as an author and her previous literary work [Le Jeu de la mer, 1992], which explores women’s daily lives” (Orlando 2007, 458), thus drawing a line of continuity that complicates matters for any critique predicated on the interpretive codes of a single genre or mode, either verbal or visual. To date, the study that best exemplifies this nuanced critical pas de deux with Sylla’s creative versatility is Odile Cazenave’s essay on Le Monologue de la muette, a medium-length documentary on the plight of domestic workers, often illiterate women from underprivileged and rural backgrounds, in contemporary Senegalese society. Cazenave situates this empathy-filled work within the wider context of postcolonial Francophone cinema, as the latter found itself, from the early ’90s on, forced to contend with the social repercussions of neoliberal austerity policies in the Global South, and “the phenomenon of globalization as it translates into daily life” (Cazenave 2018, 51). In so doing, Cazenave maps out a field of magnetic resonances where plurality of expression, multiplicity of points of view, fragmentation and discontinuity, and the dialogic grain of visual and acoustic images are the formal hallmarks of a new aesthetics that, in Sylla’s films, as well as in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako and Djibril Mambety’s Hyenas, seeks to convey the experiential reality of all the women ground down by the juggernaut of globalization, and to amplify the voices of the teeming multitudes of a

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global underclass, men and women, Black and white, citizens and denizens, all now toiling and sweating under a neoliberal dispensation. In Une Fenêtre ouverte, the catalytic force of this ethics of transindividual agency, this constant desire, in Sylla, to combine “a literary poetic narrative with a filmic narrative, self-representation with [an] analysis of contemporary Senegalese society” (Cazenave 2018, 55), is harder to gauge, let alone tease out. This is partly due to what Sasha Rossman calls, in an eloquent phrase, “a conceptual embrace of opacity” (Rossman 2014, 258). This can be already sensed in Sylla’s Le Jeu la mer, with its dysnarrative texture à la Robbe-Grillet.3 More crucially, Une Fenêtre ouverte signals a shift in that Sylla’s visual aesthetics falls under the ethical head of a certain care of the Other/self.4 Indeed, Sylla uses Aminta Ngom as a foil to attend to her own psychic conflicts and malêtre, hence the “troubling proximity” evoked in Olivier Barlet’s short review of this documentary. Likewise, in her study, Bronwen Pugsley tries to frame the discussion around issues of performative aesthetics, self-confession, and the ways such an ethics of care plays out in the context of the autobiographical documentary essay and domestic ethnography. The viewer gradually enters a hall of mirror images that alternately refer to Sylla and to her friend, evincing that “co-implication” characteristic of domestic ethnography whereby the latter “functions as a vehicle of self-examination, a means through which to construct self-knowledge through recourse to the familial [or familiaro] other” (Renov 2008, 218).5 To date, Pugsley’s is the only full-length scholarly study devoted to Une Fenêtre ouverte.6 This article engages with issues related to the critical methodology underlying “Ethical Madness? Khady Sylla’s Documentary Practice in Une Fenêtre ouverte,” a study that I deem exemplary in more than one respect. Indeed, Pugsley traces out with great finesse the aesthetic dimension and ethical edges of this documentary. Drawing on Rachel Gabara’s insightful essay on David Achkar’s Allah Tantou to stage a preliminary discussion on “the theoretical dilemma of cinematic autobiography,” Pugsley makes the case for Sylla’s documentary as a “domestic ethnography” by minutely detailing the formal features that situate self-inscription and intersubjectivity within the framework of a dense, evocative, at times lyrical performative documentary (Pugsley 2012, 211). Notwithstanding her extreme theoretical sophistication and the self-indulging abstraction of some lines of argument, Pugsley never allows the categories brought to bear on Une Fenêtre ouverte to take precedence over the latter as the main focus of

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critical analysis and discussion.7 Thus, every point of argument is spelled out in its smallest lineaments as a result of an intense close viewing experience, not so much to nail the argument as to leave open the possibility of a critique arising from a likewise sustained engagement with this documentary, not with the concepts and analytical constructs, however relevant or problematic, arrayed to make sense of Une Fenêtre ouverte. In the argument expounded below, I reconsider some of the aesthetic modalities detailed in Pugsley’s study, not so much for the sake of citational aggregation as to try out the consistency of these formal features (camera angles, varying shot scales and values, and disjunctive editing style) in the two interactive moments staged with Aminta’s mother and daughter, respectively. Much is made of the rough performative edges of Sylla’s cinema vérité–style documentary, yet Pugsley glosses over the sequences where such performativity, paradoxically enough, is marshaled to heighten the viewer’s awareness of the elaborate communicative ethics of silence governing the interaction with the two women most affected by Aminta’s mental health status. My overriding claim is that in so doing, Khady Sylla actualizes this “potential for proximity without the violence of appropriation” tagged as the redeeming virtue of video performances for documentary and archival purposes, from its early days in the ’80s onward (Renov 2008, 155–56). However, a different contextualization is in order, as the framework of my subsequent discussion, while overlapping with Pugsley’s, is more consonant with the salience of gender issues for theorizing documentary aesthetics, genres, and modes in postcolonial Africa.

African Documentary Studies: An Overview of Theoretical and Practical Issues In “Filmer les colonies, filtrer le colonialisme,” her contribution to Le livre noir du colonialisme, the mammoth collection edited by Marc Ferro, Sylvie Dallet points out that “colonial power is often conveyed through the forcible recourse to typical genres such as the epic or the novel, whereas drama, melodrama and documentary lend themselves more readily to the vision of the vanquished” (Dallet 2003, 941–42).8 The status of documentary as a privileged tool of resistance and emancipation for formerly colonized, marginalized subjects is precisely what Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, in “Toward a Third Cinema,” set their sight on: “The cinema known as documentary, with all the vastness that the concept has today, from educational

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films to the reconstruction of a fact or a historical event, is perhaps the main basis of revolutionary film-making. Every image that documents, bears witness to, refutes or deepens the truth of a situation is something more than a film image or purely artistic fact” (qtd. in Winston et al. 2016, 52). Yet there is a stark contrast between the two “takes” on documentary’s subversive edge discussed here. As Philip Rosen points out in his insightful essay, “Document and Documentary: On the Persistence of Historical Concepts,” for third cinema practitioners “documentary has always offered, in Paul Willemen’s words, the possibility of ‘an artisanal, relatively low-cost cinema working with a mixture of public and private funds, enabling directors to work in a different way and on a different economic scale from that required by Hollywood and its various national-industrial rivals’” (Rosen 1993, 77). Arguably, this is the gist of Getino and Solana’s apologetics, their declamatory flamboyance, typical of artistic manifestos, notwithstanding. In other words, there is a line of demarcation between historical and theoretical conceptions of the form, one that is still enforced, as most studies, research papers, and publications tend to rest content with merely retracing the “origins” of documentary practices in the African colonial context—as does Sylvie Dallet in her broad overview of French colonialism’s visual apparatuses.9 Relatedly, in Black African Cinema and African Cinema: The Politics of Culture, two oft-cited overviews of African film history, both Frank Ukadike and Manthia Diawara devote large sections to the corpus of “educational films” screened across colonial Africa. The heart of the matter here is that never, at any point in their rise and fall, did colonial empires display “ocularphobic” tendencies, to use Martin Jay’s coinage.10 Indeed, when it came to the administration of their peripheries, they exhibited more than a passing interest in putting to efficient use a new medium that, born only a decade after the November 1884–February 1885 Berlin Conference, was coextensive with their phase of global territorial expansion.11 Nonetheless, the question as to whether documentary impulses and practices, under the current postcolonial dispensation, can be regarded as a legacy of colonial propaganda tactics remains a contentious point—at the very least, it bears further research. To be sure, the visual archives of colonialism hold tremendous documentary value for Africanist historians and film scholars, but the documentary aesthetics underlying it all warrants a minute analysis and compelling demonstration before one can advance the claim—somewhat

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overweening—that visual tropes and scopic regimes deployed by African filmmakers to educate the masses (narration in the high and mighty voice of God style, classical continuity editing, shot selection according to the binaries of colonial discourse such as city/country, urban/rural, tradition/ modernity, etc.) are a direct emanation of roving film units spreading the secular gospel of the civilizing mission all across colonial Africa. Such tensions usually translate into fractured fields of study and freighted agendas. It comes as little surprise, then, that research methodologies in African studies and African film studies, when it comes to construing the documentary as a disciplinary object, although overlapping in some areas of contextual description, are incompatible as far as content analysis. In African studies, film is regarded as a source material imbued with mere empirical value as a bibliographical datum (Roberts 1987), or as “contrast material” used to shed light on the epistemology of putatively more robust and serious Africanist historical work (Bickford-Smith and Mendelsohn 2007).12 In this configuration, films such as Sembene Ousmane’s Camp Thiaroye, Dani Kouyaté’s Keïta: The Heritage of the Griot, Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season, and Raoul Peck’s Lumumba (the HBO-produced version), to name a few, are held up to the standards of the Africanist mode of historical analysis.13 In African film studies, the investment in documentary filmmaking proceeds from a markedly different angle. Here the visual contents of film archives are not confined in an ancillary role as mere evidentiary tools or contextual appendages.14 However, given that many African fiction films do not shy away from mustering documentary techniques or that most African filmmakers have traditionally regarded the documentary as a transit area, a purgatory on their journey to the higher circles of “auteur” cinema, the issue proves a tangle of loose ends that, at the moment, cannot be tied into a tight knot.15 In other words, unlike Africanists secure in their methodological tools and categories, African film scholars have to contend with the vagaries of a field riddled with contradictory impulses and dissonant dynamics. It is not so much that postcolonial African documentary, Francophone or otherwise, is, to borrow a famous phrase, “a misidentified film object” (Gauthier 2011, 5), as that documentary itself remains essentially an “unidentified film object,” as can be gleaned from Frank Ukadike’s engagement with its attendant theoretical issues over nearly three decades.16

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Both in “African Cinematic Reality: The Documentary Tradition as an Emerging Trend” and its revised version, “The Other Voices of the Documentary: Allah Tantou and Afrique, je te plumerai,” Ukadike laid the groundwork for a delineation of the field of African documentary studies by drawing on the formal categories Bill Nichols forged in Representing Reality. The theoretical discussion is framed in terms of “issues of formal structuration, experimental modalities, and modes of address” in Allah Tantou and Africa, I’ll Fleece You (Ukadike 1995, 88). A salient feature of documentaries addressing political issues, as Nichols notes, and as Ukadike echoes approvingly in his essay, is their mix-and-match style (Nichols 2010, 32; Ukadike 1995, 91). Thus, outgrowing the historicist reductionism of Black African Cinema, Ukadike evinces an acute interest in documentary as a mode of discourse. It is interesting to note that, of late, this theoretical framework has been enlarged to include considerations on hybridity from a different vantage point, more in line with the problematization of genres and subgenres. For instance, Rachel Gabara in “Mixing Impossible Genres” starts out from the same premises as Ukadike (i.e., the prominence of visual experimentation and stylistic hybridation in Achkar’s film), but these formal traits are tied to issues of self-confession, autobiography, autofiction, and how documentary can be suited, as an overarching film genre, to modes of first-person narration whereby a performative documentary such as Achkar’s, by “mixing autobiography and biography, [articulates] the individual, the personal, the singular, the first person, into history” (Gabara 2003, 335). In a similar vein, Maria Loftus (2010) explores the tendency for postcolonial Francophone African documentaries to embrace hybrid genres such as docufiction (Mamadou Sarr and Paulin Vieyra’s Afrique-sur-Seine, 1955) and ethnofiction (Safi Faye’s Letter from my Village, 1974). In a recent contributory piece, Ukadike falls back on his favored historical explanatory framework, arguing, among other things, that Black African cinema’s tendency, in its early phase, to mix fictional and documentary elements in every feature can be traced back to the training in film school and professional careers of “pioneer” filmmakers: “There is a common pattern of overseas film-school experience followed by official government or television documentary production leading to features. . . . It is little wonder, then, that when these directors made features documentary technique[s] loomed large. Many of the first African-made African fiction

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films, although of course structured as fictional narratives, also exhibit a pronounced documentary/fictional synthesis” (Ukadike 2013, 220). A cursory glance at the filmography of, say, the Senegalese Sembene Ousmane is enough to bear out this astute observation—however reductive. Take Borom Sarret, where the “documentary window,” as Nichols terms it in that famous eponymous subsection of his seminal Representing Reality, meant to provide insight into the (real) world, emerges through the mediation of a narrative about a (possible) world. With or without the recourse to voice-over narration, this filmic fable provides the blueprint to what Manthia Diawara, in an attempt to capture the dominant motif running through all of Sembene’s films, rightly construes as “a naturalistic and documentary approach to creating fiction out of reality” (Diawara 2010, 95).17 Thus, in the case of Black Girl, next to its uncompromising neorealist style, there is the archival footage of the opening sequence (the harbor in Marseilles) and of the closing sequence in France (summer vacationers sunbathing on a Riviera beach in Nice); there is also the Griersonian “creative treatment” and repurposing of popular allegories, fables, and legends as contre-actualités in Mandabi, Xala, and Guelwaar; finally, there are the “counter-narratives” (Cham 2003, 264) of the historical trilogy Emitai, Ceddo, and Camp Thiaroye, films that ran afoul of both African political censors and Africanist scholars, in great part due to Sembene’s stated aim of (re)shaping cultural memory by building a visual archive of the most unsavory moments in the precolonial and colonial history of Senegal and, by implication, French West Africa—from the standpoint of his unrepentantly rugged artistic militancy.18 A similar point can be made with regard to other luminaries of third cinema. However, if the theoretical issues attendant to the fiction/nonfiction film binary entails such high stakes for postcolonial African film scholarship, it is not necessarily in respect of the “pioneer” and monumentalizing narrative of African film history.19 In postcolonial Africa, documentary, conceptualized as a set of practices, is tied to the emergence of women’s voices in the public sphere.20 As Michael Renov observes, “by 1990, any chronicler of documentary history would note the growing prominence of work by women and men of diverse cultural backgrounds in which the representation of the historical world is inextricably bound up with selfinscription” (2008, 176). Although Renov was focused on racial, sexual, and gender minorities in the West, this was also particularly the case in Africa

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during the last decade of the last century, with a second wave of civil society protests sweeping over many countries, especially in the Francophone world.21 Tellingly enough, Ukadike’s “African Cinematic Reality: The Documentary Tradition as an Emerging Trend” did cast such issues in a broad historical perspective, but the formal analysis of what was then termed, with regard to Allah Tantou and Africa, I’ll Fleece You, the “filmed essay in documentary dialect,” primes over any critical reflection on the nexus of gender politics and genre aesthetics (Ukadike 1995, 94).22 In Sisters of the Screen, an inverse relationship between African film history and theory obtains, as Beti Ellerson amply chronicles the emergence of women’s voice in African film, video, and television, but here theoretical matters, formal and generic issues, and the performative aesthetics of self-inscription Renov saw as emblematic of the gender inflection and minoritarian politics of documentary practices around the early ’90s, are shortchanged for strident sloganeering.23 In a more recent essay, “Onscreen Narratives, Offscreen Lives: African Women Inscribing the Self,” Ellerson, not unlike Sawadogo in his periodic monograph, makes a brief allusion to Sylla’s Une Fenêtre ouverte in a short paragraph, noting that “self-inscription has been a critical way to reveal parts of her personality through her films” (Ellerson 2018, 468). As with the other filmmakers arrayed for discussion, the broad-sweep empirical approach precludes any close analysis holding out the possibility of a revealing insight into the formal procedures underlying such inscriptions of the self, including her own directorial presence in the film version of Sisters of the Screen (473).24 All the same, an argument can be advanced that postcolonial critical and theoretical perspectives converge around the issue of documentary as “a key site of epistemological problematization” (Rosen 1993, 80).25 Rachel Gabara’s incisive study is inscribed within this framework. The critical angle is to show in what ways newer documentary practices, especially in works by women, can be regarded as “a kind of experiential compass guiding the work toward its goals as embodied knowledge” (Renov 2008, 176). The experiential thrust inherent in Une Fenêtre ouverte lies at the heart of Bronwen Pugsley’s study, and in this regard the fact that Renovian pronouncements loom large comes as little surprise. However, that little attention is paid to long-standing debates in African film scholarship around social gnosis and how relevant the latter can be to an evaluation of the formal consistency of a postcolonial work, fiction or documentary, is hard to

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fathom. Yet, rather than mount another self-righteous critique of “Western universalism” or rue the “Eurocentric bias” informing an otherwise stimulating and insightful essay, the following elaborations are a dual attempt to plot out lines of continuity within Sylla’s growth cycles as an artist, and to situate Une Fenêtre ouverte within the orbit of postcolonial Francophone documentary practices that embed their truth-claims deep into the superimposed strata of complex societal issues.

A Visual Aesthetics of Fragmentation: Khady Sylla’s Documentary Turn Khady Sylla’s first short feature, Les Bijoux, provides a perfect illustration of Bill Nichols’s assertion that in documentary, “social actors, people, present themselves in fluid, negotiated, revealing ways” (2010, 12). Here the “documentary window” opens out onto a complex social field, providing nuanced views from a variety of experiential perspectives, in this case three generations of women in postcolonial Senegal. As in her debut novel, Le Jeu de la mer, the plot unfolds along the lines of a claustrophobia-inducing Kammerspiel meant not so much to satirize the postcolonial state as to unsilence voices from the margins—that is, engender a site of bonding and sisterhood.26 The intertwined themes of spatial enclosure and confinement crop up again in Colobane Express, the first of Sylla’s three medium-length documentary features. As with Le Monologue de la muette, the title is highly deceptive, indeed imbued with a mordant irony, for this is anything but a film de quartier, in the “documentary” tradition of countless journalistic reportages by Media Centre trainees capitalizing on the heightened status of urban neighborhoods and slum areas, a higher visibility mark that arose from a long series of cinematic investments in the postcolonial city, especially in the films of Djibril Mambety. In Colobane Express, no voiceover commentary floats around the parafilmic edges of the screen, nor is any slice of life freshly cut from the real and foisted, as enticing postcolonial exotica, upon the viewer-cum-voyeur. The battered van with picturesque frescoes and inscriptions, humorously known among locals as a car rapide or a raps (express van), can be regarded as a latter-day incarnation of the rudimentary cart in Sembene’s Borom Sarret, of Mambety’s colorful horse-drawn carriage (hippomobile) in Contras’City, and of the sputtering matatu in Badou Boy emblematizing, in a hilarious scene filled with nods and winks to silent cinema and Chaplin’s comic verve, all the patterns of

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dysfunction hamstringing nascent African postcolonial states getting on the road to “modernity,” freshly journeying out of the long dark night of colonialism.27 The opening sequence in Colobane Express encapsulates all the formal features at work in Sylla’s documentary, with its low-angle, fragmented POV shots; fast editing; Hawksian cutaways of overlapping dialogues staged within a van taking the market women to Colobane at the other far end of the city, as they depart in the wee hours of the morning from Pikine, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Dakar; and, historically, the weathervane of brewing social and political storms. This vanload of talkative mères courage attests to a more mature stance in Sylla’s engagement with social reality, for a sense of sisterly intimacy gradually accrues from the women’s jokes, sexual banter, and lighthearted carousing inside a rundown vehicle that, in less than an hour, would serve as a camera obscura, a social laboratory wherein snapshots of postcolonial Senegal are visually engineered. Colobane Express, unlike Une Fenêtre ouverte and Le Monologue de la muette, is firmly grounded in the aesthetics and ethics of the observational mode, as the filmmaker nowhere intervenes in the unfolding of the various vignettes. There is a rider to this point, however: we can infer, from scattered details and the camera-shyness typical of nonprofessional actors, that a directorial presence is training the eye of the camera on the participants. Yet the narrative or, as Renov would have it, the “fictive” dimension of this documentary at times nudges it closer toward the interactive mode, in particular regarding the frequent montage effects that disrupt any spatiotemporal continuity, itself undermined by the relative infrequency of long takes.28 Take, for instance, the scene where a woman customer asks to get off the van: first, there is a cut to a high angle shot of the vehicle as it signals to pull over on a sandy side road, off the highway; then Sylla cuts to a medium shot of the interior, as the woman customer prepares to step down, but from inside the van the camera POV shows a tarred road in a busy street intersection, an urban scenery completely at odds with the isolated highway dirt tracks of the previous shot. Then, after the woman customer has stepped off, there is again the same high angle shot of the vehicle merging into highway traffic, off the dirt tracks. Clearly, any naturalistic pretense has been thrown out the “documentary” window here. Besides, the lighted interior of the van during the night scenes early on and at the end is proof enough that, apart

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from the interactions between the participants in unscripted Wolof, everything else falls under Sylla’s tight directorial control. Thus, far from setting out to observe a hard day of labor among “the informal people” (Bayat 1997) of post-devaluation, turn-of-the-century Dakar, Colobane Express rather prefigures the interventionist techniques and tactics that would be more pronounced in the other two medium-length features, Une Fenêtre ouverte (2005) and Le Monologue de la muette (2008).29 In Le Monologue de la muette, a documentary turning the spotlight on the subaltern figures who tend to fall under the radar, even in the articulation of African counter-histories of (post)colonial modernity, emphasis is laid on the social marginalization of domestic workers and their acute anomy. In many respects, the film’s main protagonist is a modular version of Sembene’s Diouanna in Black Girl, as if Sylla were fleshing out the latter’s life as a neo-slave in Senegal, before departing for the French Riviera with the family of coopérants.30 Voice-over narration, assumed by Sylla herself in a ringing poetic diction, the interactive segments and the dramatization of daily social harassment, the verbal outbursts of the slammeuse boldly confronting the camera, as if to jolt off-screen viewers out of their apathy and torpor: all these formal features compound a scopic regime of dispersion, a steady undermining of the linearity typical of colonial actualités or their offshoots in postcolonial Senegal, the journalistic reportage and the film de quartier. Yet the point to stress here is that all these visual and verbal discontinuities enhance, rather than undermine, Sylla’s documentary impulse toward revealing the dark underside of postcoloniality in Senegal, to wit seen from the perspective of “the first person plural.”31 A slightly different scopic regime obtains in Une Fenêtre ouverte. In this medium-length feature, Sylla’s inclination toward visual fragmentation, centrifugal dispersion, and decentered focalization, all the creative undercurrents running through the previous two films, Les Bijoux (1997) and Colobane Express (1999), or that would eventually culminate into an even more ruptural documentary aesthetic with Le Monologue de la muette (2008), are structured around an anchor point (i.e., the bond of sisterhood between Khady and Aminta, the uncanny fusion of each individual’s folie douce into a folie deuce). Indeed, Aminta in Une Fenêtre ouverte provides many points of suture, visually and verbally. Sylla’s dramatization of the various attempts to liberate her friend from the secluded space of the family pantry embeds the spectatorial gaze in a time-tested identificatory cipher,

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the victim figure, but absent the baroque, slightly clumsy internal focalization of Le Monologue de la muette reminiscent of Sembene’s use of a similar device—in his case the Brecht-inspired technique of voice superimposition in Black Girl to undo the bond between dubbed text and image and achieve a powerful ostranēnie. On the face of it, Une Fenêtre ouverte tells a straightforward story: the shared experience of mental health issues Khady Sylla lived through with Aminta Ngom, a kindred soul met on the streets of Dakar in 1994. At the time, Sylla was working on a documentary about the mentally challenged who, overnight, could be seen prowling around the Senegalese capital city, a legion of peculiar postcolonial flâneurs to whom Abderrahmane Waberi also devotes a moving short story, “The Gallery of the Insane,” in his debut collection The Land Without Shadows.32 Unfortunately, the negative print proved unusable, as it was overexposed, seriously compromising the visual quality of the recorded material. In the early 2000s, following a series of severe nervous breakdowns and spells at the new mental health facility in the greater Dakar area, Sylla set out to resume her project of shooting a visual gallery portrait of the “errant fools” scattered all over the streets and main thoroughfares of the postcolonial city. Gradually, she noticed the absence of her old friend Aminta and, after some inquiries, learned that her “sister in madness” was held captive in the family compound, confined to the pantry room whose window had been sealed off to keep her from any further escape and days of vagrancy in the mean streets of Dakar. The film traces out the genealogy of this resumed bond of sisterhood, dramatizes the reunion between the two women, and, as a key motif of emplotment, organizes into a narrative sequence interspersed with performative interludes, such as Sylla’s plea to the family to loosen their grip on Aminta and allow her friend to go for walks under the supervision of the daughter, Tiane, or of Sylla herself. Ultimately, the request is granted, as much screen and speech time is devoted to the two “madwomen in the pantry” hanging out and demarcating their precarious safe space in the midst of an exclusionary social environment. In more than one respect, this documentary marks a departure from Sylla’s other films that still evince traces of the journalistic style of linear narration in observational mode. Arguably, Les Bijoux and Colobane Express were inscribed within the tradition of the film de quartier then gained wider currency through the Media Centre and, later, its various festivalistic

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

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events. More importantly, both films, in particular Colobane Express, were fastening on the micropolitical turn in cinematic inscriptions of the urban neighborhood as a metonym for all the social ills and political discontents plaguing postcolonial states under a neoliberal dispensation, a shift effected through Djibril Mambety’s singular use of the shantytown as a central node in the elaborate machinery of cultural glocalization—a linkage already at work in Badou Boy and Touki Bouki, but which reached a point of dialectical ebullience with Hyenas.33 Yet Une Fenêtre ouverte also signals a quantum leap in Sylla’s approach to documentary formalization and the organization of the profilmic space. If in Colobane Express much room was left to improvisation and to the suturing effects of montage, a “slackness” largely due to her embrace and rigorous application of Rouchian cinema vérité, absent the directorial interaction with participants, then in Une Fenêtre ouverte passive control plays out differently, as this time Sylla doesn’t rest content with a mere discrete presence behind the camera. With unusual candor, she spins a videoconfessional thread out of the film’s dominant structuring element, superimposing her own mental health issues onto the uneven psychic fields of her friend Aminta. As a result, Une Fenêtre ouverte is replete with such confessional caesuras where the documentarist, in direct address mode, bares her inner wounds while ensuring, through a complex play of mirror images, on-camera address from a peripheral vision, and impromptu poetic intonations, that the viewer should never avert her gaze from the documentary window.

Framing Postcolonial Empathy in Une Fenêtre ouverte In “Ethical Madness? Khady Sylla’s Documentary Practice in Une Fenêtre ouverte,” Bronwen Pugsley calls attention to the highly personal, almost lyrical dimension of Sylla’s representation of madness as a negative print providing a sort of coda for her formal innovations. Pugsley draws a nearly exhaustive inventory: frequent close-ups intended to “trade emotional resonance for spatial integrity,” as nicely phrased in another context (Renov 1993, 3); scalar variations of frontal shots; synecdochic aggrandizement of body parts and objects (inserts); and intermittent analeptic caesuras during which a young girl—Sylla as an infant—gazes out of the idyllic, pre-lapsarian window of childhood, when the world was still full of enchantment and harmless charms.

Fig. 4.3

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Sylla’s direct address to the DV camera prefigures the slammeuse (spoken word poetess) verbally assaulting the screen in Le Monologue de la muette. In addition to the structural features of this deceptively “imperfect aesthetic,” Pugsley also places great emphasis on the fly-in-the-soup dimension of the film, whereby the material apparatus is visibilized and disruptive moments in the act of shooting are neither edited out nor doctored to fit into a neat linear sequence. According to Pugsley, in refusing to tamper with such “discordant details,” Sylla gestures toward her directorial preoccupation with “drawing the viewer’s attention to the constructed nature of documentary” (Pugsley 2012, 209).34 More crucially, it adds another layer of complexity to the formal texture arising from a commitment to documenting both her inner angst and the plight of her friend Aminta. As Pugsley succinctly puts it, “Une Fenêtre ouverte functions as a domestic ethnography, ‘a mode of autobiographical practice that couples selfinterrogation with ethnography’s concern for the documentation of the lives of others,’ where contributors serve ‘less as a source of disinterested social scientific research than as a mirror or foil for the self’” (2012, 207). In Renov’s theoretical elaborations, “domestic ethnography” refers to “the documentation of family members or, less literally, of people with whom the maker has maintained long-standing everyday relations and has thus achieved a level of casual intimacy” (Renov 2008, 218; emphasis added). The nuance within this definition notwithstanding, the key to such a conceptualization falls on the “familiar,” loosely construed as interchangeable with the “familial.” As Renov points out, “for this mode of ethnography, the desire for the other is, at every moment, embroiled with the question of selfknowledge; it is the all too familiar rather than the exotic that holds sway” (Renov 2008, 218).35 Granted, then, that the “familiar” and the “familial” inherent in Pugsley’s domestic ethnography angle are taken in a liberal sense, “less literally” indeed; still, it doesn’t quite mesh with the tenor of Renov’s essay, as the latter bears chiefly on home videos of family members. The point for us, however, is not so much that Pugsley is reaching and stretching the definition as that she fails to re-appraise the meanings attached to notions of the familial and the familiar, the centerpieces of Renov’s conceptualization of “domestic ethnography,” in the Senegalese setting. Concretely, translated into the context of postcolonial Senegal, one comes into direct confrontation with the social figure of the accompagnant (personal attendant), practitioner of a

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form of domestic care with a specific social genealogy. In the documentary, when Sylla volunteers to serve as a personal attendant for Aminta’s outdoor walks, she is recasting the accompagnant in the noninstitutional setting of the private family, thereby infusing with positive meaning an informal figure negatively connoted for the mercenary logic underlying his or her ethics of supervisory, in-house paramedical care (Kilroy-Malrac 2014, 441–43). Thus, in failing to take into consideration the semantic slippages inherent not in whatever cultural “context” but in the family as a matrix of social constellations, Pugsley implicitly predicates her argument on the universal relevance and transcendental normativity of Western value-systems with regard to notions of the familial and the familiar. Unlike Renov, who eschews the epistemic violence of undue empirical inference thanks in large part to a well-rounded analytic scope (Renov 2008, 226–29), Pugsley advances her argument through analyses that, albeit rich, detailed, and filled with insightful wallops, are visibly afloat in the ether of theoretical-critical speculation. However, one thread we would like to fasten on and further texturize is the symbiosis that obtains between performative aesthetics and ethics of care, the “inherent link between form and ethics” (Pugsley 2012, 207–08). In the sessions with Aminta’s mother and her daughter, the pas de deux Sylla carefully executes in other interactive segments takes on a distinct social significance that is not contingent, as elsewhere, on the construal of the psychic undertow of the cared other as a foil of one’s own inner experience. Not incidentally, Pugsley’s study glosses over these two moments, but of necessity, given that, as we shall see, both sequences put up a stronger resistance to any reading predicated on the modality of the performative.36 In these two instances, Sylla’s documentary impulses must contend with ethical demands of a trans-individual character, where the subject of documentary thus interpellated has to enunciate his or her speech against the looming backdrop of the socially unsayable: neither Aminta’s madness, nor her flights of fancy and disappearing acts into the seething cauldron of postcolonial Dakar, fall under the gag rule of social taboos. By contrast, how each and every family member lives with the situation is eminently subject to an unwritten law of silence, paradoxically enough, given a supposedly oral cultural setting where speech is vested with a therapeutic function in countless other situations. Thus, the lived reality of madness as an experiential field of social interactions proves a formidable challenge for

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documentary representation. Yet, undaunted, Sylla seizes this opportunity to extend and augment the powers of visual empathy of her camera lens. In the interview with the mother, we first see Sylla set the tone and tenor of a discussion that ostensibly revolves around the therapeutic benefits of putting an end to Aminta’s domestic confinement. Yet as the exchange between the two women, Sylla and the mother, wears on, the viewer gradually comes to the realization that the situation with Aminta serves only as a springboard for a subtler dialogue with the mother, one grounded in a complex communicative ethics of “telling” silences, laconic understatements, and discreet gestures and body postures. The documentarist is less concerned with presenting a testimony, as would be the case in a pedestrian journalistic reportage, and as it obtains in many documentaries deeply informed by the epistemological fetish of indexicality, than with representing the salience of a speech couched in gestural body-language and proxemic codes.37 Sylla’s acute concern for documenting on-screen, with great empathetic finesse, the process whereby a parallel universe of meaning arises from deep within the cracks and gaps of surface social intercourse is conveyed through certain choices of mise-en-scène and camera movements: tight angles; swift cut-ins to frame a fleeting hunched shoulder denoting kersa (reserve, humility in Wolof culture); close-ups on seemingly anodyne gestures, like the mother clasping and unclasping her wrinkled hands or striking a dignified pose, thrusting a blank, inexpressive gaze out in the distance.38 This is not so much to denote embarrassment or shame, as Pugsley argues elsewhere in the essay, much less to erect a fence around the domain of the private, as to signify a surplus of meaning that, while not conveyable in words, is eminently communicable, by dint of this very ineffability, as that “something more” always fraying the edges of speech.39 In the second session with the daughter, the camera occupies with greater assertiveness the present tense of the documentary window.40 Here the classical shot–reverse shot predominant in the exchange with the mother gives way to a series of two shots in wide angle, exactly modeled on the spatial regime crafted to stage the bonds of sisterhood between Sylla and Aminta, or between mother and daughter. We see the director strike a casual conversation with the young girl about the mental health issues of the latter’s mother. This is a visual accentuation of the sensitiveness of the topic, but more importantly it clears a path of agency for the camera itself, as the latter can roam and explore different

Fig. 4.5

Fig. 4.6

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modalities of speech playing out in the transactional space thus carved out. From its entrenched position in the present tense of documentary enunciation, and reverting to the fly-on-the-wall mode, Sylla captures the eloquent gesture of the young girl repeatedly fending off a bothersome fly, precisely, buzzing around her seemingly chagrined, camera-conscious face. Unlike with the mother, here Sylla gradually fades into the background, seemingly oblivious to the setting of the interview and the camera still rolling. Her nonchalance and “slackness” reach such a point that the young girl herself must take the initiative to end the interview. In a sense, this scene helps the viewer to grasp the full import of what Pugsley has been driving at in her trenchant analyses of Sylla’s “domestic ethnography” and ethics of the uncanny encounter. In his eponymous essay, Renov rightly calls attention to the fact that “the trope of the ‘shared camera,’ which effects an erosion of textual authority or directorial control, is endemic to domestic ethnography” (Renov 2008, 224). At this point, the claim that in Une Fenêtre ouverte Sylla exerts fullspectrum control needs some qualifications, for both Bronwen Pugsley and Michael Renov work under the tacit assumption that even in handing over control of the profilmic to the subject, the “undermined” director further “underwrites” his or her authority. The intricate mechanisms contrived to capture the testimonial voice of others in Une Fenêtre ouverte involve both verbal and visual elements, vérité and direct cinema moments, performative and reflexive sequences of varying length. However, in taking cognizance of the subtleties of the profilmic events thus captured by Sylla’s empathetic camera, in coming to grips with how both women enforce a strict observance of the code of silence on a taboo subject (i.e., their own experiential roller coasters as Aminta, mother and daughter to each, struggles to cast out her demons), the viewer, informed or of the savvy type, doesn’t fall into a trap neatly laid out by the documentarist.41 Indeed, the latter refrains from acting as provocateur to prod her interlocutors, constantly “code-switching” from interactive to observational mode in both sequences, as if deeming it superfluous to conjure the telltale atmosphere of suspense prevalent in those epiphanies of the testimonial subject that Bill Nichols, in Representing Reality, speaks of with respect to Sergeant Abing in Soldier Girls (Nichols 1991, 41).42 As Carl Plantinga argues in another context, whatever assertion the documentarist purports to make, much is inferred by the spectator from the showing, regardless of the verbal contents of the telling: “The spectator may

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infer propositional knowledge from these ways of seeing, hearing, and feeling, but the filmmaker is not necessarily asserting, or intending the spectator to take as asserted, all the propositional content that can reasonably be inferred from the shot or series of shots” (Plantinga 2005, 111).43

Conclusion In a review of Ken Harrow’s Trash: African Cinema from Below, Beatriz Leal Riesco ruefully points out that “in the study of African directors and their works, there is a blatant lack of rigor in approaching the source material, which comes to be seen as a moldable object conforming to preexisting arguments and hypotheses without concern for the requirements of close analysis” (Riesco 2015, 157). Far from indicting another Eurocentric critic for evincing the patronizing condescension of high theory that Riesco finds unwarranted in Ken Harrow’s book, I have instead called attention to the fact that Bronwen Pugsley’s essay entails a methodological flaw in need of some corrective. In “Ethical Madness? Khady Sylla’s Documentary Practice in Une Fenêtre ouverte,” domestic ethnography is no frivolous add-on or, as Riesco contends with regard to the “trash” element in Harrow’s study, “more a pretext than a theoretical tool deriving from a close examination of the works at hand” (158). Far from it. The major claim advanced in this chapter has been that “domestic ethnography,” as a critical approach, cannot be brought to bear on Une Fenêtre ouverte without taking into consideration certain differentials arising from the social and cultural context of postcolonial Senegal, such as the wide range of meanings accruing to kinship concepts and categories. The “clear and significant shift” signaled with this documentary is less a retreat into the private self and the personal, to address “madness from within” (Pugsley 2012, 205), than an extension of the domain of the performative to “them,” in this case family members whose likewise personal experience of “the lives of others” is seldom documented on camera. Pace Pugsley, madness is neither a taboo nor a stigma in Senegalese society, the scanty evidence and outdated references brought in support of her claim about the transgressive edge of Sylla’s documentary notwithstanding.44 A panoply of visual tropes, as in the flashbacks with the motif of the window frame opening out onto wide vistas, tight camera angles, use of natural lighting and the balanced alternation between various documentary modes: Khady Sylla musters all these “formal innovations” to achieve

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the tour de force of illuminating dark experiential areas that lie beyond the grasp of language, for the simple reason that such affects are socially performed—that is, conveyed through gestural codes of silence (sutura) and proxemic signifiers of modesty (kersa). Thus, the on-screen testimonial performances of the two participants Sylla interviews in Une Fenêtre ouverte provided her with a unique opportunity to push the limits of empathy of documentary as a social practice, a form of care, and to test the sensitiveness of her camera lens to the nonverbal semiotics of those elusive qualia that, in the final analysis, are not so much unsayable because always threatening to exceed the prohibitions of language as that they are constantly unspoken in an idiom beyond the prescriptive reach of discourse.

Notes 1. On this point, see Cazenave (2018, 51). On the trans-generic connection between gender and the documentary as a representational genre, and on the figure of the African woman writer-cum-filmmaker, see Ellerson (2016, 221). 2. taasu is a form of festive oral poetry, often with dance and musical or rhythmic accompaniment (hand clapping), that remains a preserve of women, just like bàkk is reserved for men in gymnic games (wrestling). The form features prominently in Ramaka’s Karmen, where the women use it to create a transgressive brand of inmate intimacy inside the beachfront dungeon, thus subverting from within the carceral system of postcolonial Senegal. 3. The term dysnarratif was coined by Alain Robbe-Grillet to designate a narrative that draws on the codes of various genres, the better to blunt their outer edges as well-rounded narratives. See Gardies and Bessalel (1992, 66–67). 4. A self that cannot be reduced to the individual frozen in a narcissistic infatuation with his or her imago. 5. There is an ambivalence, in Renov’s essay, between the familial and the familiar, at times verging on deliberate conflation of their spheres of critical relevance. We shall return to the issue. 6. There is a short segment devoted to the representation of the mad, among other marginal figures, in West African Francophone cinemas. See Sawadogo (2013, 224–25). See also Sawadogo’s interview with Beti Ellerson (Ellerson 2015b). 7. For instance, the long discussion on informed consent and fair use is conducted without due regard to the specific forms of what could be called, following Philippe Lejeune’s pacte de lecture, “the documentary pact” and the shapes such a spectatorial contract may assume in this context. As Brian Winston pithily points out, “Informed consent is, in fact, something of a myth” (2013, 11). 8. “La puissance coloniale s’exprime le plus souvent par l’imposition de styles caractéristiques tels l’épopée ou le roman, alors que le drame, le mélodrame et le documentaire se prêtent à la vision des vaincus.” 9. See also Sanogo (2009). For the anglophone context, see Reynolds (2015). Classical histories of African cinema (Malkmus and Armes 1991, Diawara 1992, Ukadike 1994)

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retrace the same genealogies, without engaging in a discussion of the documentary value, in a Griersonian sense or not, of colonial actualités, newsreels and propaganda. On such formal issues and their salience for theorizing Francophone documentary practices, see Tcheuyap (2010) and Loftus (2010). 10. Jay (1994). 11. On this dual development, see Shohat and Stam (1994). 12. An in-between figure is, arguably, the cultural historian poring over visual archives to plot the genealogy of a cultural discourse such as developmentalism or humanitarianism during the colonial era. On the former, see Genova (2013), and on the latter see Bloom (2008). 13. See, in Bickford-Smith’s volume, the essays on the historical figures of “Soundjata” by Ralph Austen (2007, 28–40) and “Lumumba” by David Moore (Moore 2007, 223–39). 14. For a discussion of the issues raging across disciplinary fault lines, see Ukadike (2004, 160–63). 15. On this trend, and the “documentary moments” in African films, see Thackway (2007, 98). 16. See Cazenave and Célérier (2018) for an overview of these issues and a short history of documentary studies in Francophone Africa and its diasporas. As far as Francophone documentary practices, see Irène Assiba d’Almeida and Sonia Lee’s monograph on Francophone women documentarists, and Beti Ellerson’s wide-ranging compendia of continental and diasporic African women documentarists. 17. This is a crucial difference between Sembene and Rouch: the latter tends to fashion the real out of his stagey manipulations, on- and off-screen, of his unsuspecting documentary subjects, whereas the former evinces a complete faith in the powers of the indexical image, untampered and as naturalistic as possible, to let the real puncture the screen. On Rouchian “aesthetics,” see Renov (2008, xxi) and Stoller’s classic Cinematic Griot. On the theoretical issues of cinematic realism, see Metz’s seminal essay, still a good place to start (Metz 1990). 18. See Diouf (1996), Harrow (1995), Baum (2007). 19. Such a monumentalizing bias in retracing African film history can also be noted in Beti Ellerson’s “African Women in Cinema: An Overview,” regardless of her invaluable research contribution to a more gender-balanced account of the historical origins, in all respects, of African cinemas. 20. See Dangarembga’s contribution to the volume Gaze Regimes, where she retraces the genealogy of this political emergence in a dense, searing manifesto that complements Ellerson’s overview. See also, for a specific focus on Francophone women documentarists, Cazenave and Célérier (2018). 21. For more on this periodization, see Branch and Mampilly (2015). 22. The same glibness prevails in the revised essay, “The Other Voices of the Documentary: Allah Tantou and Afrique, je te plumerai” (Ukadike 2004, 170). Ukadike construes Allah Tantou as “an autobiographical film” (167), drawing on genre theory in documentary studies of the early ’90s, but without teasing or spelling out all the far-reaching implications for African film theory and genre criticism. Thus, Gabara’s claim that “very little work has been done on genre in film in general, and what has been done has been

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surprisingly limited” wasn’t far off the mark—and, all things considered, remains valid today (Gabara 2003, 337). 23. See also the first installment of her two-part essay, “Teaching African Women in Cinema, Part One” (2015). If one brackets out the self-congratulatory narrative of pioneering, groundbreaking agency, the self-serving educational pitches, and the overblown rhetoric of womanist militancy, the abiding value of Ellerson’s various contributions resides in the rigor of her country-by-country inventories and the organization of the collected empirical data into a neat, easy to digest academic paper. 24. The critique of a certain perfunctory and glib engagement with a creative work can also be leveled at Cazenave’s 2018 English translation of her 2011 article on Sylla’s Le Monologue de la muette. In the translated version, Une Fenêtre ouverte features more prominently, but for little to no insightful purchase. 25. Rosen is concerned with historiography (the philosophy of history) and the history of philosophy in the West, especially during the mid-nineteenth century (Ranke, Michelet) and the early twentieth century (Adorno, Benjamin, Gramsci, Lukács), but his observations do apply, mutatis mutandis, to the current postcolonial situation, even though the status of truth is harder to ground for an “African” sociology of knowledge that has to contend with highly volatile discursive constellations. 26. In the novel it is an abandoned seaside barrack, where the twin sisters indulge in their storytelling games. Eventually, it all turns out to be a figment of the police detective’s feverish imagination. 27. See Mbembe (2010). 28. On this distinction between the fictional and the fictive, see Renov (2008, 2–7). For an altogether different take on “the fictive stance” in documentary filmmaking, see Plantinga (2005, 107). 29. It is worth noting that the politics of occupying lands at the margins of urban centers described by Bayat for postrevolutionary Iran applies, word for word, to the birth of Colobane and its growth as a poverty cauldron during the postcolonial era. As Bayat puts it, “the kinds of practices described pin his essayi are not extraordinary. They occur in many urban centres of the developing world on a daily basis” (54). 30. The modular flashback, in Sylla’s film as a counterpoint to Sembene’s, charts a temporal dimension also discernible in Gerima’s Sankofa, where the filmic variation on the old Akan saw treads the path of visual analepsis—and prolepsis as well, when Mona is transported back into the present, after her initiation into the troubled past of slavery that proves the foundation of her identity in the Americas. 31. For more on the formal features of Monologue, see Cazenave (2018), a reading likewise deeply informed by Renovian insights into documentary subjectivity. 32. Waberi, The Land without Shadows, 7–16. 33. For more on this aesthetic breakthrough, see Sada Niang’s critical biography, Djibril Diop Mambety: un cinéaste à contre-courant (2002). 34. See figure 4, where a miscue results in the sound engineer moving across the screen as the cinematographer frames the mother in a wide angle shot. She is about to leave the house, casting a parting look at Sylla and Aminta located in the hors-champ of the pantry room at the opposite end to the entrance door.

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35. Again, Pugsley (2012, 207) duly invokes Renov, without discussing the validity of her critical purchases, as if one should take it for granted that “a mode of autobiographical practice that couples self-interrogation with ethnography’s concern for the documentation of the lives of others” can never strike a false note, especially when a postcolonial African society such as Senegal’s is, at best, only a loose implied context for Renov’s theoretical formulations (2008, 216). 36. On the performative mode see, inter alia, Bruzzi (2006, 185–97, esp. 186–87), Renov (2008, 176–81), Nichols (2010, 32). 37. On the interactive mode as a discursive strategy for the sake of gathering information and evidence, see Nichols (1991, 44). For an incisive critique of indexicality as an epistemological fallacy that the documentary form, from the Griersonian breakthrough on, was able to discard to avoid conflating it with actuality filmmaking, see Rosen (1993, 74–76) and Plantinga (2005, 105–06). The latter proposes a useful distinction between “documentary as indexical record” (DIR) and “documentary as assertion” (DA). Note also that Plantinga construes indexicality exclusively in terms of the moving or still photographic image and doesn’t venture, like Rosen, a “grand theory” of the genealogical bond, in Western culture, between textual and visual documents, historiography, and documentary filmmaking. 38. In “Lévinas, Ethics, Faciality,” an insightful study on the link between testimonial ethics and documentary aesthetics, Libby Saxton notes that the Holocaust survivors summoned to appear before Lanzmann’s camera exude an air of “impregnable impassivity” (Downing and Saxton 2010, 102). 39. Pugsley argues that albeit madness seems to be regarded as shameful and a blot on the family’s badge of honor, judging from a row between Aminta and her mother evoked in the documentary, “this is clearly not a feature that the filmmaker has enhanced to build a social discourse, contrary to Mariama Sylla, for example, in her recent film on the taboo of AIDS, Derrière le Silence” (Pugsley 2012, 206). The point can be readily granted, but the thematic comparison with AIDS is incongruous, and Pugsley’s reliance on authorial pronunciations to clinch the argument belies a certain intentional fallacy not consistent with the rigor of her overall formal approach. To use Plantinga’s shorthands, Pugsley conceives of both films as “documentary assertions” (DA), yet her entire analysis of Une Fenêtre ouverte is founded on how Sylla critically challenges any notion of “documentary as indexical record” (DIR). 40. On this temporal feature that, of all documentary modes, the observational is best suited to bring into salience, see Nichols (1991, 40) and Renov (2008, 174). 41. On “the savvy spectator” as an epistemological construct for the critical analysis of documentary effects, see the discussion in Winston et al. (2016, 14–17). 42. For an illuminating diagram of all documentary modes and practices and their complex interrelations, see Winston (2013, 25). 43. Winston also makes a similar point (2013, 10). 44. Pugsley (2012, 206) surmises that on a few occasions children may have pelleted Aminta with stones in the streets and blithely references a sourcebook on psychiatric care in sub-Saharan Africa dating from 1978. The question is: can a case for the stigmatization and silencing of the insane in present-day Senegal rest on such an anachronic extrapolation?

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Bibliography Barlet, Olivier. 2005. “Une Fenêtre ouverte de Khady Sylla.” Africiné, August 26, 2005. http://www.africine.org/critique/une-fenetre-ouverte/3960. Baum, Robert. 2007. “Tradition and Resistance in Ousmane Sembène’s Films.” In Black and White in Colour: African History on Screen, edited by Vivian Bickford-Smith and R. Mendelsohn, 41–58. Athens: Ohio University Press. Bayat, Asef. 1997. “The Politics of the Informal People.” Third World Quarterly 18 (1): 53–72. Bickford-Smith, Vivian, and Richard Mendelsohn, eds. 2007. Black and White in Colour: African History on Screen. Athens: Ohio University Press. Bloom, Peter. 2008. French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Branch, Adam, and Zachariah C. Mampilly. 2015. Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change. London: Zed Books. Bruzzi, Stella. 2006. New Documentary. London: Routledge. Carroll, Noël. 2003. Engaging the Moving Image. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cazenave, Odile. 2018. “The Silent Monologue, by Khady Sylla et Charlie Van Damme. Some (Not So New) Gendered Stories of Globalization.” Diogenes 62 (1): 48–56. Cazenave, Odile, and Patricia Célérier. 2018. “Le documentaire francophone africain et afro-diasporique : état des lieux, pratiques et pistes de lecture.” Nouvelles Études Francophones 33 (1): 1–17. Cham, Mbye. 2001. “Official History, Popular Memory: Reconfiguration of the African Past in the Films of Ousmane Sembène.” In The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, edited by Marsha Landy, 261–68. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Dallet, Sylvie. 2003. “Filmer les colonies, filtrer le colonialisme.” In Le livre noir du colonialisme, XVIème-XXIème siècle : de l’extermination à la repentance, edited by Marc Ferro, 939–69. Paris: Robert Laffont. Dangarembga, Tsitsi. 2015. “A Manifesto.” In: Gaze Regimes: Film and Feminisms in Africa, edited by Jyoti Mistri and Antje Schuhmann, 201–11. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Diawara, Manthia. 1992. African Cinema: Politics and Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2010. African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics. Münich: Prestel. Diouf, Mamadou. 1996. “History and Actuality in Ousmane Sembène’s Ceddo and Djibril Diop Mambety’s Hyenas.” In African Experiences of Cinema, edited by Imruh Bakari and Mbye Cham, 239–51. London: BFI. Downing, Lisa, and Libby Saxton. 2010. Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters. London: Routledge. Ellerson, Beti. 2000. Sisters of the Screen: Women of Africa on Film, Video, and Television. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. ———. 2015a. “African Women in Cinema: An Overview.” In Gaze Regimes: Film and Feminisms in Africa, edited by Jyoti Mistri and Antje Schuhmann, 1–9. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

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———. 2015b. “Boukary Sawadogo Discusses His Research: Three Marginal Figures in the Cinemas of Francophone West Africa—the Mad Person, the Homosexual, and the Woman.” Black Camera 6 (2): 229–33. ———. 2015c. “Teaching African Women in Cinema, Part One.” Black Camera 7 (1): 251–61. ———. 2016. “Teaching African Women in Cinema, Part Two.” Black Camera 7 (2): 217–33. ———. 2018. “Onscreen Narratives, Offscreen Lives: African Women Inscribing the Self.” Black Camera 9 (2): 460–76. Finnegan, Ruth. 2007. The Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 2006. History of Madness. New York: Routledge. Gabara, Rachel. 2003. “Mixing Impossible Genres: David Achkar and African Autobiographical Documentary.” New Literary History 34 (2): 331–52. Gardies, André, and Jean Bessalel. 1992. 200 mots-clés de la théorie du cinéma. Paris: Éditions du Cerf. Gauthier, Guy. 2011. Le documentaire: Un autre cinéma. Paris: Armand Colin. Genova, James. 2013. Cinema and Development in West Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Harrow, Kenneth. 1995. “Camp de Thiaroye: Who’s That Hiding in Those Tanks, and How Come We Can’t See their Faces?” Iris 18 (4): 147–52. Kilroy-Marac, Katie. 2014. “Of Shifting Economies and Making Ends Meet: The Changing Role of the Accompagnant at the Fann Psychiatric Clinic in Dakar, Senegal.” Cult Med Psychiatry 38 (3): 427–47. Loftus, Maria. 2010. “The Appeal of Hybrid Documentary Forms in West Africa.” French Forum 35 (2/3): 37–55. Malkmus, Lizbeth and Roy Armes. 1991. Arab and African Film Making. London: Zed Books. Mbembe, Achille. 2010. Sortir de la grande nuit. Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée. Paris: La Découverte. Metz, Christian. 1990. Film Language. A Semiotics of the Cinema. Translated by Michael Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Niang, Sada. 2002. Djibril Diop Mambéty: Un cinéaste à contre-courant. Paris: L’Harmattan. Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing Reality. Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2010. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Orlando, Valérie. 2007. “Voices of African Filmmakers: Contemporary Issues in African Filmmaking.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24 (5): 445–61. Pfaff, Françoise. 2013. “Colobane Express, by Khady Sylla.” African Studies Review 56 (1): 223–25. Plantinga, Carl. 2005. “What a Documentary Is, After All.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (2): 105–17. Pugsley, Bronwen. 2012. “Ethical Madness? Khady Sylla’s Documentary Practice in Une Fenêtre ouverte.” Nottingham French Studies 51 (2): 204–19.

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Renov, Michael, ed. 1993. Theorizing Documentary. New York: Routledge. ———. 2004. The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Reynolds, Glenn. 2015. Colonial Cinema in Africa: Origins, Images, Audiences. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Riesco, Beatriz Leal. 2015. “Trash: African Cinema From Below (review).” Cinema Journal 54 (2): 155–59. Roberts, Andrew D. 1987. “Africa on Film to 1940.” History in Africa 14:189–227. Rosen, Philip. 1993. “Document and Documentary: On the Persistence of Historical Concepts.” In Theorizing Documentary, edited by Michael Renov, 58–89. New York: Routledge. Rossmann, Sasha. 2014. “An Open Window, dir. Khady Sylla.” African Studies Review 57 (4): 257–58. Sanogo, Aboubakar. 2009. “The History of Documentary in Africa: The Colonial Era.” PhD diss, University of Southern California. Sanogo, Aboubakar, ed. 2015. “In Focus: Studying African Cinema and Media Today.” Cinema Journal 54 (2): 114–71. Sawadogo, Boukary. 2013. Les Cinémas francophones ouest-africains, 1990–2005. Paris: L’Harmattan. Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism. Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge. Stoller, Paul. 1992. The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thackway, Melissa. 2007. Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tcheuyap, Alexie. 2010. “Cinéma documentaire et expériences féminines en Afrique francophone.” French Forum 35 (2/3): 57–77. Ukadike, Frank. 1994. Black African Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1995. “African Cinematic Reality. The Documentary Tradition as an Emerging Trend.” Research in African Literatures 26 (3): 88–96. ———. 2004. “The Other Voices of Documentary: Allah Tantou and Afrique, je te plumerai.” In Focus on African Films, edited by Françoise Pfaff, 159–72. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2013. “Mapping Africa.” In The Documentary Film Book, edited by Brian Winston, 217–27. London: British Film Institute. Volet, Jean-Marie. 1995. “Le Jeu de la mer, by Khady Sylla.” French Review 69 (2): 375–76. Winston, Brian, ed. 2013. The Documentary Film Book. London: British Film Institute. Winston, Brian, Gail Winstone, and Wang Chi (eds). 2016. The Act of Documenting. Documentary Film in the 21st Century. New York: Bloomsbury.

El Hadji Moustapha Diop is Visiting Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Macalester College in Saint-Paul, Minnesota. His publications include studies on filmmakers Sembene Ousmane, Dani Kouyate, and Khady Sylla and novelist Fatou Diome. Diop has completed several translations, including Samba Gadjigo’s Ousmane

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Sembène: The Making of an Artist-Militant (Indiana University Press, 2010), and cotranslated Senegalese Boris Diop’s Wolof/French novel, Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks (Michigan State University Press, 2016). He is currently cotranslating Boris Diop’s latest novel, Bàmmeelu Kocc Barma, from Wolof into English.

5 TALES OF COLONELS Auteurship and Authority in Mama Colonel (2017) and This Is Congo (2017) Alexie Tcheuyap and Félix Veilleux

The widely documented war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has claimed millions of victims over the past decades. Several scholars, NGOs, and foreign governments have produced reports of various kinds relating to a conflict that dramatically affects the lives of women, children, and the elderly. Unsurprisingly, this war, like every other one, is related to economic interests as the DRC is an exceptionally rich nation being looted by foreign companies. Reports from the United States, and scholarship by Joselyn Kelly, Anna Maedl, Ingrid Samset, Véronique Moufflet, Erika Carlsen, Léonard N’Sanda Buleli, Ann Laudati, and Charlote Meterns are just a few examples of an abundant and endless literature that documents the anthropological, sociological, and political impacts of what several Congolese refer to as a genocide. In 2018, this conflict came to light again when Dr. Denis Mukwege won the Nobel Prize. Dr. Mukwege is a Congolese gynecologist who, in spite of permanent threats and assassination attempts, dedicated his life to treating women victims of rape, a crime that has notoriously become a weapon of war in his country. Belgian documentary filmmaker Thierry Michel describes Denis Mukwege’s work in his remarkable 2015 documentary The Man Who Mends Women: The Wrath of Hippocrates. This film is, in many ways, a biography of Dr. Mukwege, whose life is one of sacrifice and total dedication to others. On a related perspective, but still in the context of war-torn DRC, where women’s bodies are systematically violated, another

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local figure, Col. Honorine Manyole, is featured in Mama Colonel (2017), a documentary by Dieudo Hamadi. So are two others; Col. Kasongo and Col. Mamadou Ndala, two of the four characters featured in This Is Congo (2017) by American documentarist Daniel McCabe. While they both focus on the war in DRC, these documentaries are different in at least three perspectives. First, the directors belong to distinct backgrounds: Hamadi is Congolese and McCabe is American. Second, McCabe features four characters while Hamadi focuses on one, Colonel Honorine. Third, Hamadi’s perspective is clearly a gendered one, as he chooses to focus on a single powerful female character. They also stand out in the context of this volume, since both McCabe and Hamadi are male. However, both films resonate with each other not only in the way the devastations of war are depicted, but also in the representations of the relationship between (postcolonial) power, gender, and society. In doing so, these documentary “tales of colonels and doctors” shed light on how postcolonial subjectivities can help shape political transformations. Both films seek to go beyond the wreckage of war to explore avenues that can assist in rebuilding a broken nation. Moreover, Hamadi’s Mama Colonel adopts a gendered perspective in a narrative that articulates a discourse on sexual violence by featuring a female main protagonist. Focusing on Hamadi’s and McCabe’s films, this chapter will demonstrate how the different praxis of documentary filmmaking may influence the way we approach a subject matter that, in this case, is mostly postcolonial (sexual) violence. That does not mean that the oppressive structures revealed in This Is Congo are not relevant, but rather that their respective approaches to sexual violence in the DRC may prevent them from identifying better-suited responses to the issues at hand. Documentaries remain a dynamic form that encourage investigation, provide insight into complex situations, and allow filmmakers to reposition themselves in the face of tragic circumstances. That is particularly relevant here because, as argued by Bill Nichols, “documentaries represent the historical world by shaping its photographic record of some aspect of the world from a distinct perspective or point of view. As such they become one voice among the many voices in an arena of social debate and contestation” ([2001] 2010, 43). African women are central in the debate on sexual violence. And although the two documentaries under consideration are not directed by women, according to Beti Ellerson, documentary film practices remain “a dominant mode among

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African women, perhaps out of a genuine interest in addressing the pressing issues in their societies and relating stories that would otherwise not be told” (2016, 223). Since women are disproportionately the targets of sexual violence, the documentary form is also an important medium through which a gendered but, most importantly, local perspective on the matter can be developed.1 It is in this respect that Mama Colonel significantly differs from other films, as it presents a problem that concerns the Congolese people, rather than one that afflicts them.2 In order to contextualize this shift and to better conceptualize the distinctions in how these two films negotiate documentary auteurship, we will first outline the canonical linguistic approach to documentary auteurship as described by Bill Nichols, particularly with his seminal concept of the “voice-of-the-text.” Then we will address certain revisions that have been made to the concept, particularly with regards to feminist and affect theory. This theoretical discussion will allow us to then present a comparative analysis of This Is Congo and Mama Colonel. We consider the latter film’s capacity to bring an affective, gendered, and localized perspective to the understanding of sexual violence in the DRC. In a way, Mama Colonel may provide insight into why, incidentally, This Is Congo eludes this important problematic in its synthetic depiction of the current situation in the DRC. This comparative analysis will be guided by the following question: how can local and gendered perspectives on sexual violence in the DRC, or the lack thereof, affect a documentary praxis, and what formal consequences thus emerge? This question will allow us to show the importance of documentary filmmaking by and about women in Africa. One cannot address this question without examining the role of the voice that is central in any documentary in that, according to Nichols, it can “make a case or present an argument as well as convey a point of view. Documentaries seek to persuade or convince us: by the strength of their argument or point of view and the appeal, or power, of their voice. The voice of documentary is the specific way in which an argument or perspective is expressed” ([2001] 2010, 43). We will start by resituating that voice.

(Re)Positioning the Voice-of-the-Text It is commonly accepted that Bill Nichols and his linguistically inflected approach to documentary praxis is responsible for establishing the foundations of documentary theory. Nichols’s most widespread concept, the

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“voice-of-the-text,” refers directly to the notion of documentary auteurship and underpins much of the analysis to follow. In his canonical essay “The Voice of Documentary,” Nichols defines the voice-of-the-text as “that which conveys to us a sense of a text’s social point of view, of how it is speaking to us and how it is organizing the materials it is presenting to us” (2005, 18–19). He argues that forfeiting this fundamentally auteurial function of documentary filmmaking is the pitfall of documentaries that rely on conventions of realism and put their faith in the truthfulness they record rather than in the processes of representation so valued by linguists since Saussure. For example, this realist conception is found in so-called observational documentaries, where the voice-of-the-text is subjugated to a supposed external reality that could be recorded in its objectivity, without intervention. This perception is also found in expository documentaries, where the voice-of-the-text is either illustrative of an omniscient voice-ofGod narration or of interviewed witnesses who are reputed to be telling the truth. This is a rather traditional stance on the ideological underpinnings of the realist conventions of documentary filmmaking, where it is argued that in filming the so-called external reality, or the naturalized way of looking (as in Hollywood cinema), we are in fact producing a naturalized structure of looking that hides the cinematic apparatus’s discriminating operations. For Nichols, a more innovative solution for documentary filmmaking is to demonstrate “a sophisticated understanding of the personal” (2005, 25). This understanding, seen in the documentaries of Emilio de Antonio, for example, emanates from “a distinct textual voice” that reflexively “probes, remembers, substantiates, [and] doubts” reality and its witnesses, which incidentally “seduces us by embodying those qualities of insight, skepticism, judgment, and independence we would like to appropriate for our own” (27). A strong reaction to this concept was already elaborated by feminist film scholars like E. Ann Kaplan in the 1980s. According to Kaplan, this linguistic approach is problematic because now that the signified can only be acknowledged (i.e., probed), remembered, and doubted, the referent slides away, and the social lived experience, a historically critical space for feminism, is unrecognizable: feminist praxis remains locked in “a theoretical discourse unrelated to practice” (Kaplan 1988, 79). Moreover, in Nichols’s solution to the acknowledgment of the voice-of-the-text, the author becomes abstracted and redeemable only to a set of discourse that they must

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make salient, and not to a position they embody through their own social construction as enabler of the voice-of-the-text. This lack of recognizability of social lived experience emanates from a critical practice where the ethic of exposition supplants the very performance of knowledge. This practice is described by queer and affect theorist Eve K. Sedgwick as the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” a recurring practice in critical theory, from Marx to Freud, where the goal is to grant visibility to hidden dangers so we can attain an “unmystified, angry view of large and genuinely systemic oppressions” (Sedgwick 2003, 124). In the deconstructive practice of the “sophisticated understanding of the personal” of Emile de Antonio, for example, we witness the critical practice that allows one to feel “more evolved than one’s context” (Wiegman 2014, 11), where the threat of being fooled by discursivity is always anticipated and alleviated through the vigilant exposure of probing reality and its witnesses, and where one is not perceived as enabling a perspective through a position. Sedgwick demonstrates that this practice itself is a moral outlook on an ethical position within the world, one that hinges on an affect of paranoia where an encompassing scheme of truth value is erected in terrible alertness so that no bad surprise cannot be expected, and where a narrative that restructures an order-of-things morcelé is always needed. This narration then allows for the “paranoid [auteur’s] proffer of himself and his cognitive talent, now ready for anything it can present in the way of blandishment or violence” (Sedgwick 2003, 132). But what if, contra Nichols, we truly acknowledge the paranoid approach as a position rather than a recurring, overarching structure that gives us the seducing qualities of insight, skepticism, judgment, and independence? For Sedgwick, admitting that would allow us to access the possibility of another critical position on the spectrum, one that asks something of its object, deflates the sovereign agency of criticism, and acknowledges the damaging authority it can have (Wiegman 2014, 7). This is a different form of acknowledgment that Segwick calls, after Melanie Klein, the reparative position, a position of anxiety-mitigating achievement “from which it is possible in turn to use one’s own resources to assemble or ‘repair’ the murderous part-objects into something like a whole—though . . . not necessarily like any pre-existing whole” (Sedgwick 2003, 128). In what follows, we will deploy Sedgwick’s use of the Kleinian epistemology of positioning to show that through its form of knowledge, This Is

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Congo refrains from speaking of sexual violence for the same reason Mama Colonel, through its reparative form of knowledge, does (i.e., because the solution to the conflicts in the DRC starts with the recognition of the selfdetermination of the Congolese people). The fact that the same solution can bring such different outcomes in two films remains a testimony to the importance of a gendered and local perspective in documentary practice and demonstrates that a documentary concerned with capturing forms of knowledge in their becoming rather than exposing them in their universality can summon opposed formal and thematic devices.

Documentary Figures of Authority In his writings on power, Michel Foucault determines that the political is defined as a set of power relations in a given society that are equivalent to relations of authority. Far from being a good, authority is not transferable, and for Foucault, the network of relations it establishes is often marked by negativity. Authority is, more often than not, authority to say no. It is also the authority to maintain law and order, something that is often done in the utmost brutal way in postcolonial settings (Mbembe 2001). While Foucault rightly contends that the very existence of authority is inseparable from the possibility (and the need) to resist it, asserting authority mostly consists in successfully winning over any form of resistance and, in most authoritarian regimes, violently breaking it. The rule of law is essential in this context because as Foucault puts it, “c’est en prenant le point de vue du désordre que l’on analyse de plus en plus finement, que l’on va établir l’ordre—c’està-dire, ce qui reste. L’ordre, c’est ce qui reste lorsqu’on aura empêché en effet tout ce qui est interdit. C’est cette pensée négative qui est, je crois, caractéristique, d’un code légal. Pensée et techniques négatives” (Foucault 2004, 47). It is within this context that one can fully understand figures of authority in both documentaries. Mama Colonel and This Is Congo can seem quite similar in several ways: They are both stunning examples of contemporary observational filmmaking inside the DRC. They both thoroughly adopt the realist conventions of documentary filmmaking. Yet, the world they make knowable through this observational practice, with the apparent subjugation of an external authority to an objective reality, is mediated by the ubiquitous presence of a figure of authority: a war colonel in This Is Congo and a police colonel in Mama Colonel. These mediating figures allow for the production

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of an important “reality effect” in their respective depictions. As Dieudo Hamadi asserted in an interview, “To be accepted by those women wasn’t really hard, because I was with Mama Colonel. I was pretty much part of the police, the people we met thought we were part of the police squad.”3 But does the use of such figures for reality effect not in fact preclude any form of acknowledgment of the processes of representation? Moreover, can these figures not be used to embody a decontextualized and paranoid form of discourse, one of law or universal equality? It is important to take a closer look at how each documentary makes use of these figures of authority. Colonel Honorine, for example, is contextualized through a localized and gendered perspective. This may not seem obvious to a superficial analysis, as the act of following a cop in an observatory perspective may instead formally echo a rather pernicious subgenre of documentary filmmaking: the reality crime. Similarly to the TV show Cops, perhaps the most popular example of this subgenre, the main formal approach used in Mama Colonel shadows an on-duty police officer as they respond to what are most often, in the case of the American TV show, calls of domestic violence, drug possession, or car chases. With regards to Cops, Misha Kavka explains that this formal approach, which is considered realist for its uninterrupted and handheld sequences, helps conceal an ideologically driven “Us-and-Them” representation that reduces criminals to “social deviants rather than presenting any structural causes for crime,” a representation that overlaps neatly with the model of heroes vs. villains (Kavka 2012, 57). In Mama Colonel, however, this realist bias, as Nichols calls it, is turned on its head through the socially situated praxis of the figure of authority, as represented by Colonel Honorine herself. Charged with protecting women and children, the structural causes of the crimes Colonel Honorine is mandated to prosecute are inherently part of the “Us” of the Congolese people and of the social fabric the prosecution is supposed to improve. Indeed, the social stigmatization around women and children affected directly or indirectly by sexual violence is extremely important in the DRC, and, most often than not, Colonel Honorine is mandated to arrest stepmothers who reject or mistreat children born from a previous rape. Moreover, if we consider that close to half of the rapes in the DRC are conducted by law enforcement officers like the police and the national army (Report of the Secretary-General to the Security Council 2019), we can see how the precepts

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of reality crime in its usual Us-and-Them depiction is completely deconstructed when considered with regard to Congolese women and children. Indeed, the women in Congo are under a constant threat of being looked at as both criminals and victims, and the law enforcer as he who breaks the law. That is a particularly vicious situation wherein those expected to withhold the law are crime perpetrators, a predicament that makes postcolonial states and settings dangerously unsafe, especially, in this case, for female subjects. In this situation, Honorine is positioned like the unexpected exception, the much-awaited savior of conventional crime fiction. What is hence rapidly established in Mama Colonel, then, is not the encompassing paranoid scheme of the corrupted law (“Them”) against a victimized Congolese woman (“Us”) but rather a position that focuses on the needs and knowledge of Congolese women, a position that is emphatic instead of empathetic: a reparative position (Wiegman 2014, 19). That is why Colonel Honorine, as an icon, is so significant: being a woman, she allows the film to be focused on a women’s issue rather than a more general and universalizing situation of corruption, which she could have represented, had she been a man, or had the voice-of-the-text been granted a more prominent status. In contrast, two dominant features of This Is Congo include a prominent voice-of-the-text and a masculine authority. The figure of authority is represented by the colonel of the national army, Mamadou Ndala, and his agency only helps to illustrate the voice-of-the-text—in this case, the voice-of-God narration presented through the very important figure of Colonel Kasongo. Because of his ability, his power to speak, borrowing from Nichols, one would contend that Kasongo’s vocal and narrative authority in the documentary “addresses those aspects of the world that are subject to debate. They are issues and topics that do not lend themselves to scientific proof. As issues of understanding and interpretation, value and judgment about the world we actually occupy, they require a way of speaking that is fundamentally different from logic or storytelling. The rhetorical tradition provides a foundation for this way of speaking. It can embrace reason and narrative, evocation and poetry, but does so for the purpose of inspiring belief or instilling conviction about the merit of a particular viewpoint on a contentious issue” (Nichols 1991, 49). As Colonel Kasongo’s initially distorted voice attests, his knowledge holds a dangerous truth that will be transmitted to the privileged spectator. While emphasizing several times that as a high-ranking officer he knows

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the real problems of the Congolese people because “he was there,” his lived experience becomes the guarantor of more abstract knowledge: during the rest of the film his omniscient voice-of-God narration exposes the history of colonization and corruption that led to the present situation in the Congo. In his narrative “demonstration,” Colonel Kasango is adamant about the source of the conflicts and violence in the DRC, stating that “as long as the Congolese leaders don’t have a patriotic sense . . . the Congo will stagnate in misery forever.” In an emphatic manner, this ultimate cause of suffering is all-encompassing and hijacks any possible other threat faced by Congolese subjects. And, indeed, the figure of Colonel Mamadou provides a concrete example of a leader with a patriotic sense. That is underscored by the reality effect of the observational filmmaking present in his portion of the film, as the viewer once more witnesses the veracity of his patriotism by being literally with him in the battlefield, by being there with him as he fights for his country—just like the authority of Colonel Kasongo is unquestionably asserted for having been there. Yet, in the case of This Is Congo, Colonel Mamadou’s lived experience is a strategy used only to strengthen the more omniscient and abstract voiceof-God narration of Colonel Kasongo. His agency is subjugated to an allencompassing binary structure where a lack of patriotism by Congolese leaders and Western interests impact an otherwise victimized population fighting for its self-determination. Instead of indicating a specifically socially situated praxis, the authority figure of Colonel Mamadou exemplifies a universal idea of equality, where every nation should be given the right to decide what is best. But whereas Mama Colonel underscores this idea of selfdetermination in order to better describe the specifically gendered and Congolese violence that results in turn from the undeniable violence of colonization and neoliberalism, This Is Congo uses this call for self-determination to establish an us-versus-them structure, omitting how the population may be concerned by this situation, particularly the duality of being involved and being afflicted.4 That clearly contrasts with the representation and agency of Colonel Honorine, who is, in many respects, presented as a hero. However, does the position of Colonel Honorine as a heroic “good cop” allow her discourse to supersede the needs of the Congolese survivors? And would this representation not subjugate the voice-of-the-text to an unquestioned external reality through Colonel Honorine’s testimony, thus constituting an example of a realist bias, which Nichols warns against?

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As our argument shows, this would oppose the film’s aspirations. Colonel Honorine’s agency is used to shift the abstract external authority of the voice-of-the-text toward an internal and situated authority that enables a performance of knowledge. As a woman and police officer in the DRC, Colonel Honorine allows for the space required to reflect on the reparation needed by the actual subjects of the film: Congolese women. And this is where the notion of auteurship is the most innovatively negotiated by the film: the auteur position of the director Dieudo Hamadi is conferred upon Colonel Honorine. More importantly, this is not done to the detriment of an observational distance, where the filmmaker would emphasize his agency and acknowledge his engagement in the same historical continuum of its subject (Nichols 1991, 85). As we have argued, Mama Colonel tells the story of torment meted out to women. The rape survivors are indeed women “that we all know,” as Colonel Honorine shouts in a sequence of the film, but we subsequently learn that they are women we can help only by giving them the specific resources they need to help themselves.5 That is demonstrated through Hamadi’s acknowledgment that the voice-of-the-text needs to be subjugated to an internally situated position. Colonel Honorine does not hold the whole truth, but she holds a truth not shared by the voice-of-the-text. Mama Colonel is not about finding blame or about the construction of a common public sphere of which the male filmmaker is also a part. It is about building a space of reparation for survivors of sexual violence. Therefore, the acknowledgment made on the part of the voice-of-thetext is that such a goal can be enabled only by representing the transference of authority from filmmaker to the subjects of the film. Yet, this can be acknowledged only by coming to terms with Hamadi’s own position (i.e., as a male Congolese filmmaker) so as to enable a space for the reparation the aggrieved women of Congo, as needed. We bear witness to the recognition of the relationship between the position of the auteurist voice-of-the-text and their moral and ethical positioning. This acknowledgment results in the transference of authority from an abstract and external voice-of-thetext to an internally situated voice of authority. For example, Colonel Honorine never addresses the camera directly to imply common ground and erases the distance with the enunciative instance of the author. The perspective of Colonel Honorine cannot blend with the voice-of-the-text: they are two socially enabling positions. The rare

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sequences outside of active police work also show us the sluggishness, unprofessionalism, and vanity of Colonel Honorine’s male colleagues, and thus the inadequacy of the external authority of the text. And so what is left to be done is not to give a voice to the female victims through the filmmaker’s storytelling ability or self-reflexivity, but rather to entrust the process of the transference of authority that this particular documentary form encourages so as to highlight the discovery of the subjects’ needs and knowledge in lieu of what the author can probe and doubt. This process of discovering what the subject needs or knows through the mediating figure of authority is precisely what is left out in This Is Congo. We are rather, in this case, presented with a fait accompli. Contrary to Colonel Honorine, Colonel Mamadou does address the camera to support the narrative of the observational portion he mediates. Common ground is thus shared between the filmmaker and his subject, the former simply relaying the unquestioned argument of Colonel Kasongo, the voice of omniscience. In this case, then, the voice-of-the-text is not seen as enabling something, as its position is subjugated to an abstracted truth, connoted by the danger it holds for he who transmits it. Incidentally, the only female subject of This Is Congo, Mama Romance, for all her independence and resilience, becomes subjugated to the master narrative of the colonels and the filmmaker, and is thus transformed into a signifier inside what is ultimately a naturalized masculinist war rhetoric. For example, when we follow Mama Romance in her intrepid journey of mineral trading, we do not witness her situated position and the different perspective she could offer. Instead, one witnesses the insecurity war brings to her life. Through numerous cinematographic techniques, we too feel the threat imposed on the life of this charismatic and exemplary woman. In Mama Colonel, the damaging object of the war and its violence is made a source of reparation through the situated perception of Colonel Honorine. In This Is Congo, it is a constant threat, made more explicit by the fact that the only person powerful enough to alleviate the danger is the symbol of ultimate patriotism himself, Colonel Mamadou. In fact, in the final sequence featuring Mama Romance, the town of Goma is finally liberated by the colonel’s troops. Narratively, this coincides with a period of extreme joy for Mama Romance, as we witness her daughter’s wedding. In a burst of jubilance, Mama Romance reflects on the profundity of her joy and attributes it to the power of the Congolese people: “Congolese are

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a hard-working people. We love to really enjoy life, joy is our power.” It is interesting to note that Mama Romance’s voice is a decontextualized desynchronous voice-over, while the voice of Colonel Honorine, for example, is always heard in a contextualized synchronous setting. Thus, whereas the voice of Colonel Honorine is tied to her agency and empowerment, in the case of Mama Romance, this agency is attributed to the narrative structure of the film. The only exception lies in her outburst of immense joy at the end of the film, a sequence that coincides with the victory of Colonel Mamadou. Clearly, Mama Romance, whose name suggests more emotion than action, is placed in the shadow of the real “authority”—that is, the male Colonel Mamadou, whose trajectory retraces a universally liberationist discourse on the nation.

Women and the Cost of Nation Building As shown above, Mama Colonel and This Is Congo clearly illustrate the intricacies of postcolonial violence and authority in a nation in profound crisis. In a country decimated by rape and other crimes, Colonel Honorine stands out as an isolated leader in the middle of male carelessness and corrupt male colleagues. She is reminiscent of the African female warrior for whom the war became the opportunity to “play a primary role in the struggle for liberation” (Fanon [1959] 1970, 51). Moreover, for Fanon, Individual experience connected to the national struggle and acting as a link in the chain of national existence ceases to be individual, limited, and shrunken, since it opens out into the truth of the nation and of the world. In the same way that during the period of armed struggle each fighter held the fortune of the nation in his/her hands, so, during the period of national construction, each citizen ought to continue in his/her real, everyday activity to associate himself [or herself] with the whole of the nation, incarnate the continuous dialectical truth of the nation and this will the triumph of man [and woman] in his [or her] completeness here and now. (Fanon [1961] 1967, 200; emphasis added)

From this perspective, one can then argue that female postcolonial subjects have always been and remain part of the struggle to liberate and, later, build the continent. The struggle for self-determination is, therefore, a common one. Here, both films under examination show how female characters performs differently (and often better) than their male counterparts in nation formation.

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A pivotal scene in Mama Colonel contains unusual long shots of a crowd encircling her around the town’s symbolic anchor: the flag of the DRC. This mise-en-scène is fitting as it highlights the national dimension of the care needed to restore to their fullest the lives of the mostly female survivors who have been abandoned by a patriarchal nation. Mama Colonel subsequently shares with the crowd her plans to assist rape victims: “My idea is for them to learn a manual job in order to take care of themselves. But I can’t do everything on my own. I have no means. I stand before you with empty hands. . . . They are our mothers, our sisters, our compatriots. If you can contribute with the little you have, it will help us a lot. . . . These women you know them. . . . It’s true that we can wait for white people to help, but we also can do things ourselves. We Congolese.” The crowd’s initial reaction is lackluster, but voices of dissent quickly emerge. A man inquires about the government’s responsibility: “You come to the population, you ask for an amount of money to help rape victims, but what is the government doing?” At last, a woman asks, “The whole town of Kisangani is overwhelmed. But we fight. Why not them? We were all victims of this war.” Cut to black. “But in life, you have to manage by yourself. Why continue to complain about a war everyone has already forgotten?” Colonel Honorine’s concern is to engage rape victims in a new and positive future by providing them with the means for economic independence. Yet, her optimism and determination are challenged by a man concerned with the government’s dismal inaction. Worse, a woman doubles down on the victims by questioning their ability to “manage themselves.” It is within these two conflicting yet complementary parameters that Colonel Honorine must fight to provide hope to local rape victims. Clearly, her life establishes her as the flag bearer of a new nation, a new DRC where citizens are forced to look after themselves without any help from the central government. Given the above context, a comparative analysis of This Is Congo and Mama Colonel becomes an opportunity to further investigate one important aspect of the film—that is, the Congolese self-determination and, especially, the ways in which both films’ approaches to documentary auteurship are articulated—may propose diametrically opposed solutions through similar means. Indeed, what seems to emerge is that the patriotic joy so extolled in This Is Congo is exactly what makes the social fabric of the DRC disintegrate. But how is that possible? In her study on sexual violence in the DRC, Véronique Moufflet

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reminds us that marriage is the sine qua non condition of Congolese existence (2008, 130). She argues that after suffering sexual violence, virgin girls are almost always excluded from the institution of marriage, their existence totally compromised. Married women with similar predicaments are also often excluded from their families, accused of bringing shame upon their relatives because victims of sexual violence in the DRC are often perceived as having consented to their ordeal. In other words, they have consented to the defilement of patriotism. We can, of course, think back to the scene of the film where a woman boldly states to Colonel Honorine that these victims should not complain and that “in life you have to manage by yourself.” Is there any alternative interpretation to be made, particularly when taking into account the naturalized patriotic discourse of This Is Congo? As shown in Mama Colonel, the Congolese people are wary of the importance of women for the social fabric of their country. For Moufflet, “Women are often the first to find novel strategies of economic survival . . . [and] are the central pivot around which is build the family, the undeniable primordial entity of community solidarity in Africa, maybe more than anywhere else, the one around whom are established every social, economical and maybe even political networks” (2008, 120, translated from French). In fact, it is this pivotal importance of Congolese women that is embodied by Mama Romance. Unfortunately, in This Is Congo, her liberation is circumscribed by war rhetoric. And while this rhetoric could be deemed patriarchal, this is perhaps not the most compelling discursive element in the film.6 Rather, This Is Congo aptly argues that the rhetoric of violence has so permeated constructions of Congolese masculinity (from the slave trade, through colonization, and during the postcolonial period of dictatorship) that it has become the same rhetoric through which young Congolese men justify violence against women. It must be noted that sexual violence is often a mode of social ascension, particularly when young Congolese men cannot afford marriage and are, in turn, excluded from society (Moufflet 2998, 129–30). The implications of this social exclusion are far-reaching: after all, to defend a country, you must first be part of it. Unsurprisingly, for a film that attempts to devise a solution to violence through the all-encompassing theory of sovereign patriotism, This Is Congo is itself very violent—both graphically and in its exclusion of subjects of

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sexual violence. When considering Mama Colonel, it becomes clearer that what the documentary’s subject (Congolese women) needs is also the recognition of their struggle as a Congolese struggle, yet one that emanates not from an appeal to patriotism but to reparation. That, we argue, can be explicitly assessed through the form and negotiation of auteurship in each film. In the last sequence of Mama Colonel, the orphan children under the wing of Colonel Honorine are brought to their mothers. As the children are asked to introduce themselves, we hear the mothers weep silently in the background and listen attentively to their horrible stories. Through this difficult yet non-gratuitous sequence, Colonel Honorine finally manages to convey what she wants the viewer to see as she is given the authority to do so. She allows the audience to reimagine Congolese society, without renouncing its past. She helps the audience to see that women are the central pillar upon which African families, society, and community solidarity stand. She allows the audience to realize that if we focus on reparation and on acts that let voices flourish rather than wither, new conceptions of familial entity may emerge through the negotiation of unique positions on life-changing ordeals. Compared to This Is Congo, Mama Colonel grants the viewer the “room to realize that the future may be different from the present” and that there is potential to entertain “profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities . . . that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did” (Sedgwick 2003, 146). As one of the mothers so aptly concludes, holding an orphan child in her arms, “Even if we became outdated mothers, we know how to take care of them. We are still mothers.” Thus, motherhood and sisterhood become essential in the understanding of social dynamics of a devasted nation depicted in poignant documentaries. Borrowing from Nichols, for whom documentaries engage with the world by representing it ([2001] 2010, 2), Mama Colonel and This Is Congo show how well different directors use specific features to build a discourse on violence in the DRC. A close analysis helps better assess how the former presents a less reductive perspective on sexual violence, particularly with relation to its praxis and, more specifically, by the film’s approach to documentary auteurship in a specifically Congolese and gendered context. While it could be argued that This Is Congo does not directly concern itself with the problem of sexual violence in the DRC, the film nonetheless

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tackles the long history of armed conflict and corruption in the country, but both films deploy a similar objective (i.e., the self-determination of the Congolese people). This explains why This Is Congo does not feel like it should openly tackle the problem of sexual violence in the DRC. While this film is representative of a traditional linguistic approach of the author function, Mama Colonel shows a concern for this enabling position and acknowledges the damaging authority it can have in conflict situations. In any case, by giving voice to postcolonial characters, these directors strategically opt for a genre, the documentary, which does not “simply stand for others, representing them in ways they could not do themselves, but rather more actively make a case or argument; they assert what the nature of a matter is to win consent or influence opinion” ([2001] 2010, 4).

Conclusion Through a comparative analysis of Mama Colonel and This Is Congo, this chapter has argued that the analysis of documentary auteurship reveals an important shift in documentary praxis, from a linguistic notion of the author function to an affective one. Drawing on Bill Nichols’s concept of the “voice-of-the-text,” this chapter demonstrates how some documentaries diverge from, or at least nuance, canonical notions of documentary auteurship in order to propose a more localized, gendered, and reparative understanding of sexual violence. These different praxes shed light on a broader, ongoing debate in the social sciences regarding the understanding of sexual violence in the DRC and the importance of documentary filmmaking in relation to issues of gender and female agency in Africa.

Notes 1. While the issue of sexual violence in the DRC is usually perceived as a predominantly women’s issue, Véronique Moufflet reminds us of the often-forgotten fact that this violence is not exclusive to women but also affects men. See Moufflet (2008). 2. The term concern possesses a dual meaning and signifies both a relation to something and involvement (a concern vs. concerning). In other words, instead of understanding the problem of sexual violence in the DRC as one that is fully recognizable and foreseeable through overarching and universalizing structures of colonialism and/or patriarchy, Mama Colonel focuses on how the localized performance of the knowledge of such a situation can be achieved and how a specifically Congolese processes of reparation can be attained by survivors. 3. See Hamadi (2017).

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4. A structure where, for example, the responsibility of the national forces in the perpetration of sexual violence, the very group Colonel Mamadou is part of, is almost never acknowledged. 5. This knowledge of women survivors obviously varies according to the position of the spectator. 6. Historically, the legitimizing of war “has variously taken the forms of explicit appeals to manhood” (Scott 1986, 1073).

Bibliography Buleli, Léonard N’Sanda. 2001. “Maniema, from the AFDL War to the DRC War.” Politique Africaine 84:59–74. Carlsen, Erika. 2009. “Ra/pe and War in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” Peace Review 21 (4): 474–83. Ellerson, Beti. 2016. “African Women and the Documentary: Storytelling, Visualizing History, from the Personal to the Political.” Black Camera 8 (1): 223–39. FIFF Namur. 2017. “Dieudo Hamadi—Maman Colonelle | L’Interview | FIFF 2017.” Video, 3:28, October 3, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxKI_2aBDUQ. Fanon, Frantz. (1959) 1970. A Dying Colonialism. Translated by H. Chevalier. Harmondsworth: Pelican. ———. (1961) 1967. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by C. Farrington. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. (1964) 1988. Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays. Translated by H. Chevalier. New York: Grove. Foucault, Michel. 2004. Sécurité, territoire et population. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Freedman, Jane. 2011. “Explaining Sexual Violence and Gender Inequalities in the DRC.” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 23 (3): 170–75. Hamadi, Dieudo. 2017. “Dieudo Hamadi—Maman Colonelle | L’Interview | FIFF 2017.” FIFF Namur. October 3, 2017. YouTube video, 3:28. https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=bxKI_2aBDUQ. Hongisto, Ilona. 2015. Soul of the Documentary. Framing, Expression, Ethics. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Kaplan, E. Ann. 1988. “Theories and Strategies of the Feminist Documentary.” In New Challenges for Documentary, edited by Alan Rosenthal, 78–102. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kavka, Misha. 2012. Reality TV. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Laudati, Ann, and Charlotte Meterns. 2019. “Resources and Rape: Congo’s (Toxic) Discursive Complex.” African Studies Review 62 (4): 57–82. Maedl, Anna. 2011. “Rape as Weapon of War in the Eastern DRC? The Victims’ Perspective.” Human Rights Quarterly 33 (1): 128–47. Moufflet, Véronique. 2008. “Le paradigme du viol comme arme de guerre à l’est de La République Démocratique du Congo.” Afrique Contemporaine 3 (227): 119–33. Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing Reality. Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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———. (2001) 2010. Introduction to the Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2005. “The Voice of Documentary.” In New Challenges for Documentary: Second Edition, edited by Alan Rosenthal and John Corner, 17–33. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Report of the Secretary-General to the Security Council. Conflict-Related Sexual Violence. S/2019/280, United Nations, March 29, 2019. Sahin, Bilge, and Sidonia Lucia Kula. 2018. “What Women Want before Justice: Examining Justice Initiatives to Challenge Violence against Women in the DRC.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 12:296–313. Samset, Ingrid. 2002. “Conflict of Interests or Interests in Conflict? Diamonds and War in the DRC.” Review of African Political Economy 29 (93–94): 463–80. Scott, Joan W. 1986. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” American Historical Review 91 (5): 1053–75. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. United States. Government Accountability Office. 2011. The Democratic Republic of the Congo: Information on the Sate of Sexual Violence in War-Torn Eastern DRC. Wiegman, Robyn. 2014. “The Times We’re In: Queer Feminist Criticism and the Reparative ‘Turn.’” Feminist Theory 15 (1): 4–25.

Alexie Tcheuyap, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is Professor of French, Associate Vice President, and Vice-Provost at the University of Toronto. His publications include Avoir peur. Insécurité et roman et Afrique francophone (with Hervé Tchumkam, 2019), Autoritarisme, presse et violence au Cameroun (2014), and Postnationalist African Cinemas (2011). Félix Veilleux is a PhD candidate at the Cinema Studies Institute of the University of Toronto. His dissertation focuses on the technological philosophy of early postwar French cinema and its importance for the history of film theory and the notion of a technological aesthetic. Félix holds a BA from Université de Montréal and a joint MA from Goethe Universität and Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle Paris 3.

6 AUTHORIZING REALITY IN LEILA KILANI’S OUR FORBIDDEN PLACES (2008) AND KAOUTHER BEN HANIA’S THE SLASHER OF TUNIS (2014) Suzanne Gauch In the introduction to her handbook on new documentary cinema, Stella Bruzzi highlights the emergence of a new view of documentary authenticity, “one that eschews the traditional adherence to an observation or Bazindependent idea of the transparency of film and replaces this with a performative exchange between subjects, filmmakers/apparatus, and spectators” (Bruzzi 2000, 10). Yet the break with older models and theories of documentary film that Bruzzi describes remains tied to a distinctly Euro-American conceptualization of documentary, predicated on the belief that some combination of the film, its subjects, the filmmaker(s), and its audience can together arrive at a common understanding of what authentic documentation or documentary might look and sound like. Like documentary filmmaking itself, however, consensus about authentic or transparent documentation of historical, social, cultural, and political realities has not historically been equally possible or desirable everywhere. There are times and places where every representation of reality, from monumental historical events to current ones, from crime to social and cultural happenings, is intensively controlled by and on behalf of the state. In such places where the rigid monitoring of facts and truth—whether for the purposes of suppression or creation— coupled with the long-standing dismissal of external documentation as misrepresentation has long been the norm, aspiring documentarians, whether journalists or filmmakers, have long necessarily resorted to coded fictions to gesture if not at these realities, at least toward their many manipulations.

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This, it must be emphasized, is a fundamentally different understanding of documentary and its relationship to fiction than that articulated in Jean-Luc Godard’s famous remark that “all great fiction films tend towards documentary, just as all great documentaries tend toward fiction” (Godard 1986, 132). For the moment, however, whether this represents an ontological difference is less important than the particular manner in which documentary works are received by their publics during and after eras of state censorship and manipulation. For it is too often overlooked that alongside the particular fictional strategies that develop to represent sociopolitical realities under such conditions, there also evolve popular modes of interpreting, speaking of, and relating to both lived and represented political and social facts and experiences. Popular receptions of visual and written media are often conditioned to regard with suspicion claims of transparency in words and images, particularly when they claim to uncover truths or establish consensus. Post-Independence Morocco and Tunisia were, or are, two times and places where understandings of reality were censored in productive as much as repressive ways. Despite their different political structures, the first a monarchy and the second a republic, both countries became known for autocratic forms of government that broached no dissent from activists, political opponents, the press, and artists, among others. Reality was closely monitored, but although our focus is often on censorship in the sense of suppression, Morocco and Tunisia also deployed soft power to actively build reality and create truths. Then, in the early twenty-first century, each country experienced a break with prior state-sponsored approaches to reality, with the result that calls for the transparent and truthful documentation of past and present social and political violence gained a new purchase. In Morocco, the new King Mohammed VI established an ambitious program of reform, relaxing restrictions on the press, promoting new forms of government transparency, and, in 2003, founding an Equity and Reconciliation Commission charged with investigating, documenting, and reconciling with the political violence that had marked his father’s regime during what was called the years of lead, roughly from the 1960s through the late 1980s. In Tunisia, the Ben Ali regime, which had been in power since 1987 and had justified political oppression in the name of combating extremist Islam, was abruptly toppled in early 2011, in the popular uprisings that launched the Arab Spring.1 In both cases, documentary filmmaking was suddenly up for

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new assessments and treatments, incorporating both familiar and previously untried visual and verbal vocabularies. Significantly, in both countries, documentary film became not only possible but necessary, widely received as evidence of sweeping change and a tool for furthering such change. Yet it also continued to be viewed with skepticism by both filmmakers and domestic audiences. What happens to perceptions of reality, truth, and transparency, for example, when sanctioned approaches to them so abruptly change? How are sudden offers of the discoverability of reality, the achievability of transparency, and individual and collective agency in the representation of history (and politics) negotiated? Are documentary conventions developed elsewhere—long presented as duplicitous by former regimes, even while their modalities were seen as reductive by insiders—now sufficient and transferable?2 How do documentarians navigate deep-seated, oblique representational and interpretive conventions—and associated skepticism and fears—that Moroccans and Tunisians have developed over decades? Two filmmakers, roughly contemporaries, Morocco’s Leila Kilani and Tunisia’s Kaouther Ben Hania, began making documentary films in the periods around their countries’ transitions to this new openness in the documentation of political and social violence, each completing a feature-length documentary that resonated with domestic audiences. Kilani’s Our Forbidden Places (2008) is concerned with the imperative for victims of the years of lead to establish the truth of what happened to them and their loved ones, while Ben Hania’s The Challat of Tunis (2014) attempts to uncover the real story behind the crimes and fate of an urban slasher (the titular “challat,” a colloquial adaptation of the word “Gillet,” itself shorthand for a straight-edge razor) who targeted women until his arrest by then-president Ben Ali’s forces of order. Starting from the common premise that they would offer a means of bringing to light long repressed and manipulated truths, both films eventually come to document popular struggles to parse abrupt shifts in representational imperatives and conventions of transparency. Initially approaching their subject matter as something to be collectively discovered, engaging a process of consensus building as healing, both films instead end up depicting the epistemic violence revealed and effected by these recent political shifts and accompanying breaks with representational practices. Perhaps it is not surprising that two women filmmakers, hailing as they do from countries where images of women have long been held up—by domestic as

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well as international journalists and filmmakers—as embodying the truth of the nation, would be the ones to most forcefully challenge the precepts of documentary filmmaking in conveying Moroccan and Tunisian social and political realities and audience receptivity to them. Not coincidentally, both have gone on to make fiction features. Kilani’s Our Forbidden Places and Ben Hania’s The Slasher of Tunis differ considerably in stylistic approach and tone: Kilani naturalizes the camera to the point where her subjects no longer perceive its presence as foreign. Her own voice and image never intervene in the film, and her subjects never address her directly, speaking instead with family members, fellow survivors, or the Equity and Reconciliation Committee’s interviewers. Ben Hania, by contrast, repeatedly confronts her subjects with the camera, and they alternately perform to and reject it. The film underscores her listening presence and positions her as skeptic, ally, challenger, and arbiter. Although each establishes transparency in different ways, neither film in the end styles itself as strictly documentarian. Instead, both explore film’s power to script truth, through editing as much as through interventions in the lives of those they portray—and, in Ben Hania’s case, through generically coded reenactments—all while chronicling their subjects’ engagements with the agency in recording and shaping their reality that recent events have ostensibly granted them. A freelance journalist who studied economics and Mediterranean history and civilization in France, Leila Kilani made documentaries of varying lengths—about clandestine migrants in Tangier (Tangier, Dream of Burners, 2002), about a French Lebanese musical innovator (Zad Moultaka, passages, 2002), and about factory workers in France (D’ici et d’ailleurs, 2003)—prior to making her documentary feature Our Forbidden Places. She describes her subsequent first fiction feature film, On the Edge (2011), as documentary cinema; it employs film noir conventions and centers on a young shrimp factory worker by day and thief by night who loses control of her coconspirators and her own fate in the buildup to a big heist.3 Her more recent films, such as Joint Property (2017), continue to offer fictionalized perspectives on real-world events and issues. Our Forbidden Places was her last film to present as a straightforward work of journalistic documentary, and indeed sprung from Kilani’s role as cinematographer for Morocco’s Equity and Reconciliation Commission, or ERC, itself established in 2003 by King Mohammed VI in an effort to process the disappearances, torture,

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illegal detention and imprisonment that had marked much of his father Hassan II’s reign (1961–99).4 Yet while it is often held up as a vital testimonial document, Kilani describes her documentary in a 2008 promotional video as “not journalism, but cinema.” She emphasizes throughout this promotional video, destined for international audiences, that she consciously constructed, wrote, and edited her film, guiding her subjects off camera with a view to story development and cinematic effect.5 Excluding this work from the film’s frames, she establishes authenticity and transparency through the intimate depiction of four subjects as they struggle with silences, fear, and frustrations not just to uncover the truth but to articulate and explain their experiences in a meaningful way, even if only for themselves and close family members. Kilani has explained that she initially envisioned featuring well-known former prisoners who would expose and condemn the violence of the Moroccan state, but she instead turned her focus to subjects more representative of the tens of thousands who contacted the ERC in an effort to find out what had happened to their loved ones or to be heard and counted.6 In her video, she stresses that it was nevertheless very difficult to persuade her subjects to participate in the film even though it was proposed to them as a way of claiming agency, of authoring their own stories on their own terms. As it emerges in the documentary, this reticence arises not just from the complete shift in self-perception and self-narration from subject to citizen, with the entire restructuring of the social fabric that this entails, demanded by the ERC’s project, but also very much from fears that this new valuation of transparency is itself but another manipulation and public consensus on this past, but another trap. Four groups of characters feature in Our Forbidden Places: a grandmother whose trade-unionist husband disappeared in the early 1960s; her daughter and her granddaughter; a son, Said, and his mother, whose father and husband, a member of the military, vanished into the infamous Tazmamert prison after a failed coup in 1971; a former student activist imprisoned with his fellow students in the infamous Kalat M’Gouna prison, and his mother; and Hassan El Bou, a leftist imprisoned in the Kenitra prison, and his two nieces. None are identified by name until the film’s final credits, and I introduce some names here only for ease of reference. Overlays of names and titles and other forms of identity signaling common to documentary presume settled identities and function to present subjects as

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experts of sorts, even if only of their own stories. Their absence in Kilani’s documentary has the effect of underscoring the unsettled selves of the film’s subjects, foregrounding their struggles to claim the narration, and in some cases literally to reauthor themselves by reclaiming the family names they had changed to avoid shame and further persecution. Similarly, no voiceover narrative intervenes to explain what befell the film’s subjects during the years of lead, to fill the gaps in their stories, or to illuminate the relevance or exemplary nature of their experiences. Instead, their narratives only gradually emerge in successive conversations with family and official interviewers, while their own reluctance, and sometimes inability, to speak their experience, the irrecoverability of facts and evidence, and the limits imposed on the ERC’s mandate by the king open a seemingly insurmountable gulf between popular ways of relating the lived experience of the recent past and the newly promoted vision of official history. Thus, while it chronicles efforts to bring a new transparency to post-independence Moroccan history, Our Forbidden Places also counts on the interpretive habits of domestic audiences cultivated during the decades known as the years of lead to parse its more nuanced messages. Despite the fragmentation, obliqueness, and unresolved nature of each subject’s personal story and its relation to collective history, each does follow a developmental arc for cinematic purposes. This is most apparent in the case of Hassan El Bou, perhaps the best known of the subjects because his case was once championed by Amnesty International, whose narrative develops from fractured snippets into a forceful reclamation of his Marxist-Leninist (and thus decisively antimonarchist) political ideology.7 Because El Bou, who experienced a psychological breakdown as a result of his torture and detention, juxtaposes his life story with the emergence of the post-independence state, and because it is conveyed from the film’s opening frames via voice-over, it comes to function as the subtle guiding narrative of Our Forbidden Places. At the film’s opening, the haunted phrases by which El Bou expresses incomprehension at and suspicion of the ERC’s mission to right the wrongs of Morocco’s recent history are prefaced by scrolling text that explains the mission of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission to bring to light the political violence of King Hassan II’s regime, and the film’s dedication to the now deceased Driss Benzekri, political prisoner and the commission’s chair. As the final words scroll away, El Bou’s voice speaks against the black screen: “Holes . . . silences . . . to stitch together . . . to reconstruct a self in some way. . . . Where

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will I begin? I have no memories, just words. . . . I repeat disordered words.”8 As he alternately whispers and speaks forcefully the details of his birth and Moroccan post-independence, a blood red Moroccan flag appears fluttering against the night. Equating the madness of the broken man with the legacy of recent Moroccan history, this opening draws powerfully on the familiar figure of the madman as truth teller. This comes into focus just before the film’s title flashes on-screen, when El Bou says, “Moroccan history is told as a fable, like Kalila and Dimna [the Arabic title of a story collection also known as the Panchatantra], one can recount it, but it isn’t written.” Although the film’s French subtitles elide the reference to Kalila and Dimna, it offers a key to understanding the monumental nature of each subject’s, and the documentary’s, endeavor. For in his reference to Kalila and Dimna’s animal-centered, hyena-narrated medieval lessons in strategy, guile, and the uses and abuses of power, El Bou invokes a very long history of deeply coded, multilayered, and ever shifting representational and interpretive strategies that not only conflict with the idea of stable and transparent documentation but present it as a trap laid by those who aspire to power. Just as El Bou is searching to reconcile old multivalent ways of narrating lived experience with a new request for straightforward language, so too is Kilani’s film grappling with diverging representational strategies. El Bou’s struggle to find words exposes the radical unfamiliarity of conventions of transparency in political and personal history and demonstrates that the task at hand is far greater than simply uncovering or voicing previously repressed truths. Moments later, the camera passes over El Bou standing at the counter of a crowded café before refocusing on the small television where Benzekri enumerates the ERC’s four-part mission before the café’s rapt audience. This back and forth between the narratives of the film’s four subjects and the state-sanctioned charge of the ERC recurs throughout the film, revealing not just the shortfalls of the ERC’s stated goals but also the weight of its manipulated representations. What emerges is the nagging sense that El Bou is right, that a change in terminology and emphasis on transparency cannot ultimately mask the state’s continued stage-management of reality, and that even and despite the good intentions of the ERC’s members, its mandate serves only to rehabilitate the monarchy and further undermine political resistance. In one of the few studies of the film as a documentary rather than as recorded testimony, Marie Pierre-Bouthier writes that it acknowledges from

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its first frames documentary’s “incapacity to factually reconstruct and fully represent the subject of state violence through documenting testimony.”9 More pointedly, by presenting the ERC’s objectives at a mediated remove from the film’s subjects and from the experience of political violence that it aims to record, Kilani’s film documents the painful distance between the truth that the state wishes to establish in an apparent dismantling of previous official policies and discourse and the complex truths of the individuals who are the targets of this project. As the title Our Forbidden Places suggests, their truth does not simply await the state’s acceptance but rather entails that its subjects come to a new understanding of their reality as Moroccan citizens, past, present, and future, even as off-limits topics signal that they remain de facto subjects of the king. As the film introduces each person and then follows their trajectories to their conclusions, what is reflected is not reconciliation but a specter of renewed symbolic violence. That specter emerges with the hesitant opening of memories long sealed off—in some cases, families have changed their names in an effort to flee the stigma of association with husbands and fathers labeled as criminals and traitors—and is only partially banished with the ERC’s failure to uncover the fate of loved ones; to identify those who informed, arrested, tortured, and killed and explain their motives; to acknowledge the political agency with which victims and survivors acted; or to respect the wishes of the victims’ families to participate in the memorialization of their loved ones.10 Although Kilani’s film acknowledges that it will not be able to capture the state violence that the ERC targets, it succeeds brilliantly in capturing the pedestrian, less spectacular, and ongoing violence inflicted by the Moroccan state’s carefully delimited, staged reclamation of the past in the name of its victims. If symbolic violence, according to Bourdieu, requires the complicity of those it wrongs, then Kilani’s film documents both its success and failure. This comes into sharper focus near the film’s conclusion, when one of Hassan El Bou’s twenty-something nieces responds to his unequivocal reclamation of the political ideology that led him to prison and madness by declaring that it makes her happy to know that there were Moroccans like him who had the courage to say “no,” because her generation is too fearful for that kind of resistance.11 Her matter-of-fact words open a crack in the benevolent self-representation of Mohammed VI’s government, a crack that reveals the continued suppression of victims’ truths in favor of a carefully curated narrative of truth and reconciliation on the state’s terms.

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Her sister attests to the symbolic violence inherent in this truth and reconciliation when she reiterates her incomprehension at her uncle’s refusal of reparations. At the close of this scene, El Bou’s final appearance in the film, he hesitantly, repeatedly stumbling, intones the lyrics of a revolutionary anthem as the camera travels once again over the exterior of night-shrouded, concrete block apartment buildings. Focused as it is on gendered violence and on the story of defined, isolated criminal actions, Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Slasher of Tunis seems to set itself at once a far broader and more circumscribed task than does Kilani’s Our Forbidden Places. Adopting an investigative mode newly possible in the wake of the 2011 revolution, which swept away the Ben Ali regime’s pretext of the “defense of the public order” as a means of quashing information, the documentary aims to identify, interview, and illuminate the motives of the slasher of women’s buttocks arrested in 2003. Very quickly, however, Ben Hania reveals an absence where the figure of the slasher should be, and the depths and nuances of the Tunisian State’s manipulation of social realities for political lurches into view. No less than Kilani’s film, though much more loquaciously and in ways at times darkly humorous, The Slasher of Tunis seeks to document and understand the suppressed truths of recent violence that continues to reverberate in the political present. In a filmed interview that also serves as a promotional video, Ben Hania describes her film as a mockumentary, defining it as a fiction film made with the cheaper techniques of documentary. In so doing, however, she redirects the mockery implicit in the term mockumentary away from the film’s subjects and toward the film itself.12 Her film’s opening frames transpose this mockery into visual terms by sending up its own fact-finding project and celebrating sensationalism over realism. Ben Hania studied business and filmmaking in college and began her career with fiction shorts before making an acclaimed documentary, Imams Go to School (2010), about imams studying religion at the Catholic Institute of Paris. She has worked for Aljazeera Documentary and obtained her second master’s degree with a thesis on “documenteurs,” or “docu-liars,” around the time she made The Slasher of Tunis. Her films since then have alternated between feature-length documentaries like Zineb Hates the Snow (2016) and fiction features inspired by real-life events and reshaped by genre tropes, like her acclaimed 2017 Beauty and the Dogs, based on the true story of a young woman raped by police officers and prosecuted for deposing a

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complaint. These interests collide at the beginning of The Challat of Tunis, which at first presents as straight documentary, offering viewers information against a black screen in the form of audio from a 2003 newscast. A female voice announces, “We’ve just learned that the Challat, the man who slashes women, has struck again three times. Police have been able to arrest the criminal, thanks to the attention of President Ben Ali, who esteemed the matter of critical importance. This is proof of His Excellency’s determination to punish those who dare to disturb the public order and stability of Tunisia.” Moped handlebars and rushing pavement replace the black screen and newscaster’s voice, a small handlebar mirror offering a brief glimpse of the helmet-clad driver’s silhouette. Taking the perspective of this anonymous driver, the camera focuses on the handlebars: a razor suddenly appears in the driver’s right hand, the bike speeds up behind a woman clad in tight jeans, the razor-wielding hand reaches out, a woman screams . . . and a cartoon drawing of the title Slasher of Tunis replaces the scene, dripping red gradually coloring in its letters. By following the delivery of a presumably archival news broadcast with a lurid, campy reenactment not of the slasher’s arrest but of his attacks, The Slasher of Tunis not only shuttles viewers from the perspective of concerned citizens into that of the slasher but also conveys how the prerevolutionary regime’s self-congratulatory, fact-poor news transmissions fueled urban legend. Two years after the end of what many deemed the most intensive regime of censorship in the Arab world, where journalists and documentarians of all kinds were characterized as dangerous manipulators of truth, Ben Hania’s documentary goes for the hook of cheap thrills rather than staking a claim for documentary impartiality, transparency, or authenticity.13 Jumping ten years forward, from 2003 to 2013, immediately following the title and director credit, The Slasher of Tunis quickly switches mode and tone, reengaging the conventional documentary trope of the truth-seeking filmmaker to reflect on how the former regime’s manipulations of reality blocked public examination of causes, effects, and influences as much as justice for victims. Arriving at a prison that sports a crude, hand-painted “no filming” pictogram once found on all public institutions, Ben Hania and her cameraman quickly engage with a sentry who orders them to stop filming. When Ben Hania counters by inquiring whether the slasher is being held in the prison, an absurdist scenario ensues as the sentry rejects their written authorization to film as invalid because the sign on the wall

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says no filming, and he has orders not to allow filming. Growing progressively more agitated as Ben Hania and her cameraman stand their ground, the sentry finally grabs their camera, threatening to break it and have them arrested as the image spins out of control. An angry but measured Ben Hania insists he return the tools of their trade and tells him that their questions and filming break no laws. In the end, he hands over the camera, all the while shouting at them to get lost. In the course of this chaotic exchange, Ben Hania does receive two answers to her query about the slasher’s presence: “They’re all challats in there,” the sentry tells her, later adding that she cannot expect him to reveal “all the secrets of the prison.” In these responses, as much as in the clash between pre-and post-revolutionary claims to authority, several critical points emerge: the camera is reaffirmed as a subversive documentary tool; the prior regime’s claims to success in maintaining “public order” is revealed to be wholly contingent on secrecy and invisibility; the old regime maintains the grip it developed by casting an entire class of men into service as bogeymen; and finally, while the demand for facts and evidence is no longer a criminalizable offense, many continue to see it as a threat to social order. As this and other opening scenes establish, the never-identified slasher—everywhere present yet never identified—became one of the Ben Ali regime’s bogeymen, at once an isolated and containable individual and an everyman, emblem of a retrograde Arab masculinity that threatens Tunisia’s progressive society, politics, and international appeal as a stable trading partner and site of investment.14 That the prison sentry continues to paint all those imprisoned with this brush, while attempting to shut down the rights of the filmmakers and the slasher’s victims, presents the revolution of 2011—whose uprisings in winter 2010 were initiated by exactly such men and sustained by feminist activists, alongside others—as fundamentally incomplete, even unrealized. As in Our Forbidden Places, voice-over is absent from Ben Hania’s documentary. Oblique views of the filmmaker’s person (her face is glimpsed from the side but never shown in a frontal shot) along with her intermittent questions present her less as a guide and more as a personally invested Tunisian citizen, with the overall effect of a documentary seeking its form as much as its subject matter. These stylistic elements, along with documentary’s serious treatment of its interviewees, even when it takes a skeptical view of their claims, all signal transparency and authenticity. Yet the

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film also exposes its scriptedness by ominous, heavy-handed sound and visual effects that recall its lurid opening and impart valences of horror, gangster dramas, and melodrama. Ben Hania’s quest seemingly comes to a head during a casting call for the part of the slasher in a docudrama that is resonant with such overtones. In a darkened cinema, one man after another sits before a static camera, as other men sit clustered in seats near the movie theater’s door, avidly watching. Asked to assume the slasher’s persona and explain his motives, the men spin tales of revenge for womeninflicted slights—snubs, temptations, rejections, humiliations, betrayals— with more or less ease. As one more wannabe actor relates his version of this tale, a young man dressed in a rhinestone-accentuated Scarface T-shirt storms up the aisle and confronts Ben Hania with the claim that he is the real slasher, and that ergo, the role is rightfully his. Although Ben Hania greets his evidence, a worn newspaper clipping she has already seen and from which the slasher’s name is absent, with pure skepticism, she subsequently tracks him down and allows him to guide the film, even as she engages a lawyer to investigate the truth of his clams. Near the film’s end, that lawyer discovers that while this man, Jalel Dridi, was indeed arrested for some of the slashings, he was found innocent of any wrongdoing and released. In the meantime, and with Jalel as guide, The Slasher of Tunis gradually shifts its focus from detailing the slasher’s motives to investigating the personal utility and burden of the slasher’s legend to Jalel. He is filmed both in domestic situations—the home where the youngish, unmarried man still lives with his mother—and as he goes about creating work for himself in a true gig economy by setting up an internet boutique with a friend. This boutique will feature the friend’s video game, where players assume the slasher’s identity and score points by slashing women in form-fitting jeans but lose them for slashing veiled women. What emerges is a portrait of a young man on the socioeconomic margins deeply worried about his value to and place in society. Social power comes in the form of the threatening masculinity of the slasher, but contempt and humiliation also threaten at every turn, whether in the form of a fiancée whom he can never be completely sure is as pure and devoted as she claims, the failure of his internet boutique business, public perception of him as a weak pretender, or the dismissal of the slasher’s legend. If the symbolic violence of the Ben Ali regime’s cultivation of the slasher’s mystique is evident, Jalel is fully complicit with it, as he is within the norms of masculinity of

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his neighborhood, which similarly run counter to his social integration and well-being. Jalel thus spends his days in the company of his buff and pious buddy, pumping iron and visiting the local imam, who greenlights their video game with reasoning that anyone literate in religious matters could easily refute. He also falls prey to a mother-son huckster duo who sell him a virginity meter that he can immerse in his fiancée’s urine to verify her purity—a gambit that only ends their relationship by irremediably insulting her—and verbally assaults a mother who asks the duo to withdraw their video game, telling them that it breaks the corruption of minors law. This confrontation exposes all of Jalel’s insecurities, and while it is unclear whether his distress escalates to physical aggression, at the end of the film, Jalel resurfaces in prison. Confronted by Ben Hania, he admits that he is not the slasher, yet claims the role anew, shrugging that her quest has only led her back to him, quickly resuming his Scarface persona. Yet as he makes this point that she has no other options, it is rather his own lack of options that are highlighted. Throughout the film, Ben Hania has attempted to track down victims of the slasher, presumably as a means to document the still unremediated harm done to his victims. Initially, she turns up only a young woman who presented herself as a victim of the slasher so that her husband would grant her permission to get a tattoo (to cover the presumed scar), and the grieving family of a young girl who committed suicide for wholly different reasons, who continue to be hurt and mystified by her association with the slasher. Yet two interviews with actual victims of the slasher, or slashers, appear just before this last meeting with Jalel, finally shifting the legend by detailing not just individual trauma but also how the slasher’s legend masks the extent and repetition of sexual violence in Tunisian society, pre- and post-revolution. Qualitatively distinct from other interviews in their conformity to conventional interview staging and the absence of Ben Hania’s prompting presence, these two interviews recast the events of the documentary. Both women are middle aged, self-possessed, clearly educated, and middle class, and both believe they were attacked for the socioeconomic independence and self-reliance they represented. Each describes lingering trauma from the attack, one relating how the police officer assigned to escort her home began to fondle her in the car on the premise that she must be “easy” because the slasher had singled her out. The other remarks that there was no

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victim profile, that there likely existed multiple slashers. She includes educated men—doctors and lawyers—in the ranks of these slashers, pointing out that words as well as knives can leave scars. Thereby refusing to profile a single class of men as slashers, this interviewee identifies the complex nature of the issues that drove the slasher, or slashers. More significantly, both women’s words emphasize the need for sustained, complex documentation of reality, even and especially when achieving transparency and consensus about that reality seems impossible. Neither woman offers any sense that Tunisian society has finished with the slasher, and the documentary closes with a statement that there are eleven confirmed victims of the slasher in Tunisia, and that there have been similar cases in Egypt, Syria, and probably elsewhere. In closing, then, The Slasher of Tunis holds two options up for viewers: a sensationalist, mysterious figure on endless replay who offers entertainment but no answers, or difficult stories of repeated acts of sexual violence that demand careful documentation of social realities past and present, the learning of new narratives of truth and transparency. Soon after completing these documentaries, both Kilani and Ben Hania turned to fiction film. In some ways, this turn suggests the continuing inaccessibility of arriving at a consensus of documentary truth. In other ways, however, their turns to fiction are also explorations of how fictions take hold, their relation to reality, and how the tropes they birth can change in ways that prompt reassessments of both their construction and the realities that shaped them. In both modes, their work continues to prompt reflections on how authenticity and transparency are established, maintained, and modified on the power underpinning them, and on how filmmaking might contribute to or oppose the authorizing of certain political and social realities.

Notes 1. I have chosen to employ this term here despite its much-criticized Orientalist overtones both because of its broad legibility and to reflect that manipulations of reality in the service of dominant political interests are not limited to Africa or the Global South. 2. I recall being especially struck by the characterization of journalistic and documentary media as duplicitous and dangerous in my intermediate-level Arabic textbook when I studied the language in Tunisia in summer 2006. This was borne out by the heavy censorship of all news pertaining to the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon that began in July of that year, as well the coded discussions of that war that ensued in the classroom and elsewhere. 3. Leila Kilani, “Entretien avec Leila Kilani, Cannes 2011,” interview by Charlotte Vincent for RFI, video, 4:37, April 9, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykYjwbaskuk.

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4. Kilani’s 81 DVD recordings of testimony represent a major component of the ERC’s archive. 5. Leila Kilani, “Nos lieux interdits: Genèse d’un documentaire” [Our Forbidden Places: Genesis of a Documentary], Mediapart, video, 10:17, 2008, https://www.dailymotion .com/video/x7h18z. 6. Cited in Pierre-Bouthier (2018). 7. Despite a suicide attempt, Hassan El Bou served fourteen years and seven months of a twenty-two-year sentence before his release in 1989. 8. Unless otherwise indicated, translations of the film’s French subtitles and entirely my own. 9. Pierre-Bouthier (2018, 236). 10. In the end, the ERC fails each one of the families in one way or another: Rouqia, Najat, and Zineb because the commission fails to discover either the fate or the remains of their husband-father-grandfather; Said because his sole wish, to be present at the reburial of his father’s remains, is brushed off as unfeasible; and Mohammed and Hassan because the causes for which they fought and were imprisoned continue to be silenced in the ERC’s final report. It is important to note that what is at stake in each case is not vengeance but rather what Martha Nussbaum terms accountability, the process through which a will to create a better future is established (Nussbaum 2016). 11. Although Pierre-Bouthier describes the other young woman as materialist because she cannot comprehend her uncle’s disregard for reparations, I would argue that it is less the money than the sense of self with which she seems to struggle. 12. “Kaouther Ben Hania, Tunisian Director of Le Challat de Tunis,” EuromedAudiovisual, video, 5:35, June 17, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdcFLg2CFGE. 13. In her analysis of filmmaker Salma Baccar’s documentary works, Stephanie Van De Peer emphasizes the challenges of working under Tunisian regimes of censorship, describing Tunisia as “the land of fictions” (Van De Peer 2017, 83–109). 14. I have written on this at greater length in chapter 9, “Breaking Out,” of my book Maghrebs in Motion: African Cinema in Nine Movements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 171–89.

Bibliography Bruzzi, Stella. 2000. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge. Gauch, Suzanne. 2016. Maghrebs in Motion: African Cinema in Nine Movements. New York: Oxford University Press. Godard, Jean-Luc. 1986. Godard on Godard: Critical Writings. Edited by Jean Narboni and Tom Milne. New York: Da Capo. Nussbaum, Martha. 2016. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. New York: Oxford University Press. Pierre-Bouthier, Marie. 2018. “Documentary Cinema and Memory of Political Violence in Post-Authoritarian Morocco and Tunisia.” Journal of North African Studies 23 (1/2): 225–45. Van De Peer, Stephanie. 2017. Negotiating Dissidence: The Pioneering Women of Arab Documentary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Suzanne Gauch is a former Professor of Film, Gender, and Postcolonial Studies. She is the author of Maghrebs in Motion: North African Cinema in Nine Movements and Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam as well as a number of articles on African film and literature. She is currently completing a book on silent cinema and the 1001 Nights.

7 DOCUMENTING TYRANNY The Politics of Memory in Leila Kilani and Osvalde Lewat Hervé Tchumkam

In Morocco between 1960 and 1980, hundreds of political opponents to or critics of the monarchy were killed; many others disappeared and were never accounted for. Almost thirty years later, a decree by the president of the Republic of Cameroon created an Operational Command Unit to tackle rampant banditry in the country’s coastal region of Douala. This special unit, with the power vested in them by the sovereign, became responsible for the disappearance or killings of over one thousand people. Taken together, the years of lead (années de plomb) in Morocco and the Bépanda Affair in Cameroon demand a reevaluation of the value ascribed to human lives in postcolonial context. Scrutinizing the documentation of tyranny and the relation between documentary filmmaking and politics in Leila Kilani’s Nos lieux interdits (2008) and Osvalde Lewat’s Une affaire de nègres (2008), I contend that because of the confusion between the police and the figure of the sovereign both in Morocco and Cameroon, where people were sentenced to death without trial and treated as outlaws who could be murdered without reprisal, documentaries have become a powerful prompt for the memory of the oppressed and forgotten. In her outstanding documentary film, Osvalde Lewat takes on the following question raised by Nigerian Nobel Prize laureate novelist Wole Soyinka: “They say Africans are not ready for democracy. So I wonder: have they ever been ready for dictatorship?” Leila Kilani dedicates her documentary to Driss Benzekri, a political prisoner who arbitrarily spent seventeen years of his life behind bars before

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becoming the chair of the Instance Équité et Réconciliation established in Morocco in 2004, a committee tasked with freeing the country from the ghosts of the years of lead. Leila Kilani endeavors to revisit political violence through the lens of family secrets that in fact are a gateway to state secrets. These two documentaries are a real coup de force insofar as their producers, two women, open up Pandora’s box by giving a voice back to the families of victims, thereby in a way giving visibility to the many dead whose disappearances had been cast into oblivion. In doing so, they open a new avenue to reconsider the ethics of testimony, especially considering Giorgio Agamben’s prevalent thesis that the integral witness cannot testify. My objective in this chapter is threefold: First, I analyze the ways in which the two documentary filmmakers unveil tyranny and dictatorship in African contexts—namely, in Morocco and Cameroon. Second, I highlight the relationships between the state and the police as a new location for reflecting on African dictatorships since independence. Last but not least, I maintain that the precarization of African lives ushers them into a zone of uncertainty where their status as humans becomes indistinguishable from that of objects, since their lives can be subjected to abject violence or pure annihilation without any judicial consequence or accountability.

Tyranny, Terror, and the Government of Bodies In her seminal essay The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt has reflected on totalitarian governments and the ways in which, in the relentless search to extend their power, they have created a system where human rights are simply trampled. The ensuing consequence of the rise of totalitarian regimes, Arendt teaches us, lies in the relegation of masses of humans if not to a lawless zone, at least to an area where the boundary between human and inhuman is completely blurred. As she puts it, “Totalitarian governments, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man” (1951, 475). It is important to note the undoing of the link between individual citizens and the state that is first and foremost supposed to protect their rights and guarantee their security and search for happiness in

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the type of governments that Arendt is interested in. In other words, one might say that in the case of totalitarian regimes, the role of the state has shifted from the protection of its borders to the invention of some kind of enemy within that needs to be contained, if not simply eliminated. Moreover, through the means of a scrutiny of the political systems of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia, the philosopher points to terror as the guiding principle or bedrock of totalitarianism and underlines uprootedness and superfluousness as two coalescent conditions that ultimately characterize human lives in totalitarian contexts. For Arendt, Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its executioners and victims, is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the breakdown of political institutions and social traditions in our own time. To be uprooted means to have no place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others; to be superfluous means not to belong to the world at all. Uprootedness can be the preliminary condition for superfluousness, just as isolation can (but must not) be the preliminary condition for loneliness. (475, my emphasis)

As can be seen in the quote above, the separation from the sphere of “normal life”—that is, the suspension of the rights of a citizen—becomes a quasi sine qua non condition for the realization of a terror state that puts in seclusion citizens confronted with state tyranny. Such citizens shift from having next to no place in the world to not belonging either to the nation as persons or to the world as human beings. Taking my cue from Hannah Arendt, I would like to look at the representation of Cameroon and Morocco in two documentary films respectively by Leila Kilani and Osvalde Lewat. I suggest that even though these two productions differ in nature—one deals with a republic, the other a monarchy—both exhibit features of totalitarian regimes. Une affaire de nègres, the 2008 documentary film by Osvalde Lewat, revisits a dark page of the recent history of Cameroon and sheds light on gruesome events that have been either forgotten, insufficiently publicized, or discussed in ways that are not significant. Soon after the creation of the Operational Command, the local press and human rights organizations started denouncing deaths and disappearances of people who were, for the majority, never brought to trial. The following year, following a tip by an alleged police informant,

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nine young men disappeared in Bépanda, a popular neighborhood district of Douala. They were never seen again. All subsequent investigations on the matter of the nine missing in Bépanda came to no fruition. Thus, those young men were stripped off their rights and subjected to death without mediation. The families of these and other victims lived their lives, painfully torn between the desire for justice and the pressure for the crimes to be wiped forever from the collective memory. Altogether, the Operational Command, with the power vested in them by the sovereign, became responsible for the disappearances or summary killings of over one thousand people. In the history of the kingdom of Morocco, Leila Kilani, a filmmaker concerned with the terror the state had subjected its citizens to, follows, in Nos lieux interdits, four families at a time when the new king of Morocco had ordered the creation of an investigative commission known as Instance Équité et Réconciliation in an effort to heal the wounds of many families who lost their loved ones roughly between 1960 and 1980 under the brutal regime of his late father, King Hassan II. Marie Pierre-Bouthier brilliantly summarizes the political violence that punctuated life in Morocco at the time. Speaking of the reign of Hassan II, she writes, “The thirty years of this regime are marked by successive episodes of violence: in October 1965, Mehdi Ben Barka was abducted and disappeared in Paris, a few months after the suppression of the Casablanca riots (March 23rd 1965); Marxist-Leninist activists were imprisoned in the 70s; demonstrations of the 1981 ‘bread riots’ were violently suppressed; military rebels of the 1971 and 1972 military coups were sent to deadly prisoners’ camps, such as Tazmamart, and so were some Sahrawi activists after the invasion of Western Sahara in 1975” (2018, 225–26). In fact, in interview after interview, the many survivors of the years of lead stress the absence of justice that seems to have sealed the fate of their loved ones who perished, were abruptly executed, died in prison, or suffered long sessions of torture during their imprisonment in places such as Tazmamart, a prison that has been called a Bastille in the Moroccan desert.1 If, in the case of Morocco, kidnappings and activities opposing the monarchy were used to justify arrests and deaths at the hand of security forces, in Cameroon there was no such thing as an attempt to destabilize a thirty-year regime. In this latter country, the armed forces conducted a brutal operation in order to combat insecurity in the economic capital of Cameroon. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that while in Morocco the reigning king

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created a state-sanctioned albeit flawed commission to give voice to the silenced masses who survived or endured the loss of their family members, in Cameroon, no such attempts at reparations ever took place.2 Instead, silence and oblivion have been the responses to the disappearances and killings of close to a thousand people, according to human rights organizations and the Catholic Church in Cameroon.3 Besides, although in March 2001 the government of Cameroon ordered an official investigation, all charges were quickly dropped one year later (July 2002), and the military officers responsible for the disappearance of the nine missing Bépanda youths and, more broadly, for the killings of the Operational Command, were declared “responsible but not guilty.” Consequently, they were exculpated and freed. In their documentaries, Leila Kilani and Osvalde Lewat give voice to the anonymous and invisible who confess that they have been defeated by a political system in Cameroon and Morocco, which both appear to have taken the form of what Giorgio Agamben (2005) has called “states of exception.” The permanence of fear and terror under which citizens lived in Cameroon with the decree creating the Operational Command, as well as the constant threat Moroccan citizens endured in the years of lead, clearly attest to the fact that the suspension of rights, normally an exceptional measure, had become routine in both cases. Both documentaries amply illustrate this fact as they feature family members of the disappeared and innocently executed still searching for reasons of their arrest, or their whereabouts. In State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben returns to ancient Rome to explain that whenever the Senate was informed of a situation that was perilous for the republic, it would issue a decree declaring the tumultus—that is, an emergency situation resulting from a foreign war, insurrection, or civil war. This tumultus, Agamben continues, usually led to the declaration of the iustitium, literally the suspension of law. In the words of the philosopher, “The term implied, then, a suspension not simply of the administration of justice but of the law as such” (2005, 41). Although Agamben’s theorization of the state of exception is applied primarily to Western societies, it proves very effective in interpreting the juridical void in which human lives had been cast in postcolonial Cameroon and Morocco. For indeed, just as King Hassan II of Morocco had adopted exceptional measures to guarantee the stability of his regime and shield it from attacks, in Cameroon the decree creating the death squadrons officially aimed at tackling grand banditry and thus guaranteeing civil protection in order

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to prevent possible chaos resulting from popular uprisings in response to rampant insecurity. In this regard, one central lesson to be drawn from the events exposed and discussed in the documentaries by Leila Kilani and Osvalde Lewat is that, in Hassan II’s Morocco and Paul Biya’s Cameroon, the proclamation of special measures were definitely coterminous with ancient Rome iustitium, and that consequently, citizens directly faced death in the absence of trials, much less a sentencing to a prison term. In this sense, Cameroon and Morocco clearly became two sites of necropolitics, to use a word coined by Achille Mbembe. In clear, Leila Kilani and Osvalde Lewat shed light on two countries where indeed, as Mbembe puts it, “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power” (2003, 11–12). In such contexts, I will argue that Nos lieux interdits and Une affaire de nègres unveil, denounce, and critique two African regimes that have become states of insecurity and that have ceased to guarantee civil protections and social welfare, and have mutated to become governments of bodies. It is at this level that Hannah Arendt’s totalitarianism and Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception meet when one carefully observes the political conditions that made possible the disappearance of thousands of people in Cameroon between 2000 and 2001, and the loss of an equal number of men and women in Morocco during the years of lead. In both cases, the creation of a context where both the administration of justice and the law itself were suspended was the juridical condition necessary to reduce citizens to uprootedness and superfluousness. Incidentally, Hannah Arendt’s argument that “terror becomes total when it becomes independent of all opposition; it rules supreme when nobody any longer stands in its way. If lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian domination” (1951, 465) resonates well with Agamben’s contention that “modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system” (2005, 2). These two theoretical statements help account for the deafening silence and the abundance of tears in Leila Kilani’s

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and Osvalde Lewat’s documentaries. Here and there, people bereft of their loved ones suddenly discovered that they had been reduced to naked life by their respective governments and exposed to death without any mediation. But what do the stories of these victims of tyranny imply? More precisely, how can one account for the politics of memory in Kilani and Lewat, and, most importantly, what do their documentaries tell us about what I will call the precarization of lives in Cameroon and Morocco?

The Politics of Memory: For Precarious Lives The relation between precarious lives and the politics of memory can be identified at the junction point of modes of representations and the emphasis on the values of human lives. As I have shown above, Une affaire de nègres and Nos lieux interdits both tell the stories of citizens whose lives had become a constant meditation on a constant threat of death. In both documentaries, the families of victims, but also the people who survived internment and tortures in prison cells and other containment areas, have to live between the desire for justice and the pressure for the crimes to be wiped forever from the collective memory. Altogether, the Operational Command in Cameroon and the years of lead (from 1960 to 1980) in Morocco became responsible for the disappearances or killings of thousands of people. Looking retrospectively at what happened, it is important to raise the following questions: What place is given to death, and how does this place determine the value of the human body? What becomes of the citizen when the boundary is blurred between their sacredness and their expendability, and what state mechanisms function to blur these boundaries? How do we then understand the relation between the police and the sovereign? Such questions will guide my inquiry into the politicization of life (the transformation from mere life into political life) that seems to have become the basis for the ultimate expression of sovereignty in Africa, and more specifically in Cameroon and Morocco. One old lady in Kilani’s documentary who speaks to a man, probably her son, compares the king to a dragon and the state, the makhzen, to a river that enriches some people and crushes others. Lewat’s documentary begins with a troubling scene where one sees parents burying a banana trunk that symbolizes their lost son whose body had never been accounted for. As a matter of fact, all these parents know and say is that their son was arrested by the police and literally disappeared. They have no idea what happened to him, nor do they know when, how, and where

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he was killed. Taken together, these two scenes illustrate the deep trauma that has affected the survivors of state brutality. But even more intriguing is the kind of historical and religious determinism that characterize people in Africa. When survivors and victims’ families do not simply fall back on silence or resign themselves to explaining all the violence by fate, as is the case in Kilani’s documentary, they resort to the will of God as both an explanation of abjection and, in Lewat’s film, the ultimate righter of wrongs. I argue that this current state of affairs can be explained and should be understood by the gradual transformation of human lives in Morocco and Cameroon into precarious lives. As Isabel Lorey puts it, “The conceptual composition of ‘precarious’ can be described in the broadest sense as insecurity and vulnerability, destabilization and endangerment” (2015, 10). In this sense, the very absence of political and social protection or protection against anything that puts citizens in danger has simply transformed these citizens into passive victims of state violence. The memorialization of suffering in Kilani and Lewat rests largely on these two women filmmakers’ investigation into the precariousness of lives. What their documentaries show is that precarization had become a mode of government in Morocco and Cameroon where the victims and survivors of state tyranny have moved from invisibility to depression, while the dead have seen the sacredness of their lives shattered by unsanctionable deaths. In this sense, the deceased, the missing, the survivors, and their families who are put on display in the documentaries are nothing less than precarious people, if we are to believe Guillaume Le Blanc, for whom the precarious who has become invisible simply enters into the realm of emptiness: “Having become invisible and reduced to emptiness, the precarious becomes derealized in that a negative identity designed by the dominant society is imposed on them: jobless, precarious, excluded” (2007, 192).4 Although the precarity that Le Blanc discusses here hinges more on social classes, it is noteworthy that in the cases of Morocco and Cameroon, social class was also attributable, albeit only partially, to the degrading and dehumanizing treatment of human beings. With the exception of intellectuals and military officers in Morocco, the many people who had disappeared or who were thrown in jail in Kilani’s documentary were members of workers’ unions. Social class and financial power also played a role during the Operational Command in Cameroon, as illustrated in Lewat’s documentary by Richard Nzamyo, whose son,

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Cyrille, was shot dead in front of him by an army officer who wanted to remind him that he was either unable or unwilling to pay the one hundred thousand CFA francs (roughly the equivalent of $200) that was asked of him when his son was arbitrarily detained. It is therefore very easy to understand the depression that is subsequent to precarity, a depression that is visible through the zooms on people’s faces as they are interviewed in the two documentaries. Alexie Tcheuyap has given a noteworthy reading of the relation between the vulnerability of people’s lives and the permanence of death in his analysis of Osvalde Lewat’s documentary: The camera focuses on the somber and bony faces of people overtaken by suffering and misery, seizes the gazes of victim’s parents being interviewed, thus offering a separation, a fragmentation that bestows on body parts, on the remainders and reduced spaces an absolute value in a postcolonial cartography of pain. Even living bodies seem to appear as living dead whose parts are simply awaiting the same fate as the dead and which the camera captures in dead silence. Here, the absence of wholesomeness, the decaying carcasses thus become signs and the remains of bodies forsaken by indifferent human beings and being eaten by animals, symbolize the permanence of death, of vulnerability and the defenselessness of human bodies which the camera is reluctant to wholly portray.5 (2010, 72–73)

The image of bodies represented in Une affaire de nègres as living dead that Alexie Tcheuyap proposes can also be applied to the many faces, sad, anxious, and terrified by death, which one also sees in the families interviewed in Nos lieux interdits. The manner in which oral testimonies make it possible for the victims to finally mourn their lost ones ultimately raises the question not only of testimony but of grief and mourning. First, the depth with which survivors and the families of the victims narrate their suffering allows us to reconsider the ethics of testimony. While it is true that the witness can testify only about the impossibility to do so, it is also absolutely important to note that the ultimate testimony, the one that only the dead can give, is situated in the confessions that survivors and family victims make about their lack of words to testify and therefore in listening to the emptiness that each of their testimonies carries. Second, it is remarkable that in both documentaries, there seems to be what I term the impossibility of mourning. And there are many reasons for this state of affairs: not only have the bodies of the dead in Cameroon and Morocco not

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been retrieved, turning them into humans without sepulchre, but also, the precarity of human lives as observed in Kilani and Lewat reveals a hidden matrix of postcolonial African states: the integration of police into sovereignty. In Morocco, the police and army that kidnapped and killed thousands were vested with special powers by the king. In Cameroon, not only were the death squadrons given exceptional powers by the president of the republic, but they also used the pretext of security to permanently install insecurity and fear. In Une affaire de nègres, Rigobert Kouyang is a soldier who served during the Operational Command and was even a member of the firing squad charged with killing people and dumping their bodies in the surrounding forests or rivers. Not only does Rigobert remain insensitive when he describes the techniques used to kill civilians in mass, he also reveals that the more they killed, the more their commanding officers would reward them. To sum up, the sovereign who is the head of state has put citizens’ lives at the disposal of the army and the police, literally granting these forces the power of life or death over their captives. The concept of sovereignty had thus entered in the figure of the police in a way that was lethal for citizens. And the proximity between the king and his armed forces in Morocco, or the complicity between President Biya and his Operational Command, clearly reveal an “embarrassing contiguity between sovereignty and police function [that] is expressed, [Agamben writes,] in the intangible sacredness that, according to the ancient codes, the figure of the sovereign and the figure of the executioner have in common” (Agamben 2000, 105). It therefore comes as no surprise that in both Cameroon and in Morocco, the targeting of those who would be jailed, tortured, or eventually killed was organized as a police operation, thereby inserting precarization into the usual instruments of governance. Richard Nzamyo, Zacharie Tahi, and Denise Etaha, just like Said Hadan and his mother as well as all the nameless victims’ family members in Cameroon, are left to guess whether their loved ones will miraculously return home one day. Additionally, the fact that in Morocco the decision creating the Instance Équité et Réconciliation underlined that no names of executioners would be disclosed during the hearings, and that no indictments would result from the investigation in the kingdom, adds to the not guilty verdict pronounced in favor of the army and police officers responsible for the 2001 deaths and disappearances in Cameroon. The queries of parents and family members of victims in Cameroon—unlike in Morocco, where

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they were at least allowed to speak publicly—were answered with silence and scorn by law enforcement and judicial authorities. Such negation of justice points to the question that Judith Butler raises in her book Precarious Lives (2004)—namely, who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? What makes for a grievable life? (20). These questions are particularly relevant for cases explored in both documentaries. In Morocco, in spite of the work of the Instance Équité et Réconciliation, the former political detainees featured in Kilani’s film are never informed of the official reason for their kidnapping. No missing person is found anywhere, and no other body has been identified. To top it all, family victims are denied the right to re-bury the few bodies found in Tazmamart. In all instances, the victims’ families and survivors are powerless in front of the rigidity of the respective administrations. As one interviewee puts it, for them, their relatives are not dead, but they live in their minds and consciences, for to acknowledge death, they must at the very least see the dead body. In Cameroon, as depicted in Lewat’s documentary, nobody outside the country actually cared about what was happening, in spite of all the local newspapers’ reports on the abuses perpetrated by the unit of the Operational Command. Anicet Ekane, a political leader and human rights activist whom I interviewed about the 2000–01 events in Cameroon, was beaten to death as he was leading mass demonstrations to denounce state barbarism. Moreover, Albert Dzongang, another politician, stresses the insignificance of the lives of the deceased and abductees when he tells the documentary filmmaker that precisely because they knew that the truth would be truncated when the president of Cameroon finally ordered an investigation, he had created an independent commission of inquiry. But what is gripping in his testimony is that he stresses that neither Amnesty International France nor the European Commission, and not even the NGO Survie in France, showed any interest in what was becoming of human beings in Cameroon. As a result, they never published any official report on the acts of violence perpetrated by police and military forces. Were international organizations and NGOs and the European Union silent because, at the end of the day, as previously witnessed in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, all the victims were Africans, and African lives did not matter? Could it be that African lives, in Rwanda and in Cameroon as well as in Morocco, are not grievable lives? Clearly, if one looks at the silence of the international community, the United Nations, or the European Union, which are always prone to recite

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the litany of democratic, justice, and human rights principles in the world, it is difficult not to be tempted to believe that African lives, precisely because of who they are, are expendable, not worthy of mourning, and may well not be human lives. Do African lives really matter? And, most importantly, do those lives even matter to African themselves, when one considers the continent’s leaders and promoters of authoritarianism, or the masses that do not seem to realize that as potential victims, they worship and praise their executioners on a daily basis? What is the value of African lives at the hand of African leaders, who, throughout the continent, have shown their proximity with the executioner, to paraphrase Giorgio Agamben? And ultimately, is reconciliation possible? Can forgiveness happen when the persecutor never acknowledges any wrongdoing, when the state takes necessary measures to deny justice in Cameroon by organizing a judicial farce or when the remains of lost ones cannot even be retrieved, thereby making any mourning impossible, as was the case in Morocco? Naima Hachad has reflected on Morocco’s transitional justice, and what she writes highlights the shortcomings of Instance Équité et Réconciliation and, in a sense, provides a beginning of answers to the questions above: “In a 2004 address about the IER, King Mohammed VI reaffirms his father’s desire to definitively close the file of human rights abuses and explains that the commission’s purpose ‘is to ensure that Moroccans make peace with themselves and their history, that they free up their energy, and they join in building a modern and democratic society, which is the best protection against backsliding.’ The King and the Moroccan government used the IER to showcase Morocco’s ‘democratic transition.’ Yet for Tazmamart victims, the IER is no resolution” (2018, 220). Hachad’s observations on the process of transitional justice in Morocco can be suitably applied to the judicial treatment of those who were abducted, disappeared, or died at the hands of the units of the Operational Command. First of all, the trials that were organized in Cameroon, as many observers noted both in the documentary and in civil society, enacted a facade of justice carefully orchestrated to satisfy an international community that never sought to see to it that justice was delivered. Both in Cameroon and in Morocco, official inquiries and the work of Instance Équité et Réconciliation yielded no result capable of appeasing the minds of the survivors and the victims’ families. And while in Morocco we haven’t been able to find cases where survivors or victims’ families conspired with the state,

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in Cameroon it is clear that some families had accepted bribes from the government, in the form of financial and social privileges, in exchange for their silence about their deceased or missing loved ones. Worse still, as shown before the ending of Une affaire de nègres, when a few Cameroonians are interviewed and asked whether they would support the reinstatement of the Operational Command, their answers are shocking. As if nothing had ever happened, these interviewees long for the restoration of the special units, all with the exception of one lone man who states that while it was put together to combat grand banditry, it ended up killing innocents and protecting criminals who paid bribes to the members of the armed forces. That makes one wonder whether in that regard, the people are not accomplices of the state and as such, do not reflect some of the most troubling dimensions of the vulnerability of human lives in Cameroon in particular, and in Africa in general. Fundamentally, the work of the Instance Équité et Réconcialition, in the words of Marie Pierre-Bouthier, “legitimated the new King as peacemaker and democrat, in contrast to his father, Hassan II. But the regime remained a monarchy, the King is still sacred and issues involving him and his family are still state taboos.” Is it not analogous to the dropping of charges in the trials of military leaders of the Operational Command and the celebration of Cameroon’s Paul Biya as the guarantor of democracy and peace by many people, including the lawyer who was defending the victims’ families in Cameroon? In fact, Maitre Jean de Dieu Momo, the lawyer who vehemently criticizes human rights abuses in Cameroon in Osvalde Lewat’s documentary, has become one of the most zealous supporters of Paul Biya in Cameroon. Ultimately, the contribution of Leila Kilani and Osvalde Lewat to the documentation of tyranny and the coming of a politics of memory in Morocco and Cameroon can be summarized in the staging of the African citizen as the homo sacer. To understand the analogy that I draw between the African citizen and the homo sacer, it is important to briefly return to the understanding of the paradoxical status of the homo sacer in ancient Rome. In his influential work Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben elaborates on the work of Michel Foucault on biopower—that is, the mechanisms of control that are applied to individual bodies. Agamben suggests that the notion of sovereignty in the Western tradition implies that the sovereign has power over life. Agamben’s theory rests on the enigmatic homo sacer, a figure in ancient Rome that was

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not permitted to be sacrificed, yet its killing was not considered homicide. As Agamben clearly puts it, homo sacer presents the originary figure of life taken into the sovereign ban and preserves the memory of the originary exclusion through which the political dimension was first constituted. The political sphere of sovereignty was thus constituted through a double exclusion, as an excrescence of the profane in the religious and the religious in the profane, which takes the form of a zone of distinction between sacrifice and homicide. The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, a sacred life—that is, and life that may be killed but not sacrificed—is the life that has been captured in this sphere. (1998, 83)

Homo sacer is therefore characterized by the contradiction between the fact that as humans, they could be killed but not sacrificed. Building on that paradox, and considering that it can help illustrate the relation between sovereign power and the citizen in today’s democracies, the figure of the homo sacer becomes a provisional code for modernity. In the wake of Giorgio Agamben, I would like to reconsider the figure of the homo sacer as a crucial tool to interpret the relation between state power and citizens in contemporary Africa, and more specifically in Cameroon and Morocco. For, indeed, documentaries by Leila Kilani and Osvalde Lewat investigate the ways in which the life of the African citizen has been reduced to a “bare life”—that is, a form of life that has been put at the disposal of the sovereign who exercises absolute power of life and death over citizens. By looking at those instances in Morocco and Cameroon as they are dramatized in the two documentaries, I submit that the homo africanus has gradually become a homo sacer. In other words, the African citizen has literally become confused with that person who cannot be put to death by the ritual, but whose killing is not considered homicide. Nos lieux interdits and Une affaire de nègres successfully and powerfully give voice to the voiceless and visibility to people who had been subjected to a publicly constructed invisibility, in order not to provide a definitive answer to but only to open up possible avenues for an appeased memory for the families of the victims of state violence in Cameroon and Morocco. And although both documentaries clearly indicate that mourning is incomplete as long as truth and justice do not prevail, it seems fair to note that by opening up the forbidden pages of the history of Cameroon and Morocco, they have prepared the ground

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for the deceased whose atrocious stories have been brought out of silence and oblivion through Nos lieux interdits and Une affaire de nègres. For all these reasons, Leila Kilani and Osvalde Lewat have revitalized the genre of woman documentary filmmaking in Africa by inscribing their work at the heart of the reflection on the human condition in Africa and the absolute urgency to reconsider the value of human lives in Africa.

Notes 1. The prison, Tazmamart, has also been the main theme of many novels such as Abdelhak Serhane’s La chienne de Tazmamart (2001), Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Cette aveuglante absence de lumière (2001), and Mahi Binebine’s Le fou du roi (2017), to name just a few. 2. I will return to address this question later. 3. Examples include the Ligue Camerounaise des Droits de l’Homme (LCDH); the Comité National des Droits de l’Homme et des Libertés (CNDHL); the Mouvement des droits de l’Homme et des libertés (MDDHL); and the Human Rights Defence Group (HRDG). The Association Chrétienne pour l’Abolition de la Torture (ACAT) has carried out interviews of the families of victims. 4. “N’étant plus aisément visible, n’étant potentiellement plus personne, le précaire n’est desormais que cette identité negative que lui confère de l’extérieur le jugement stigmatisant: identité sociale de chòmeur, de précaire, d’exclu” (2007, 192). 5. L’objectif saisit de très près les visages mélancoliques et osseux des personnages terrassés par la douleur et la misère, happe les faces des parents de victimes interviewés, offrant ainsi une segmentation, une fragmentation qui donne aux parties, aux restes et aux espaces réduits une valeur absolue dans une stylistique postcoloniale de la peine. Même les corps vivants ne semblent donc être que des restes des corps, des parties qui attendent de sombrer dans la décomposition que connaissent les autres restes de cadavres que balaie la caméra dans un silence de mort. L’absence de totalité, la décomposition (physique) devient donc un signifié, et les restes de corps dévorés par les animaux et les mouches, abandonnés par les hommes indifférents, deviennent le symbole du hasard de la mort, de la vulnérabilité de la vie, de la fragilité des corps dont la caméra ne semble vouloir saisir que des parties (2010, 72–73).

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000. Means without End: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2005. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: World Publishing. Ben Jelloun, Tahar. 2001. Cette aveuglante absence de lumière. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Binebine, Mahi. 2017. Le fou du roi. Paris: Stock.

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Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso. Hachad, Naima. 2018. “Narrating Tazmamart: Visceral Contestations of Morocco’s Transitional Justice and Democracy.” Journal of North African Studies 23 (1–2): 208–24. Le Blanc, Guillaume. 2007. Vies ordinaires, vies précaires. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Lorey, Isabel. 2015. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. Translated by Aileen Derieg. New York: Verso. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Cultures 15 (1): 11–40. Pierre-Bouthier, Marie. 2018. “Documentary Cinema and Memory of Political Violence in Post-Authoritarian Morocco and Tunisia (2009–2015).” Journal of North African Studies 23 (1–2): 225–45. Serhane, Abdelhak. 2001. La chienne de Tazmamart. Paris: Paris Mediterannée. Tcheuyap, Alexie. 2010. “Cinéma documentaire et expériences féminines en Afrique francophone.” French Forum 35 (2–3): 57–77.

Hervé Tchumkam is Professor of French and Postcolonial Studies and a Fellow of the John G. Tower Center for Public Policy and International Affairs at SMU. Trained as a comparatist, his areas of interest include Comparative Postcolonial Studies, Literary Theory, Political Philosophy, African Studies, and Human Rights. He is the author of State Power and Stigmatization and Youth Resistance Cultures in the French Banlieues: Uncanny Citizenship (2015) and the coauthor with Alexie Tcheuyap of Avoir peur: Insécurité et roman en Afrique Francophone (2019). His most recent monograph, Precarious Lives and Marginal Bodies in North Africa: Homo Expendibilis, was published in 2021.

8 ECOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS IN AFRICAN WOMEN DOCUMENTARIES Suzanne Crosta Africa’s natural history has been the site of wondrous and turbulent ecological changes, historically documented in world cinemas and wildlife cinematography.1 From lush grasslands to deserts, from bountiful rivers to dry riverbeds, from hunting for subsistence to animal poaching, from smallscale fishing to foreign exploitation of marine resources, from agricultural farming to foreign development initiatives in chemical and mining industries, wildlife and independent filmmakers have shown the ways in which Africans have had to deal with opportunities and challenges arising from the ebbs and flows of climate change and human interventions. Although there have been many scientific studies to chronicle from diachronic or synchronic perspectives the nature and impact of ecological changes and the multifarious challenges African peoples have had to face, these epistemological contributions have not always led to tangible outcomes nor reached wide African audiences. The advent of technological advances (video cameras, cable television, DVDs, live-streaming, computers, and social platforms) and mobile cinema initiatives have also made readily accessible the means with which Africans can participate in the cinematic industries providing them voice, perspective, and agency. The production of nature documentaries such as Planet Earth or wildlife films like Serengeti have offered state-of-the-art, highdefinition imagery to showcase the beauty of Africa’s natural landscapes, seascapes, and wildlife within a larger global context. Moreover, Africa’s

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Nature, Environment, and Wildlife Filmmakers (NEWF) congresses, African environmental film festivals such as Dakar Vert, Masuku—Nature and Environment, Mama Afrika, etc., have confirmed the growing interest in a collaborative and collective approach to seeing and screening Africa’s ecosystems from African perspectives.2 New technologies and new media platforms as well as more accessible training in filmmaking have given African women the means, the access, and the opportunities to not only tell their stories and those of their respective communities but also share them with wider audiences.

Screening African Women and Environmental Activism Documentaries on African women’s contributions to protecting and regreening Africa’s landscapes such as Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai (2008), Wangari Maathai & the Green Belt Movement (2010), and Wangari Maathai Tribute Film (2011) have been instrumental in raising awareness of the leadership roles African women have played in building sustainable and healthy communities. Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 2004, Wangari Maathai, an outspoken Kenyan environmentalist and social activist, has been recognized for the establishment of the Green Belt Movement and her work on addressing social and political inequalities alongside the degradation of the environment and the restoration of human rights.3 In her interventions and speeches, she focuses on three main points: • Respecting and protecting the environment matters. • Making a difference starts with small incremental steps: planting a tree, cultivating a garden, sharing its harvest . . . • Seizing opportunities to create a legacy that will honor the ancestors and sustain future generations is important. Her influence over and approach to identifying and resolving larger underlying issues continue to impact a whole generation of African women. A Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 2011, Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian peace activist and women’s rights advocate, has been praised for her leadership of the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, a nonviolent movement comprised of Christian and Muslim women.4 In her award-winning documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell (2008), she chronicles the critical and pivotal role this movement played in ending her county’s civil war in 2003,

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promoting cross-national and cross-cultural peace-building efforts, transforming women’s participation from victims to peacekeepers advocating in unison for democracy, greater respect for human rights, and healthier ecosystems in the region.5

Documentary Filmmaking and African Women As African women filmmakers bring to the screen everyday lived experiences, they seek to foster self-knowledge in order to initiate change to improve their communities and safeguard their environment, all the while experimenting with the aesthetic qualities of their representation. In order to illustrate African women’s prism of perspectives and angles on protecting the environment and building stronger and healthier communities, this chapter seeks to do the following: • Raise awareness of a growing body of films on the environment and the topics and themes they highlight and bring to the screen. • Identify the various ways in which they represent and treat environmental concerns (communal consciousness, slow violence, nature-culture continuum, environmental justice, human rights, etc.). • Examine the eco-critical perspectives they offer through their cinematographic practices.6 Attention will focus on Amina Weira’s film La Colère dans le vent (Anger in the Wind, 2016) but will make references to other African women documentary filmmakers such as Chloé Aïcha Boro and Nadine Otsobogo to expand the discussion and exemplify aesthetic practices. The emergence and growing presence of African women filmmakers interested in documenting village life within an ecosystem framework can be attributed, as was alluded to earlier, to indomitable environmental female pioneers and their explicit calls to pass the torch or to develop projects with tangible results. It is also noteworthy that exposure to African films and documentaries by their male counterparts with the latter’s moral or financial support have also increased their participation in film festivals and other venues. Compiling an inventory of documentary films on Africa’s diverse ecosystems by African women is daunting and ongoing; however, the selected filmography at the end of this chapter is not meant to be exhaustive but indicative of its emergence, key trends, and cinematic highlights. In

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reviewing these documentaries, it is very clear that there is personal investment in the subject matter African women filmmakers bring to the screen. Whether it is lending their voice in the narrative or appearing on-screen or using first-person narratives, a subjective point of view emerges that structures and shapes their relationships with their community and documentary practice. Indeed, this trend signals the development of a type of “autophylographical” genre (the writing/filming of self within the community) in films by Safi Faye, Alice Diop, Monique Phoba Mbeke, and Khady Sylla, for example.7 This practice is particularly interesting to compare with the work of African and Caribbean writers who began by writing childhood narratives, rereading and theorizing on the relationships and intersections between their country/island and world histories, cultures, and politics.8 The idea of a communal identity or communal consciousness in filmmaking emphasizes a temporal layering that intersects with events where the legacies of colonialism, Western modernity, foreign interests, patriarchy, sexism, racism, and so on disrupt and negatively impact the wellness of communities. For example, Le Loup d’or de Balolé (The Golden Wolf of Balolé, 2019) by Chloé Aïcha Boro and La Colère dans le vent (Anger in the Wind, 2016) by Amina Weira manifest a communal consciousness while promoting a transformative approach to break the cycle of political and social inequalities, resulting in environmental degradation and unhealthy habitats. Both filmmakers depict village or slum life in the city, slowly traverse personal and collective spaces, and zoom in and out of natural spaces most often abandoned, isolated, and contaminated. Whereas Boro lends her voice to the workers (men, women, and children) of the gravel pit who share with us their daily routines, working conditions, dreams, and aspirations, Weira goes one step further and becomes both subject and object of her narrative. She consciously weaves biography and documentary, race, class, and gender with environmental degradation, abject poverty, and foreign interests. In treating these ecological issues, Boro and Weira intensify the subjective nature of representation, undoubtedly as a response to indifference by local and global leaders and decision-makers.

Anger in the Wind In order to pursue these questions further, let’s examine more closely Amina Weira’s film Anger in the Wind.9 It is noteworthy that Weira had long

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been interested in screening everyday village life, focusing on nature and the environment. Her first foray in directing shorts, La Musique des films (Film Music) in 2011, Des études aux miels (From Studies to Honey) in 2012, and C’est possible (It Can Be Done) in 2013, led her to think about the aesthetics of filming and the importance of healthy habitats. We can see in her early career trajectory as a filmmaker that ecological representations of villagers in their respective habitats instilled a sense of duty to raise environmental concerns, this ethical stance gained greater currency in her films and transparency in the titles of her films. Anger in the Wind (2016) is Weira’s first professional documentary film that garnered several honors and prizes, chief among them Best Short Film awarded by the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie and the Sustainable Development Prize conferred by L’Institution de la Francophonie pour le développement durable at the festival Vues d’Afrique. In terms of subject matter, Anger in the Wind echoes Idrissou MoraKpai’s documentary Arlit, deuxième Paris (Arlit: The Second Paris, 2005). Both are set in the uranium mining village in the Sahara Desert of Niger, and both explore the harmful environmental impact of Orano industries (formerly Areva) on workers and villagers who were largely ill-informed of the effects of these extractive activities. Mora-Kpai’s version retraces the city’s downfall to European corporations and market policies, to foreign interests in nuclear power and the global arms race, and to successive migrations of impoverished workers in Europe (Spain and France). Once known as the Second Paris, the city of Arlit, with its uranium mines, attracted workers from neighboring regions and around the world to become the Eldorado of North Niger. As Mora-Kpai’s documentary clearly shows, the collapse of uranium prices, along with the Tuareg rebellion against the central government, irrevocably changed the lives of villagers, migrants, and refugees who wait patiently to either die of radiation poisoning or brave a perilous journey to Europe. It is noteworthy that Mora-Kpai’s film provides unique insights on the lives of Beninese migrants in Arlit and their struggles to eke out a living and cope with their health and financial challenges. They encourage their children to move to a less toxic place, where there are more opportunities. For them, Arlit is a kingdom of lies and despair, and their stories are cautionary tales. Weira’s documentary offers a more poetic insider’s view of the ecological and ethical ramifications of uranium mining in Arlit and, by extension,

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in Niger. In Anger in the Wind, Arlit is also represented as a ghost town, a shell of its former self, but Weira underscores the fact that it is also part of a larger ecosystem whose degradation is attributed to a slow and invisible violence that spreads around radiotoxins as they frequently interact with wind and sand. These nefarious winds of change disrupt lives, habitats, and flora and fauna. Several times throughout the film, Weira cuts to images of the town’s children playing with irradiated scrap metal, extracted from mounds of discarded rubbish by both the town and the mining company. The radiation in Arlit is not physically visible to the camera, but Weira systematically includes shots of villagers interacting with materials known to be dangerously irradiated at several points throughout the documentary. She uses these shots to remind us of the silent villains of this story; the radiation and the people who brought it there, living safely away from its negative effects. Weira, originally from Arlit, returns home and reconnects with her family and her community, in particular her father, named Mahamane. As they walk through the village together, they make frequent stops, going from house to house and talking to villagers, acquaintances, and workers— all of whom have been and continue to be profoundly impacted by the longterm toxicity of their environment. Anger in the Wind is replete with images of hardship and suffering: old men dragging themselves in pain, workers stiffly sitting in groups outside, adults and children afflicted with painful conditions. An extreme close-up of a member of the village shows that his eyes are red, his face marked with scars, his gaze intense as he stares directly at the camera. These images are powerful visual representations and confirmation of the pain felt by the people of Arlit. An electrician in the uranium mine for more than thirty-five years, now retired, Mahamane not only lends credence to his daughter’s claims that Orano industries is guilty of negligence but, in facilitating her access to former workers and their families, also provides her viewers with an irrefutable case against the company’s exploitative practices and total disregard for the well-being of the inhabitants of Arlit. Weira’s interest in the topic of radiation poisoning is both personal and political: “As a filmmaker, it is my duty to make a contribution.”10 Weira’s documentary seeks to raise awareness among the younger generation about the environmental impact of Orano industries in order to offer an alternate perspective. Whereas portrayals of the mining industries were fairly

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positive in its heyday, Weira reverses the optics and focuses on the human dimension. Her intimate and autobiographical portrayal of the degradation of her village, and her use of the first person to underscore the fact that villagers are ill-informed of the contaminants in the soil, air, and water, shape both her ecological discourse and wider concerns for her community. She depicts villagers recovering scrap metal from the mine, melting, and transforming it into kitchen utensils that they in turn sell to the general population or export to Nigeria. In several interviews, Weira takes an ethical stance and argues that Areva/Orano needs to step up to educate its workers on the dangers of the workplace and develop measures to prevent access to contaminated scrap metal on their site. Inaction on this front has led to distribution of contaminated products and, consequently, homelessness as viewers witness the destruction of contaminated and radioactive sandstone walls used to build shelters and human habitats.

“Autonomy of Landscape” Weira makes frequent use of lingering long shots in which villagers are dwarfed within their environment, implying, among other things, that the environment is unavoidably implicated in human existence and will serve, to some degree, as a determining factor in the lives of those who inhabit it. A similar technique can be seen in The Golden Wolf of Balolé by Chloé Aïcha Boro. Such a technique is worthy of our attention as Western mainstream cinema and documentary filmmaking tend to represent landscapes as subservient to the purposes of the film narrative, with little or no reference to the interconnected and reciprocal relationship between the two, or between landscapes and humans on-screen. Allowing the environment to be front and center, equally or more importantly as the people in the film, is an occurrence Lefebvre refers to as the “autonomy of landscape” (2006, 26). Indeed, Anger in the Wind offers impressive landscapes that bring the background into the foreground to emphasize the fact that Arlit is an ecosystem, a site irreparably damaged by sandstorms that spread radioactive toxins in the air, water, fauna, and flora. Images abound of dead livestock carcasses, the presence of mysterious diseases, the search for clean drinking water . . . all of which harm the health and sustainability of this once vibrant community. Whereas “intentional cinematic landscape,” to use Lefebvre’s expression, tends to offer beautiful or monstrous landscapes up for

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contemplation, Weira and Boro’s strategy is to use them as metaphor and evoke powerful emotions such as curiosity, happiness, sadness, frustration, and anger, the latter aptly echoed in Weira’s documentary title. Moreover, in Anger in the Wind, the idea of landscape as either ambient or a stable space is an illusion, sometimes a lofty aspiration, sometimes a dream. In Anger in the Wind, the present landscape is replete with toxic dust sullying all ecological systems. And so the invisibility of the radiation is associated with the long shots of empty farms, empty houses, and lands contaminated with radiation. These clash with close-ups of workers whose gazes betray anger and despair, of children whose innocent faces betray an uncertain future.

Silence and “Slow Violence” Determined to record the villagers’ ongoing struggle for survival and justice, Weira’s Anger in the Wind points to the disastrous impacts of environmental pollution by companies in the energy sector. As the camera moves to portray the ways in which contaminated materials are recycled in a variety of ways, silence is often used to underscore the hovering yet invisible danger and the cause of much suffering for the local population. Postcolonial ecocritic Rob Nixon draws attention to this point in his seminal study Slow Violence: Environmentalism for the Poor. “Slow violence,” according to him, refers to the violence done to humans, animals, and the environment over time, a violence that poses representational challenges: “By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility”11 (Nixon 2011, 2). Given that uranium, toxic waste, and radioactivity are not visible, environmental crises and catastrophes provide a stark perspective on the effects of this “slow violence.” In order to move beyond the spectacle of disaster, Nixon recommends using different types of writings: “Writing can challenge perceptual habits that downplay the damage slow violence inflicts and bring into imaginative focus apprehensions that elude sensory corroboration. The narrative imaginings of writer-activists may thus offer a different kind of witnessing: of sights unseen” (Nixon 2011, 15).

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In response to the “slow violence” of this catastrophic event in Arlit, Weira’s Anger in the Wind features storytelling, dialogues, and interviews, even silences, to connect and sensitize viewers to this crisis. Silence and slow violence underscore the forgotten perspective of the villagers’ lives and the inability of some to express the depth of their despair, the suffering that numbs their bodies, all of which underscore the toxic ecology that besets Arlit. Yet as Weira sadly concludes, little has been done to address the longterm devastation of these ecological catastrophes. Ironically, as Weira tries to counter its effects, she is faced with resistance from the poor workers who rely on Orano industries for their livelihood. The voice of the narrator intervenes in the documentary to inform and educate her community on the risks to their health and welfare. As her voice gains currency, the opposition to her influence and fight for justice sets in. Contrary to the transformative action led by Wangari Maathai to demand environmental reform and restoration of democracy, action strongly supported by rural women and a grassroots movement that helped bring down Kenya’s twenty-four-year dictatorship, Weira’s aspiration to present a strong case for tackling this environmental crisis falls short. Her call for reforms to protect villagers against contaminants in the water, air, and sand is stalled with the censorship of her documentary in Niger.12 Uncertain as it may be, her hopes remain in a future where the message and significance of her film will no longer linger in silence.

Nature/Culture Continuum In Weira’s Anger in the Wind, ecological representations often resonate metaphorically or symbolically with the need to ensure the nature/culture continuum. This is also true for many African women filmmakers, who are looking at extending the dialogue and redefining environmentalism by interweaving it with questions of poverty/livability, social justice, and, most importantly, multispecies interactions. Like Weira, African women filmmakers seek to put pressure on powerful companies and industries by encouraging their respective audiences to make small but continuous day-to-day interventions in their immediate habitat, as is the case in the city of Arlit. Nadine Otsobogo’s imaginary also raises ecological concerns with a clear emphasis on protecting forests, fisheries, and communities. Le Seau de poissons (The Fish Bucket, 2011) critiques large-scale fishing by reversing the power structure and giving voice to a fisherman whose livelihood is affected by foreign policies (European Union agreements) that allow

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overfishing and foreign fishing trawlers along the African coasts. The camera zooms in to the lone fisherman, his raw presence and his voice, focusing on the message while the powerful companies and interests remain invisible. It is significant that moving victims to the foreground and yielding to their voices reverses the power structure of those invisible economic forces that impact communities, habitats, and ecosystems of the region. Like African women activists and filmmakers, Nadine Otsobogo raises the nature/ culture continuum to express a sense of duty to ancestors, family (near and extended), community, and country and to improve or restore the health of Gabon’s ecosystems where humans and nonhumans dwell, and this with a long-term view to sustain them for present and future generations.

Visuality and New Synergies Chloé Aïcha Boro and Aminata Weira have produced films that not only bear witness to a communal consciousness of their communities but also represent and reflect their subjective perspectives in novel ways. Acute visuality and understated poetics elicit viewers to interpret the many levels of possible meanings simultaneously. For example, the image of the wind in Weira’s film traverses the entire work, appears and reappears, and comes to personify anger at environmental irresponsibility. In Boro’s film, the image of the ever deepening and expansive quarry, with its contaminated smoke rising from the ashes, underscores the remarkable resiliency of its multigenerational workforce whose hopes and aspirations are more often dashed than realized. Whereas the latter emphasizes vertical movements (climbing in and out of the pit), the former insists on horizontal movements (walking, sitting, cooking, riding bicycles . . .). Weira’s film reveals both the resiliency and the powerlessness of workers and villagers to address ecological concerns in Arlit. Boro’s film, on the other hand, shows that any progress in human or workers’ rights lies squarely on their shoulders. Notwithstanding the powerful images of the elements (windstorms, toxic fumes, piles upon piles of stones, contaminated and dangerous materials), it is the prevalence of human suffering and bonded labor that capture our attention. As viewers bear witness to the harsh working conditions of individuals, lack of workplace safety measures, and exposure to hazards and pollution beyond the workplace, personal stories, individual trials and tribulations, and hopes and dreams emerge that evoke sympathy and goad viewers not only to act ecologically but also to promote human rights and freedoms.

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Nadine Otsobogo extends this ethical stance and reflects on the symbiotic relationships between humans and the natural world. Her search for harmony is focused on capturing new synergies between dancers, whom she calls “creatures of Mother Nature,” and the transfer of energy between humans and the ecosystems in which they dwell to foster new relationships and connections. In seeking new approaches to free body, mind, and soul, her visual sensibility offers a type of environmental dance in which choreographers and dancers negotiate movement and energy in the sea, sand, and studio. As their ballet unfolds, there emerges a new sense of time, space, and being in the world. Otsobogo’s research into embodied knowledge in Maady Kaan (2006), Songe au rêve (2006), Patrick A “Le Geste” (2012), and Escale à l’école des sables (2017) draws attention to the connection between body and earth, body and space, body and air through improvised gestures and creativity. Although each film focuses on a specific choreographer or dancer, Otsobogo is attuned to the creative forces of the universe where imagination, emotions, and links with humans and nonhumans can inspire and incite viewers to new ways of interacting with each other and the world, to new ways of being and engaging in and with our ecosystems.

Screening Ecosystems: In Search of Harmony and Healing Environments From cultural activism to advocating healthier ecosystems, African women filmmakers point to an alternative pathway into ecological thinking where interspecies interactions are held to a higher standard of respect and fostering close association with their natural landscapes and fauna. Women’s voices are sought for their insights on environmental catastrophes, poverty, illiteracy, foreign interests in Africa’s resources, and political instability, but more importantly, their voices are summoned for the betterment of their community, for current and future generations. For some African women directors, like Chloé Aïcha Boro (The Golden Wolf of Balolé) and Amina Weira (Anger in the Wind), documentary filmmaking expresses communal feelings of anger and despair, a general sense of vulnerability given local government corruption and ongoing environmental irresponsibility in contexts where quarries, mining companies, and other industries violate and exploit human and natural resources with impunity. For others like Khady Sylla (Une fenêtre ouverte, 2005 and Le Monologue de la muette, 2008) and Aïcha Thiam (Le Cri de la mer, 2006),

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documentary filmmaking is part of a difficult healing journey that engages the community experience in an alternate perspective on the powerlessness of marginalized groups (persons with physical disabilities or suffering from mental health, unemployed youth and marginalized youth, etc.) and indicts the government’s failure to protect its people and ensure their wellness. And again, for others like Nadine Otsobogo (Kellé, 2006; Maady Kaan, 2007; Patrick A “Le Geste,” 2012; Escale à l’école des sables, 2017), documentary filmmaking is the expression of a dream, a dream catcher of sorts, exploring intersections between humans and nature, rhythms and movements, tangles and intersections, creativity and reality. Resolute in shaping a better and just world, it is not surprising that African women filmmakers are softening binaries, offering a prism of angles and perspectives on experiences and lived realities, reinventing the conventions of documentary filmmaking, and inciting audiences to act ecologically and ethically. They often blur boundaries between seascapes and landscapes, between humans and nonhumans, between genres (documentary and fiction), between objective and subjective temporality. They delve and engage in these intersections and connections in search of harmony and well-being, where the ecosystems being imagined and reconfigured might sustain our planet and enrich humanity.

Notes 1. National Geographic documentaries on African wildlife, David Attenborough’s Planet Earth documentaries, Wildlife Documentary Around the World, BBC Wildlife Documentary, Global Documentary, Wildlife films, Africa Media (environmental and wildlife media company, terrestrial and aquatic productions, https://www.africa-media .org/), and Africa Wildlife Films (http://www.africawildlifefilms.co.za). 2. “Africa’s Nature, Environment & Wildlife Filmmakers Congress (NEWF), Durban, July 16–18,” Documentary Business (July 6, 2018), https://www.documentarytelevision .com/africa/africas-nature-environment-wildlife-filmmakers-congress-newf-the -program-durban-july-16-18/. 3. It is noteworthy that Waagari Maasthai is the first African woman to achieve this distinction among many others (Indira Gandhi Peace Prize, Légion d’honneur, World Citizenship Award, NAACP Image Award, Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun of Japan). See Evan Mwangi’s position on ecocriticism on African ecocriticism (Mwangi 2004). 4. Leymah Gbowee is founder and current president of Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa and is currently serving as executive director of the Women, Peace and Security Program at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. She shares the Nobel Peace Prize with fellow Liberian Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Yemen native Tawakkol Karman. 5. See other prominent African women environmentalists: Winnie Asiti (Kenya), Hilda F. Nakabuye (Uganda), Oladosu Adenike (Nigeria), and Makoma Lekalakala and Liz McDaid (South Africa).

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6. For the purposes of this study, we shall defer to Glofelty’s definition of ecocriticism— “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (1996, xviii)—but we are expanding the definition to include films and documentaries. According to Tallmadge and Harrington, ecocriticism still exhibits potential for further growth (Tallmadge and Harrington 2000, xv), and to that end, it is fitting that we examine the representation of nature in documentaries and films and look at how this representation informs ecocritical concerns and/or inspires spectators to act on them. 7. The concept of “autophylography” was first coined by James Olney to distinguish autobiographical practices in African American writings and has been applied to African and Caribbean narratives that focus on a communal consciousness (Olney 1979; 1993). 8. See Crosta 1998, Récits d’enfance antillaise, and 1998, Récits de vie de l’Afrique et des Antilles. 9. Aminata Weira is an up-and-coming filmmaker from Niger who received formal training in documentary filmmaking at both l’Institut de Formation aux Techniques de l’Information et de la Communication in Niamey Niger and the Gaston Berger University at St-Louis in Senegal. 10. My translation from the French: “En tant que cinéaste, c’est un devoir pour moi d’apporter ma pierre à l’édifice.” See “Hors-les-murs: La Colère dans le vent d’Amina Weira,” CINE ATTAC and Festival Filmer le travail, April 20, 2017, http://filmerletravail .org/hors-les-murs-la-colere-dans-le-vent-damina-weira/. 11. See also Garritano’s in-depth analysis of “slow violence” as a “representational challenge” in Mora-Kpai’s Arlit: The Second Paris. 12. See the film by Lisa Merton and Alan Dater, Taking Root. The Vision of Wangari Maathai (2015).

Bibliography Bartosch, Roman. 2013. Environmentality: Ecocriticism and the Event of Postcolonial Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Caminero-Santangelo, Byron. 2011. “Shifting the Center: A Tradition of Environmental Literary Discourse from Africa.” In Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Stephanie LeMenager, Teresa Shewry, and Ken Hiltner, 148–62. New York: Routledge. ———. 2014. Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Caminero-Santangelo, Byron, and Garth Myers, eds. 2011. Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2): 197–222. ———. 2012. “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change.” New Literary History 43 (1): 1–18. Crosta, Suzanne. 1998. Récits d’enfance antillaise. Québec: Université Laval, GRELCA 15. ———. 1998. Récits de vie de l’Afrique et des Antilles. Québec: Université Laval, GRELCA 16. D’Almeida, Irène Assiba, Lucie Viakinnou-Brinson, and Thelma Pinto, eds. 2014. EcoImagination: African and Diasporan Literatures and Sustainability. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

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Deloughrey, Elizabeth, and George B. Handley, eds. 2011. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Sousa Santos, Boaventura. 2007. “Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges.” Review 30 (1): 45–89. Dobrin, Sidney I., and Sean Morey, eds. 2009. Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press. Garritano, C. 2020. “Waiting on the Past: African Uranium Futures in Arlit, deuxième Paris.” Modern Fiction Studies 66 (1): 122–40. Gbowee, Leymah. 2011. Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War. New York: Beast Books. Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Fromm, Harold. 1996. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. 2010. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. London: Routledge. Ivakhiv, Adrian. 2013. Ecologies of the Moving Image. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University. Kääpä, Pietari, and Tommy Gustafsson, eds. 2013. Transnational Ecocinema. Bristol, UK: Intellect. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lefebvre, Martin, ed. 2006. Landscape and Film. Hoboken, NJ: Routledge. LeMenager, Stephanie, Teresa Shewry, and Ken Hiltner, eds. 2011. Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge. Martin, Julia. 1993. “New, with Added Ecology? Hippos, Forests and Environmental Literacy.” In Literature, Nature and the Land: Ethics and Aesthetics of the Environment, edited by Nigel Bell and Meg Cowper-Lewis, 75–83. South Africa: University of Zululand. Mwangi, Evan. “Nobel Prize: A Shot in the Arm for African Eco-Criticism.” The Nation, October 24, 2004. https://www.asle.org/wp-content/uploads/ASLE_Primer _NobelPrize.pdf. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo. 1996. Africa Wo/Man Palava/Palaver: The Nigerian Novel by Women. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. Okuyade, Ogaga, ed. 2013. Eco-Critical Literature: Regreening African Landscapes. New York: African Heritage. Olney, James. 1979. “The Value of Autobiography for Comparative Studies: African vs. Western Autobiography.” Comparative Civilizations Review 2 (Spring): 52–64. Rpt. In African American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by William L. Andrews, 212–23. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993. ———. 1983. “Aké: Wole Solyinka as Autobiographer.” Yale Review 73 (1): 72–93. Pick, Anat, and Guinevere Narraway, eds. 2013. Screening Nature: Cinema beyond the Human. New York: Berghahn.

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Roos, Bonnie, and Alex Hunt, eds. 2010. Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Rust, Stephen, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, eds. 2013. Ecocinema Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge. ———. 2015. Ecomedia: Key Issues. New York: Routledge. Salih, M. A. Mohamed. 1999. Environmental Politics and Liberation in Contemporary Africa. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Slaymaker, William. 2001. “Ecoing the Other(S): The Call of Global Green and Black African Responses.” PMLA 116, no. 1 (January): 129–44. Smith, Mick. 2011. Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving the Natural World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tallmade, John, and Henry Harrington, eds. 2000. Reading under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Boston: Harvard University Press. Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula, ed. 2010. Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Woodward, Wendy. 2008. The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narratives. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Wright, Laura. 2010. Wilderness into Civilized Shapes: Reading the Postcolonial Environment. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Wylie, Dan, ed. 2008. Toxic Belonging? Identity and Ecology in Southern Africa. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.

Selected Filmography Adjike, Assouma (Togo). L’eau potable d’Anazive. 1992. ———. L’Eau sacrée. 1993. ———. Vivre du poisson. 1993. ———. Le savon de l’espoir. 1993. ———. Sossolo (du côté du Levant). 2008. Boni-Claverie, Isabelle (Ivory Coast). La Coiffeuse de la rue Pétion. 1999. ———. L’image, le vent et Gary Cooper. 2001. ———. Trop noire pour être française. 2015. Boro, Chloé Aïcha (Burkina Faso). Le Loup d’or de Balolé. [The Golden Wolf of Balolé.] 2019. Diop, Adrienne (Senegal). Le Riz dans la vallée du fleuve. 1990. ———. La Pêche artisanale au Sénégal. 1990. Faye, Safi (Senegal). Kaddu Beykat. 1976. ———. Goob Na Nu. 1979. ———. Les âmes au soleil. 1980. Gbowee, Leymah (Liberia). Pray the Devil Back to Hell. 2008. Ilboudo, Martine Condé (Burkina Faso). Un cri dans le Sahel. 1994. Mora-Kpai, Idrissou (Benin). Arlit, deuxième Paris. [Arlit, the Second Paris.] 2005. Lewat, Osvalde (Cameroon). Au-delà de la peine. 2003. ———. Un amour pendant la guerre. 2005.

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———. Les Disparus de Douala. 2006. ———. Une Affaire de nègres. 2008. ———. Sderot, seconde class. 2011. ———. Land Rush. 2012. Macky, Aïcha (Nigeria). La Voix de l’eau. Merton, Alisa, and Alan Dater. Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai. 2015. Otsobogo, Nadine (Gabon). Songe au rêve. 2006. ———. Kellé. Documentary. 2006. ———. Maady Kaan? Maady Kaan2? 2007. ———. Le Seau de poissons. 2011. ———. Patrick a “Le Geste.” 2012. ———. Dialemi. Elle s’amuse. 2013. ———. Chez Ombalo. 2016. ———. Escale à l’école des sables. 2017. ———. À voir la vue. 2017. Oubda, Franceline (Burkina Faso). Accès des femmes à la terre. 1992. Ouédraogo, Lancina (Burkina Faso). Approche participative et foresterie villageoise. 1994. Sawadogo, Cilia (Burkina Faso). Naissance. 1994. Selly, Mariam Kane (Senegal). Femmes rurales. 1993. Sylla, Khady (Senegal). Colobane Express. 1999. ———. Une fenêtre ouverte. 2005. ———. Le Monologue de la muette. 2008. Thiam, Aïcha (Senegal). Le Cri de la mer. 2008. Weira, Amina (Niger). C’est possible. 2013. ———. La Colère dans le vent. [Anger in the Wind.] 2016. Yaméogo, Florentine (Burkina Faso). Sacrées chenilles. 1994.

Suzanne Crosta is Professor of French at McMaster University. She teaches contemporary African, Asian, and Caribbean literatures and cinemas in French with a focus on ecocriticism, childhood/life narratives, postcolonialism, ethics, migration, violence, and genocide. She has lectured widely at various universities in Africa, Asia, Europe, South America, and the United States in these disciplines. Her articles have appeared in Callaloo, Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, Itinéraires et Contacts de cultures, Présence Francophone, Review in Feminist Research, Tangence, Thamyris, and Voix plurielles, among others. She is also the author of books and has edited volumes.

9 LOOPING THE LOOP Rama Thiaw’s The Revolution Won’t Be Televised (2016) Sada Niang

In Senegal, the first decade of the millennium had been marked by an uneasy period of social and political unrest and a renewal of popular culture through hip-hop and rap. By 2007, a huge popular protest movement spearheaded by an estimated three thousand hip-hop groups had developed. In 2012, a rap group flimsily yet earnestly dubbed Yen a Marre (We Are Fed Up!) was created in the suburbs of Dakar. The then-incumbent president of the country, a lawyer-cum-economist who had styled himself “the man with the greatest number of academic pedigrees from the Mediterranean to the Cape,” had engaged in a series of fidgeting amendments to the constitution of the country close to the end of his second and last legal mandate. Maître Abdoulaye Wade wanted to secure for himself, his family, his party, and his regime a third mandate at the helm of Senegal.1 Yet factors militating against the success of such a move were aplenty. Poverty was rampant; youth unemployment, a scourge he had promised to tackle once elected, had exploded; and student unrest went unabated. Rap artists who had supported his electoral campaign in 2000 were now openly calling him a thief, a liar, and a fraud.2 Newspapers and radio stations broadcasting in the local languages (Wolof, in particular) were awash with stories of his less than candid management style, the extravagance of his son, and the equally dismal administration of the Fesman, a festival widely advertised as a replica of the 1966 Festival of Negro Arts.3

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As this drama in several acts was unfolding, the president and his family toured the world in private jets and held court in posh mansions along the Dakar coast. At the same time, the impoverished and seedy suburbs of the Senegalese capital were abuzz with the sound and gritty lyrics of rap music, displacing the pulsing compositions of a Youssou Ndour, Baba Maal, or Ismael Lô. The genre had taken root in these spaces, after similar developments in the US, notably after the popularization of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” (2005) and Grand Master Flash’s “The Message” (1982), and in France with the emergence of MC Solar, Booba, Doc Gyneco, Youssoupha, and Disizlapest, to name but a few. Mired in a present of want and dogged by an uncertain future, the youth of these peripheries were burning with a desire to be heard. Progressively, unfulfilled electoral promises and chronic unemployment grew into a deep-seated collective anger seeking a venue for expression and finally erupted in a grand political rally on June 23, 2011.4 Thiat and his friends, founding members of the group Keurgui (The House), along with other rap performers, lent their musical creativity to his disaffection and created the movement known as Yen a Marre (We Are Fed Up!). Recounting this moment, Marame Gueye writes: The movement Y’en a Marre was co-founded in January 2011 by Cheikh Omar Cyrille Touré aka Thiat (the last born) and Mbessane Seck aka Kilifeu (the authority/elder) from the rap group Keur Gui (The House) of Kaolack, and activist journalists Fadel Barro and Alioune Sané. They were later joined by Malal Tall aka Fou Malade (Crazy Sick) from the group Bat’haillons BlinD (Armored Beaten Rags or Armored Battalion), and many other rap artists. According to Fadel Barro, the creation of the movement was a cathartic idea, which emerged as they sat in his living room waiting for electricity to return after a twenty-hour blackout. (Gueye 2013, 25)

Soon enough their bold and cheeky lyrics, modeled on trends that migrated to Senegal from the United States through the turbulent French suburbs (92, 94) had propagated to the peripheries of Dakar: Parcelles Assainies, Thiaroye, Pikine, and Camberene, and entire cities like Kaolack, Saint Louis, and Ziguinchor.5 Local groups such as Dara J and Positive Black Soul (PBS) emerged, with a steady following of young disenfranchised men and women regularly filling stadiums and concert halls with exuberant dance gestures and chants of “Abdoulaye Wade! Get out, get out, get out.”6 Rama Thiaw’s The Revolution Won’t Be Televised (2016) images this atmosphere of constant rebellion and party time. It pays tribute to the group

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Yen a Marre through an aesthetic of cosmopolitan patching. Like the performance of a griot, the film strings together image after image of the pains and glory of grassroots organizing. Epic-like, it features a poet, the late Khady Sylla, using features of orality to reinscribe the glory of disappeared resisters from the 1960s. Finally, like a rap song, the film “samples” Gil Scott-Heron’s celebrated hip-hop tune “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” to link the struggle of the Senegalese banlieues with those of America and Europe. In the end, Thiaw’s The Revolution Won’t Be Televised (2016) loops the loop as it structures as an imaged rap song centering on rappers and the vagaries of their musical activism.

An Aesthetics of Cosmopolitan Patching In his 1992 In My Father’s House, Anthony Appiah argues that familiarity with the world beyond the immediate frontiers of one’s own country—at times, the ability for former colonials to inhabit, relate to, and function among others located in former metropolitan spaces—has become one of the hallmarks of the postcolonial condition. Yet such “worldliness” is not solely limited to expatriates. In the postcolony, it also informs the daily experiences of the inhabitants of urban spaces. Almost at the same time, reflecting on the experiences of uprootedness, family breakups, and isolation brought about by the Atlantic slave trade and plantation society, Edouard Glissant was arguing that exchanges, wars, trade, and the circulation of cultural artifacts such as films, literature, music, and paintings—indeed, the World Wide Web itself—have created a world of unorderly, unpredictable, yet stimulating experiences he labeled “le chaos-monde.” For Glissant the writer and cultural critic, such instability provided the basis for the creative process of writers and artists generally: Our contemporary world is characterized by a phenomenon I would call “the imaginary of languages,” i.e. the presence of all the languages in the world. I think that in XVIIIth and XIXth century Europe a French writer however functional in English, Italian or German would not take into account these idioms while writing. Literary creation was monolingual. Today, even if a writer knows no other language, her/his writing bears the mark of the languages in her/his surrounding, whether s/he is aware of this it or not. Writing in a monolingual fashion has simply become a thing of the past. Writing with the imaginary of languages in mind is a must. These imaginaries forcefully come to us in all sorts of unforeseen and novel ways: through audio-visual object, radio and television. (Gauvin, 2017, 12)7

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What Glissant says about literature can also be applied to cinema. Film language today is subjected to the same diverse, fragmented, suggestive, and multiple sourcing mentioned by Glissant. Rama Thiaw’s The Revolution Won’t Be Televised features real people, real places, unedited language use, familiar mannerisms, and unstaged reactions to events. In the writing, direction, and production of this film, the Afropolitan Thiaw engages local venues of power and solidarity, mixes local sounds with sounds of the African diaspora in Europe and the United States, and shows how local Islamic practice coexists with radical political protest. Further, she associates wellestablished, local generic forms of tribute, forms usually meant for royalty, to grassroots opponents of the establishment. The ensuing images suggest a diversely sourced approach, mindful of the legacy of past local filmmakers, attentive to cultural heritage yet drawing on a cosmopolitan experience of the world. The unexpectedness of these cultural cross-references creates a surprising, chaotic, yet dynamic viewing experience, much in tune with the urban postcolonial condition in Africa. As Glissant attested in the same interview, such shocking images generate moments of greater aesthetic significance for the reader/viewer: “I think that it is these types of encounters, these flashes and bursts whose workings and principles still evade us which make up the beauty of the ‘chaos-monde’” (Gauvin, 2017, 12). Thiaw’s The Revolution Won’t Be Televised is shockingly meaningful. Coasting on images of the familiar (open and closed spaces, personal relationships) and grounded in the local film heritage, the film strings extraordinary events one after the other from beginning to end.

Groundings in Local Popular Film Culture In more ways than one, Rama Thiaw’s The Revolution Won’t Be Televised (2016) could be read as a sequel to Djibril Diop Mambety’s Hyenas (1992). A similar dramatic tension sutures both films. Throughout Hyenas, the commotion opposing Linguere Ramatou to the village of Colobane is sewn in silence and periodic outbursts of anger and theatrical declamations. First, city hall is distrained; then Linguere Ramatou arrives with her lavish free gifts; then, as the inhabitants revel on this newly found bonanza, she imposes a Cornelian extortion on them in exchange for additional goodies; then, as tragedy sets in within Draman’s household and store, an uneasy and incremental reversal develops among the mayor, his councillors, and,

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later, the villagers. Finally, a resolution of the drama is reached with the decision to “execute” Draman Drameh for the good of all. The pace of these dramatic stages is slow. As the film progresses, a heavy feeling of unbearable yet inevitable doom, heightened by haunting sounds, vivid colors, allegorical sacrificial performances, and majestically crafted music, hovers over the community. Rama Thiaw’s The Revolution Won’t Be Televised is no less dramatic. A similar pace, alternating between moments of profound silence and bursts of raucous debate or angry political demonstrations, is surrounded by loud, boisterous music. Here, as in the first scene of Hyenas where Draman and Lat Koura jovially accuse each other of past guilty deeds, Thiat, Kilifeu, and Gadiaga engage in no less jovial banter but intense discussions on the legacy of their personal political commitments (1:13–2:54). Tempers do not flare, but the passion displayed on all sides delimits, for the viewer, the nature of their political alliance while at the same time exposing their differing ideological affiliations. Furthermore, in Hyenas, as in The Revolution Won’t Be Televised, the opposing parties share one overarching feature: their marginality. In an interview with the late Frank Ukadike, Mambety stated: Draman Drameh in . . . Hyenas is marginalized, although he is a well-known character in the city of Colobane: he is a marginal even though he owns the market. Everyone comes in—to buy food, or to have a drink—so Draman Drameh has the key to the “tree of words.” Yet, he is a marginal. Notable, but marginal: the fact that everyone confides in him sets him apart. . . . Linguere Ramatou is also a marginalized, because she is exactly the same person who crossed the Atlantic to go to Europe in Touki Bouki. . . . She is a rich foreigner. The people of Colobane feel they need her money: you could say in the language of the World Bank that she is a marginal person “we want to have.” (Ukadike, 143)

Similarly, political foes at opposite sides of the strife in the streets of Dakar are located within areas of social and global marginality. Thiat and his friends enjoy a popularity without bounds yet live in the seedy suburbs of Dakar, amid populations affected by global economic forces and state neglect. The Revolution Won’t Be Televised does not show many people confiding with them, but their followers are many, and at thirty-eight minutes, a griot meets Gadiaga and praises the long line of resisters that make up his ancestry. Local DJs play the musical creations of Thiat and his other two collaborators all day long, yet they are threatened with arrest by the local

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police, beaten to a stupor by the latter, and doused in tear gas and pepper spray during demonstrations. To top it all, access to the Dakar Independence Square is forbidden to them (39 minutes). Similarly, their main foe, Abdoulaye Wade, though shown only once, is equally marginalized. He is bared in a lush, brightly lit, and sedately decorated palace that has become a virtual prison for him (4:21–4:52) while being interviewed by French journalists working for a French television network. The wry smile at the corners of his mouth notwithstanding, he knows that thousands of people of all ages and sexes are clamoring for his speedy departure from the helm of the country, as this popular tune crafted by Yen a Marre shows: [Abdoulaye!] You have taken a huge handful, and another, Yet you still want to take the last bone from the cow We are the ones who will force it out of your hands Before the inevitable happens! (quoted by Gueye, 30)

As the film progresses, the president’s name appears only in the damning portrayals on the posters of the marching protesters, before disappearing completely in the second part of the film. Finally, the filiation of The Revolution Won’t Be Televised to Diop’s Hyenas is even more striking if one considers the sound score of the latter film and the storyline of the former. Thiat loudly admonishing a crowd of demonstrators assembled at the place de l’obélisque in Dakar by uttering the single phrase “the time for talking is now over” mirrors the exact same words belted by the deep voice of Wasis Diop in the last minutes of Hyenas. Wasis’s warning to the inhabitants of Colobane, indeed to Linguere and Draman, closely resonates with the decision of the Yen a Marre to act against a regime desperately seeking to stay in power against the wishes of its impoverished citizenry. Get up and work Get up and work the fields Get up and stop talking Get up and plough the land Go to work and stop talking If you do not prepare your fields, seed them or fabricate something How will you conquer your freedom? (Hyenas, 1990)

Similar affinities could be drawn between Sembene’s Guelewaar (1992) and Thiaw’s The Revolution Won’t Be Televised: Thiat could very well be seen as an adult version of one of the youth trashing on the ground the food gifts

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offered by American relief agencies to the local population. In addition, here, as in Sembene’s 1992 film, death and the threat of political assassination loom large over protagonists such as Thiat, Gadiaga, and their followers. Guelewaar’s fatidic speech at the political rally, in utter defiance of the attending officials, taps into the same principles of personal autonomy and collective freedom expounded by Thiat’s short warning speech on January 27, 2012, at the place de l’obélisque.8 Finally, though The Revolution Won’t Be Televised is replete with images of police brutality and sympathetic shots of youths uttering bitter invectives at the old man Wade, Thiaw’s ideological affinities remain subsumed under images. Yet in a gesture simulating a rapper’s sampling of old tunes, the film features an ineffective religious response to police brutalities against the population. One recalls that Sembene, the Marxist of the 1960s and ’70s, portrayed scenes of Modou, the main character of Borom sarrret (1963), vainly imploring the protection of his marabouts at the start of his workday. In The Revolution Won’t Be Televised, the sequence of images at 42:24 depicts the assault of the local police on Muslim Friday prayers in one of the most celebrated sites of Islamic worship and nationalist political resistance in the history of Senegal (the Zawiyah of El Hadj Malick Sy in downtown Dakar). As defiant Juma prayer attendees keep loudly chanting “praise the almighty Allah,” they are covered in a cloud of tear gas and eventually have to flee for shelter in the adjacent streets. The anger generated by such disruption explodes immediately after, as these threats by one of the attendees show: This zawiya (Mosque) founded by El Hadj Malick Sy is the symbol of the Revolution and the struggle against French colonialists! It was established in the heart of Dakar at a time when no one dared build a mosque there. What’s happening today will never happen again. Today Abdoulaye Wade has touched the untouchable! from now on, we won’t leave him in peace! He’s gonna have to walk over our dead bodies to keep ruling Senegal!

Meanwhile, bonfires are lit in the streets surrounding the mosque, as young protesters briskly walk in the semidarkness of the night to the heavy beats of a rap tune sung by Thiat and Kilifeu, rejoined by shouts of “Wade get out! Get out! We are fed up!”

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These cross-references help locate Rama Thiaw’s The Revolution Won’t Be Televised in the same political traces cleared by her predecessors who had opted for fiction. However, with rap music as the main carrier of political protest of her protagonists, Thiaw’s indexation of the prevailing political context further ropes itself within a broader movement fusing local and diasporic experiences of marginalization.

Hip-Hop, Rap, and Yen a Marre’s Popular Protest The aesthetics of The Revolution Won’t Be Televised are framed by local discursive forms of poetic praise or oral performance known locally as “tagg,” a praise discourse meant to highlight the achievements or the worthiness of one individual or an individual’s lineage. Its mode is oral and declamatory. Its venue usually selects public open spaces, and its participants usually involve a griot or an oral performer in front of an audience, in the presence or not of his/her main subject. Tagg performances sometimes involve wordplay and direct invectives and often trigger body postures suggesting pride or humility. Films such as Borom Sarret (1963), Keita: The Heritage of the Griot (1995), Moolaade (2004), and Sia, the Dream of the Python (2001) provide excellent illustrations of this form of oral performance. I suggest that Rama Thiaw’s The Revolution Won’t Be Televised wraps its action around a tagg expounded in two distinct tiers. First the film is dedicated to the late Khady Sylla (1964–2013), whose persona and performance in the film convey the filmmaker’s desire to keep her memory alive. In turn, Khady Sylla performs a long tagg poem dedicated to Thiat and through him to Blondin Diop and other long forgotten young activists of years past. This layered structure, built on a well-known West African performance genre, pegs the ethnographic cultural and geographical limits of the film. Yet these limits are porous. The inclusion of extensive samplings of Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Won’t Be Televised,” followed by several sound recordings or videos of the group Yen a Marre disrupt and exceed these barriers. According to Adam Bradley and Andrew Dubois, hip-hop and rap are intimately linked to the point of frequent assimilation. In fact, they maintain that “Hip-Hop is an umbrella term to describe the multifaceted culture of which rap is but a part” (2010, xxx). For Henry Louis Gates, the generic form adopted by Gil Scott-Heron and Keurgui (hip-hop and rap) could be read as “the postmodern version of African American vernacular tradition

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that stretches back to chants, toasts and trickster tales” (2010, xxv). Yet the existence of such oral forms or oral performance genres would also link them to older, more traditional forms of performance in Senegalese Malian or Burkinabe societies, as the films mentioned earlier suggest. One could even include East African societies in the group: in 1966, the English Ocoli poet Okot P’Bitek published an epic poem (Song of Lawino) displaying features similar to Khady Sylla’s performance. It was followed by a responding epic poem (Song of Ocol) that does not occur here. Whatever the case, and this common stock of orality notwithstanding, both Gil Scott-Heron and Keurgui end up subverting the genre. In both cases, the discourse of their creations sides with the underdogs, not the powerful in society. Scott-Heron directly addresses the down and outs of society, urging them to claim their rightful place in the revolution: You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out. You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and Skip out for beer during commercials, Because the revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox In four parts without commercial interruptions. The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon Blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat Hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary. The revolution will not be televised.

In short, history, Scott-Heron melodiously argues, is on the march; and unless one courageously recognizes the importance of the moment and stakes a role in it, then one can hardly claim a seat at the table of the emerging brotherhood. The text is disposed in verse form that does not rhyme, unlike most rap songs, but its rhythm is maintained by frequent repetitions of the same phrase or word, coupled with the strain of heavy beats. The use of a language style with features of informal conversation between peers suggests contexts of camaraderie recognizable by African Americans and other marginalized users of the English language in the United States. Nonetheless, the tune filtered through some circles in France and Francophone Africa; in Senegal it became popular among unemployed graduates of the university and students returning home from France who found

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themselves unemployed.9 The social and political consciousness it extols was immediately taken up by members of these groups residing mainly in the close suburbs of Dakar, where poverty was rampant and early morning scenes of dead bodies of would-be “boat people” on the beaches of Thiaroye, Hann plage, or Cayar were not infrequent. Though not featured in The Revolution Won’t Be Televised, a song with similar tones, addressing Abdoulaye Wade, was crafted by the Keurgui group in 2011: Get ready for a face to face with us We will face your shadows We will fight until the end Anything you gather we will spill Us and you until the river dries out. We will be present wherever you summon us A revolted nation is not a match for an old thug.10

Consequently, even though the social conditions that gave rise to rap and hip-hop in the US and Senegal may have been different, the despair generated by such situations and the affected demographical sections in both societies were comparable. Here and there, frustration, despair, and the prospects of a gloomy future produced “a generation of young creators set on defying their circumstance, versed in language play and hyperkinetic dance moves” (Gates 2010, xxx). Writing about rap lyrics in the United States, Henry Louis Gates claims that rappers in the Bronx drew not only from “the folk idioms of the African diaspora but from the legacy of Western verse and the musical tradition of jazz, blues, funk, gospel and reggae.” In The Revolution Won’t Be Televised, Thiat and friends’ lyrics exhibit some rhyming, hues of jazz and blues, but their most distinctive feature lies in a mix of English, French, and Wolof. In concerts, their audiences respond in chorus as they castigate the scandal-ridden regime of then-president Abdoulaye Wade: Your last seven years in power, old President Wade Were bitter for us You stole all the cards from us For your own profit You sold the ICS [Chemical Industries of Senegal] to the French for nothing And emptied the vaults of the Asecna [Agency for Aerial Navigation Safety in Africa and Madagascar] You pushed us into an economic crisis that has no solution Your only alternatives are dumb illusions

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You used our country as your ladder to fortune But don’t forget you are only a servant If you don’t stop starving us, drowning your nation We’ll kick you out! Cause you don’t feed us with your lies And we won’t let you kill us

The crowd of mostly young men rages and dances in unison as they repeat the words of their songs and, when prompted, illuminate the night with their phones and cigarette lighters high up above their heads.

Conclusion Rama Thiaw’s The Revolution Won’t Be Televised “represents qualities and problems found in the historical world” (Nichols 2010, 42). As a film, it speaks about the African world of youth protest through “images and sounds.” And in doing so it highlights the sounds and music created by its main protagonists and the interconnectedness of youth disillusionment and discontent throughout the continent, and bridges the gaps between similar protests in Europe and the United States. The meticulous testimonial it performs wraps itself in principles of pleasure that, more than anything, galvanize youth beyond the limited circle of traditionally committed individuals. Thiaw’s The Revolution Won’t Be Televised is both a reportage and a musical, both a compendium of political debates/demonstrations and a festival of words, both an explosion of emotions and a riot of colors.

Notes 1. See the detailed recounting of the amendments of the Senegalese constitution in Gueye (2013). 2. In an interview in the film Democracy in Dakar (2007), Didier Awadi states, “In the year 2000, all the efforts of the rappers became a reality. All the energy that we put saying that this system is ‘bullshit’ came to success.” His assessment is further confirmed by Assane Aw’s testimony in the same film. “The year 2000 represented a big, huge hope for us. . . . It’s all gone today. And every day they talk about billions on TV, billions on radio Where are those damn billions?” See Versatillia, “Democracy in Dakar,” video, 32:14, January 16, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytJBEodguL8. 3. Wade’s son, Karim Meissa Wade, served in his father’s government as Minister of State for International Cooperation, Regional Development, Air Transport, and Infrastructure. Friends and foes alike dubbed him “minister of the earth and the skies.” He was later tried for embezzlement of state funds and condemned to six years in prison. He was later freed and exiled to Qatar. For the administration of Fesman, see Maria Malgardis,

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“Les Scandales de la famille Wade,” Le Temps, March 3, 2012, https://www.letemps.ch /monde/scandales-famille-wade. 4. On the major actors and the significance of this date, see Catherine Lena Kelly, “Did the June 23 Movement Change Senegal?,” Social Science Research Council, July 12, 2012, http://forums.ssrc.org/african-futures/2012/07/12/june-23-movement-change-senegal/. 5. I am referring to the much-publicized French banlieues uprising that struck France in 2005. However, as Hervé Tchumkam noted: While that particular uprising has been presented in the media as politically important, it should be noted that rioting as a way for young people in the banlieues to protest injustice has been occurring frequently over the last twenty-five years, without much attention being paid to them or the underlying social causes. Even as recently as June 2011, violent clashes between young people and the police occurred in the cité des Tarterêts in Corbeil-Essonnes. As a whole, this social unrest attests to the relations between particular groups—the French citizens born from African migrant parents and the sovereign power—as well as revealing the treatment of “difference” in contemporary France. The reaction of successive French governments to social unrest has been to draw a line between “them” and “us”: that is between those who they deem unworthy of or unable to access “Frenchness,” and those who are properly “French” and “Républicain.” In this vein, a powerful discourse, more or less dooming the cités to become lawless zones (zones de non droit) has gained acceptance; at the same time as this discourse became prevalent, the French parliament tried to pass a law recognizing French “colonial grandeur” in the colonies. (Tchumkam 2013)

6. These were loudly and defiantly uttered in Wolof by angry demonstrators: “Na dem, na dem, na dema dema dem!” The group PBS was initially created by Didier Saourou (Awadi) and Amadou Barry (Duggy-Tee). Marame Gueye further writes: Like most early African rap music of the 1980s and early 1990s, PBS’s first recordings were in European languages such as French and English, with mixes that imitated American rap music. Following PBS’s lead several hip-hop groups formed in Dakar and around the country. By 2000, Senegal had over 3000 collectives. Earlier groups were youth from the upper middle class whose families could afford subscriptions to overseas music channels, as Senegal had only one television station. From the mid1990s, the Senegalese hip-hop landscape shifted when youth from the suburbs of Dakar and the rest of the country entered the scene. (2013, 24)

7. “Ce qui caractérise notre temps, c’est ce que j’appelle l’imaginaire des langues, c’està-dire la présence de toutes les langues du monde. Je pense que dans l’Europe du XVIIIe et du XIXe siècles, même quand un écrivain français connaissait la langue anglaise ou la langue italienne ou la langue allemande, il n’en tenait pas compte dans son écriture. Les écritures étaient monolingues. Aujourd’hui, même quand un écrivain ne connaît aucune autre langue, il tient compte, qu’il le sache ou non, de l’existence de ces langues autour de lui dans son processus d’écriture. On ne peut plus écrire une langue de manière monolingue. On est obligé de tenir compte des imaginaires des langues. Ces imaginaires nous frappent par toutes sortes de moyens inédits, nouveaux: l’audio-visuel, la radio, la télévision” (Gauvin 2017, 12). All translations are mine. 8. With the local member of parliament and two European guests in attendance at the ceremony of staple goods distribution, a determined Guelewaar walks to the podium and utters these words: La paume de la main ouverte à un passant, c’est mendier . . . C’est ce que nous faisons. [. . .] nous dansons devant ces dons. Quand allons-nous savoir qu’une famille

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ne peut se bâtir, se solidifier, s’enraciner dans la mendicité à perpète?. . . . Ces dons assassinent à chaque fois un peu plus en nous toute velleité de faire face à l’adversité climatique. La sécheresse, la famine, les famines ne sont pas des opprobres. L’opprobre est lorsque tout un peuple attend qu’un autre peuple le nourrisse, le vête, et ce peuple n’aura qu’un mot de génération en génération, un seul mot . . . jerejef, jerejef, jerejef, jerekef, jerejef. Sembene, Guelewaar.

9. In the YouTube clip Democracy in Dakar, the rapper Jojo Yatfu declares, “I didn’t understand English and he [?] translated [Public Enemy’s] ‘Fight the Power’ for us and when we heard it, we wanted to do the same. . . . We wanted to express what we held in our hearts, what we really thought.” Another unnamed rapper comments, “We realized that rap was a form of expression that could awaken people to their condition.” Didier Awadi, one of the pillars of rap in the 180 states, “For me, it was a way to say what wrong with the society, what was important to change.” See Versatillia, “Democracy in Dakar,” video, 32:14, January 16, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytJBEodguL8. 10. Hoside Studio, “Faux! Pas forcé (Y’en a Marre),” Mouvement Y en a marre, video, 4:23, September 24, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCuKAn-T0pk.

Bibliography Bradley, Adam, and Andrew Dubois. 2010. The Anthropology of Rap. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Brossier, Marie. 2019. “Au nom du père, du fils et du Sénégal ou comment l’héritage ne fait toujours pas l’héritier en politique.” Cahiers d’études africaines 234:655–81. http://journals.openedition.org/etudesafricaines/26120. Gates, Henry Louis. 2010. “Foreword.” In The Anthropology of Rap, edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew Dubois, xxii–xxviii. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gauvin, Lise. 1992. “L’imaginaire des langues: Entretien avec Edouard Glissant.” Etudes françaises 28 (2–3): 11–22. Gueye, Marame. 2013. “Urban Guerrilla Poetry: The Movement Yen a Marre and the Socio-Political Influences of Hip Hop in Senegal.” Journal of Pan African Studies 6 (3) (September): 22–42. Niang, Sada. 2002. Djibril Diop Mambety: un cinéaste à contre courant. Paris: L’Harmattan. Nichols, Bill. [2001] 2010. Introduction to Documentary. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tchumkam, Hervé. 2015. State Power, Stigmatisation and Youth Resistance Culture in French Banlieues: Uncanny Citizenship. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ———. 2013. Review of Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France, edited by Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom. French Forum 38 (1): 292–96. Ukadike, Frank. 2019. “The Hyenas’ Last Laugh: A Conversation with Djibril Diop Mambety.” Transition 8 (2): 136–53.

Sada Niang is Professor of Francophone Literatures and Cinemas in the Department of French at the University of Victoria. He has published Cinéma et littérature en Afrique francophone (1997), Djibril Diop

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Mambéty un cinéaste à contre courant (2002), and Nationalist African cinemas: Legacy and Transformations (2014), and coedited two special issues of Presence Francophone (2001 and 2008), a collection of essays on Ousmane Sembene (2010), and a special issue of Critical Interventions (2018) on African documentaries. Niang has also widely published on Francophone African and Caribbean literatures.

10 DANCING WITH THE CAMERA Interview with Nadine Otsobogo African Documentary Film Collective (ADFC): Suzanne Crosta, McMaster University; Sada Niang, University of Victoria; and Alexie Tcheuyap, University of Toronto Introduction Born in Gabon, Nadine Otsobogo has to her credit an extensive career history in the film industry: professional makeup artist, photographer, director, and producer. Her desire to hone her craft has connected her with other filmmakers and allowed her to develop new partnerships with cultural organizations and funding agencies. She launched in 2010 her very own Djobusy Productions to showcase her films and upcoming projects at various stages. Furthermore, she has been the director and founder of the Masuku Film Festival (Nature and Environment) since 2013, offering network opportunities, new venues, and awards for new and established filmmakers wishing to show their films on global/local ecological issues. Eager to reaching out to young people, Nadine Otsobogo has created a venue for them to submit their work for the annual selection of student videos. As a filmmaker, Nadine Otsobogo is committed to innovating and exploring her artistic talents. She is very much inspired by Miriam Makeba and Euzhan Palcy, both remarkable pioneering women renowned for their activism and exceptional talent in their respective fields: music and cinema. It is not surprising that her films focus on artists and their work. Her documentary, Il était une fois . . . Naneth (2007), on Nanette Nkogue, better known as Naneth, is a case in point and focuses on the first female rapper in Gabon. However, dance inspires many of her films and documentaries,

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offering a prism of perspectives on the question of the body and its relationships with the natural wonders and their cultural expressions. Songe au rêve (2006) and Dialemi (2013), both fiction films, offer sequences of dance in which conflict and seduction are weaved into the choreography. Her documentaries, Kellé (2006), Maady Kaan (2007), Patrick a “Le Geste” (2012), and Escale à l’école des sables (2017), can be considered essays on the art and marvel of dance as they examine different traditions of dance and the relationships among dancers and their space, their body movements, the drumming/ music, and the choreographer. As these films delve into the meaning of dance, they also highlight the myriad of connections between the body and the basic elements of nature in search of balance and harmony. Otsobogo’s feature film Dialemi, which garnered several prizes, reflects on the notion of creativity and the search for inspiration. The film revolves around a stone sculptor who has relinquished the city in favor of a remote life in the forest to fuel his creative work. By chance, he meets a dancer who rekindles his passion for love and art. As Otsobogo explains in the interview, the title underscores the pleasures they experienced and shared from their encounter. Dialemi reminds viewers of the importance of their connection to the living world and to the healing environments artists can create or stimulate, all of which can foster emotional and a kind of spiritual comfort. In a humorous vein, her new television series, Chez Ombalo (2016–) [Welcome to Ombalo’s] shows her keen interest in telling stories and in examining the breadth of human connections. The comedy series starts with Ombalo, a civil servant who quits his job and opens a bar bearing his name, Chez Ombalo, where people of all ages and from all walks of life meet, drink, socialize, and share their life experiences in Gabon and beyond. It is noteworthy that Nadine Otsobogo is also committed to raising awareness of important issues facing segments of peoples in Gabon as two of her documentaries clearly attest. Le Seau de poisons (2011) examines the impact of overfishing, whereas À voir la vue (2017) addresses access to eye care and focuses on a devoted ophthalmologist who travels the countryside to treat patients with mild and severe vision problems. In the following interview conducted in 2019, Nadine Otsobogo discusses her views of cinema as a way of bridging divides and removing barriers, expresses her commitment to environmental issues impacting communities in Gabon and beyond, and reveals her search for inspiration and creativity to foster connections and encounters beneficial to spiritual and emotional well-being. Indeed,

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what is clear is that Gabonese cinema is burgeoning, and she is inviting viewers to take notice.

Dancing with the Camera: Interview with Nadine Otsobogo ADFC: Let us start with your background. Can you tell us a little about yourself, when and where you were born and educated? N. Otsobogo: I was born in Gabon on July 20, 1968, in Moanda to be precise. I grew up in Gabon until high school, and then I continued my studies in France. ADFC: Could you tell us about your professional pathway? What drew you to filmmaking? N. Otsobogo: I studied aesthetics and then artistic makeup. It was only later that I realized that cinema had always been a part of my life. I had a camera early, when I was seventeen. I filmed birthdays and with my cousins, we shot short films. However, the real desire for cinema appeared with the need to tell my stories, release them, and share them with a wider audience. ADFC: You are widely regarded as an influential and significant figure in Gabonese cinema. How do you react to this designation? Undoubtedly, your level of commitment is significant: festival organizer; film market creation; partnership with the Cinéma numérique ambulant (CNA). N. Otsobogo: Cinema or art is not fixed. Before me, there were other standard-bearers; tomorrow there will be others. The key is continuity, the will to advance the film industry by linking partnerships and creating opportunities and spaces for reflection. ADFC: What solutions do you envisage to improve the conditions of cinema in Gabon, in particular the absence of screening rooms or perhaps even that of the public? N. Otsobogo: Gabonese people have always loved cinema, especially their images, “their cinema.” In Gabon, there were screening spaces in different provinces. Perhaps they were no longer profitable, I don’t know. . . . The lack of a projection capability is a real problem here. I think filmmakers and the public need to find alternative solutions, such as screening outdoors, in classrooms, ministries, or churches. The great difficulty is the soundproofing of these spaces. This is not within my purview; there are ministers and researchers to think about these challenges. To each his/her own profession.

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ADFC: You often refer to the didactic scope of cinema either to become aware of the problems related to nature and biodiversity or to question the contribution of culture and cinema. Could you tell us about your documentaries and your intention in making these documentaries? What relationship do you want to establish between yourself as a director and the subject you are filming? You and your audience? N. Otsobogo: Let’s start with Le Seau de poissons [The fish bucket], a title which is a valuable expression of the film’s message. A man had once asked me about traditional fishing in overexploited marine resources, more specifically about the role and commitment of the state to protect artisanal fishery and to monitor trawlers. Le Seau de poissons highlights the challenges faced by small-scale fishermen whose activities are respectful of the environment but who struggle to survive because new European Community agreements are allowing trawlers to deplete fish stocks and destroy their livelihoods. ADFC: What do you want to highlight in the documentary that others have ignored? Is large-scale fishing also a problem in Gabon? N. Otsobogo: I admit that I do not know much about the fishing industry in Gabon, but you know it’s a problem on a global scale. Overfishing, illegal fishing, climate change—all of these are undermining the African coasts. ADFC: How important is Gabon’s ecology to your work as a filmmaker? N. Otsobogo: I pay significant attention to ecology, which is why I created the Masuku Environment and Film Festival. The aim of this initiative is to raise public awareness of the living environment, climate change, and sustainable development through film. In December 2019, we will host the seventh edition, and the theme from the beginning has been and remains “Nature and Environment.” I have also set up an environmental competition for schoolchildren. ADFC: In your documentary films, the relationship between humans, earth, and water is significant and poetically expressed. For example, the representation of clay soil is commonplace in African films of the 1980s. What did you want to emphasize in your films, for example in Maddy Kaan, by showing this material? N. Otsobogo: In Maddy Kaan, clay soil and dead leaves are the artistic choices of the dancers; it is part of their creative energies and staging. In the film, I just highlight human beings, especially men, because these dancers are creatures of Mother Nature. Moreover, Kaolack, one of the dancers in Maddy Kaan says, “Man was created from the earth.”

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ADFC: I believe Maady Kan means in Wolof “who am I,” pronounced insistently [“Who am I really?” Or “This is who I really am!”]. In the film, the actors talk about their attachment to each other. How do you see the portrayal of male bodies in this film, especially the intimacy developing between male bodies? N. Otsobogo: Indeed, “Maady Kaan” means “who am I?” in Wolof, the most popular spoken language in Senegal. These dancers wonder about their “self,” their relationship to dance, nature, and the afterlife. This obviously referred me back to my relationship with film and dance as well as the body. In particular, how to film the body. Nevertheless, at this stage the bodies are asexual; there is no longer any feminine or masculine; it is simply material to knead, to grasp. They undressed in front of me in a carefree fashion. I film these bodies, of course, because the question “maady kaan?” is not physical—it is spiritual, even mystical. Moreover, I focus on these moving bodies because the sensations they evoke interest me. ADFC: What connection, if any, do you make between your work as a director and your work as a makeup director? N. Otsobogo: Mainly to be at the service of cinema. ADFC: Your two documentaries, more than four years apart, Patrick a “Le Geste” and Escale à l’école des sables, tackle contemporary African dance. Why dance? Is it to inhabit space differently? Is this a way to highlight a new ecology in Africa? N. Otsobogo: The latter film emphasizes the training of dancers who work under the direction of Germaine Acogny while the former integrates not only the Indian gestural, the Soli [which mixes contemporary Western influences and dance steps anchored in the African tradition], but also a relationship with the body, the sand, and the sea. Kellé also delves into this poetic direction. ADFC: In your documentary films, you seem to favor movement dance, walking, sea waves. . . . What is the relationship between image, space, and human being in your films? N. Otsobogo: Interesting. You are right—it is about sensing and loving nature. I never asked myself that question. However, I admit that I like haikus. When I produce a film, my camera is my pen, or my brush, you see? Visual storytelling provides a frame in which you tell your story and create human connections. ADFC: You have directed two short fiction films: Songe au rêve and Dialemi. Both also address the importance of dance but under its dramatic

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and poetic truth. Could you explain your vision and your choice of subject for fiction films? N. Otsobogo: The world of tales and epics fascinates me. Everything has been said, everything has been done, hasn’t it? However, there is still so much to tell. In Songe au rêve, the sequence of the fight is danced. For the choreography of the fight, I asked Ciré BEYE and Kaolack [the choreographers] to propose a mixture of Senegalese wrestling, capoeira [AfroBrazilian martial art], and Krump. I wanted this fighting dance, this dramatic poetry. . . . Let us not forget that Songe au rêve is a fantastic tale. In Dialemi the seduction sequence is danced, it is a captivating dance. With the support of actress/choreographer Prudence Maidou, I wanted to unveil dances from Gabon, especially the movements from the region where we were touring, for example, Cape Esterias. ADFC: The title of your film, Dialemi, emphasizes playfulness, the feminine joie de vivre. Why this emphasis on the body and pleasure? N. Otsobogo: I do not insist on the body and pleasure, on the contrary. Dialemi [She’s having fun], means “my love,” “my story.” Dialemi talks about inspiration, lack of inspiration, transmission, and love. Inspiration is volatile, ephemeral; literally speaking, she delights in being with the artist. ADFC: Overall, do you prefer documentary or fiction films? Alternatively, do you want to cross the boundaries between film genres? N. Otsobogo: Let’s say that I’m more comfortable in the world of fiction, because I like to stage. Paradoxically, the rigor of documentary filmmaking seduces me because we capture life, we tell the story without staging. ADFC: Are you working on new projects? Are they an extension of your previous work or are they going into a new direction? N. Otsobogo: Currently I am working on various projects, including a documentary on the first Gabonese botanist and priest, a feature film, and a detective series. Strangely, the first two projects reveal a reflection, which I did not necessarily seek, but which unconsciously imposed itself on me: “Man in his living environment.” For the series, it is completely different. First, it is a manuscript I was given. Then it is a detective series. Finally, it is a completely masculine universe. It is complicated, but I like that kind of challenge. ADFC: On a final note, what does making films or documentaries mean to you?

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N. Otsobogo: I love movies. Cinema is my life, my passion. Cinema is about rhythm. We have an inner music that, when we listen to it, transcends us. Cinema is like a dream catcher. Its magic transforms people, both in front of and behind the camera. We don’t make films to make films; for me, that’s cheating or settling for a half-life. To make films is accepting to open oneself to others, to reveal oneself, to expose oneself. It’s not easy. There is something divine in cinema. Cinema is about sharing, because you do not make a film alone, it’s a human adventure. All these emotions in visuals—contradictions, fights, love, hate—these only appear in cinema. Indeed, the magic of cinema is boundless. ADFC: Thank you for sharing your vision of cinema (documentary or fiction) with us. We look forward to the fruition of your new projects.

Selected Filmography Songe au rêve. Short Fiction. Gabon, 2006. https://vimeo.com/88821959; http://www .djobusyproductions.com/film_songe.html. Kellé. Documentary. Gabon, Senegal, Burkina Faso, 2006. http://www .djobusyproductions.com/film_kelle.html. Il était une fois . . . Naneth. Documentary. Gabon, 2007. http://www.djobusyproductions .com/film_naneth.html. Maady Kaan? Maady Kaan2? Documentary. Gabon, 2007. http://www .djobusyproductions.com/film_maady.html. Le Seau de poissons. Short documentary. Senegal, 2011. https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=5tP5LxoingA; http://www.djobusyproductions.com/film_leseau.html. Patrick a “Le Geste.” Documentary. Senegal, 2012. http://www.djobusyproductions.com /film_legeste.html. Dialemi. Elle s’amuse. [She’s having fun.] Fiction. Gabon, 2013. http://www .djobusyproductions.com/film_dialemi.html. Chez Ombalo. TV series. Gabon, 2016–. http://www.djobusyproductions.com/film_chez -ombalo.html. Escale à l’école des sables. Documentary. Senegal, 2017. http://www.djobusyproductions .com/film_escale.html. À voir la vue. Documentary. Gabon, Collection “Afrique en Vues,” 2017. http://www .djobusyproductions.com/film_lavue.html.

INDEX

À voir la vue, 176 AC Le Feu, 45 accountability, 127n10, 130 Achkar, David, 6, 67, 71 Ackerman, Chantal, 54 Acogny, Germaine, 179 activism, 35, 37, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, 155, 163, 175; activist films, 37, 46; activist organizations, 34; activist space, 40, 46. See also activists; audiences: activism; environment: activism activists, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45, 114, 146, 154, 168; activist filmmakers, 34, 35, 47, 154; activist journalists, 162; feminist, 123; human rights, 139; Marxist-Leninist, 132; peace, 146; Sahrawi, 132; student, 117; women, 154; writer-activists, 152. See also activism affect theory, 97 Africa, I’ll Fleece You, 71, 73 Africa’s Nature, Environment, and Wildlife Filmmakers (NEWF), 145 afro-politan, 3, 9n5 Agamben, Giorgio, 7, 130, 133, 134, 138, 140, 141–42 agency, 22, 24, 58, 89n23, 102, 103, 104, 106, 117, 145; and audience, 26; for camera, 83; collective, 115; of criticism, 99; female, 110;

forms of, 56; individual, 115; political, 120; transindividual, 67 Agénor, Monique, 65 L’Aîné des orphelins, 7 Alassane, Moustapha, 8n3 Algeria, 13, 29n4, 29n6, 44, 65; Algerians, 42 Alia, Rabia and the Others, 30n15 alimony, 30n17 Aljazeera Documentary, 121 Allah Tantou, 6, 67, 71, 73, 88n22 allegories, 72, 165 Alloula, Malek, 23–24 altruism, 3, 8n1 Amad, Paula, 55–56 Amazigh people, 13, 19, 22, 29n7; villages, 13, 14 Ambassades nourricières, 50 Les Ames au Soleil, 50 Aminata Traoré, a Woman from the Sahel, 12 amnesia, organized, 38, 43 Amnesty International, 118, 139 ancestors, 51, 146, 154 anger, 20, 152, 154, 162, 164, 167 Anger in the Wind, 147, 148–49, 150, 151–52, 153, 155 Appiah, Anthony, 163 Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), 19

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Arab Spring, 25, 114 Arabic language, 4, 13, 14, 29n8, 119, 126n2 Arendt, Hannah, 130–31, 134 Areva/Orano, 149, 150, 151, 153 Arlit, 149–50, 151, 153, 154 Arlit, deuxième Paris, 149 arrests, 15, 101, 120, 123, 132, 133, 135, 165 Asia, 19; South Asia, 9n4 assassination, 95; political, 30n15, 167 Association Chrétienne pour l’Abolition de la Torture (ACAT), 143n3 Atlas Mountains, 13, 14, 16 Atwia Experimental Community Theatre Project, 2 audiences, 3, 4, 8, 25, 26, 109, 113, 116, 119, 146, 153, 156, 168, 170, 177, 178; and activism, 34, 46; African, 145; domestic, 115, 118; female, 16; international, 117; male, 3; urban, 8n1. See also agency: audience auteurship, documentary, 97, 98, 104, 107, 109, 110 autobiography, 4, 6, 12, 25, 36, 37, 67, 71, 81, 88n22, 90, 151, 157n7. See also biography autofiction, 71 autonomy, 21, 43, 167. See also landscapes: autonomy of autophylography, 148, 157n7 Aw, Assane, 171n2 Awadi, Didier, 171n2, 173n9 Baccar, Selma, 29n4, 30n18, 127n13 Badoe, Yaba, 65 Badou Boy, 74, 79 Bamako, 66 banlieues, 5, 37, 45, 163; uprising, 172n5 Barlet, Olivier, 3, 5, 67 Barro, Fadel, 162 Barry, Amadou, 172n6 Bat’haillons Blin-D, 162 Bayat, Asef, 89n29 Beauty and the Dogs, 121 Belabbès, Hakim, 30n20 belonging, 8n1, 44, 46, 55, 130, 131 Ben Ali, Zine al-Abidine, 114, 115, 121, 122, 123, 124 Ben Barka, Mehdi, 132

Ben Hania, Kaouther, 115, 116, 121, 122–24, 125, 126 Benin, 9n4, 149 Ben Jelloun, Tahar, 143n1 Benjelloun, Hassan, 29n11, 30n15 Benlyazid, Farida, 11, 12 Bennani, Larbi, 29n3 Bensaïdi, Faouzi, 30n20 Benzekri, Driss, 118, 119, 129 Bépanda Affair, 129, 132, 133 bias, 88n19; Eurocentric, 74; realist, 101, 103. See also gender: bias Les Bijoux, 66, 74, 76, 77 Binebine, Mahi, 143n1 biography, 71, 95, 148. See also autobiography Bitton, Simone, 14 Biya, Paul, 7, 134, 138, 141 Bizot, Judithe, 12 Black Girl, 9, 72, 76, 77 Blanchard, Pascal, 43 Bocandé, Anne, 42 body, human, 79, 134, 135, 137, 141, 153, 155, 176, 179, 180; body language, 83; body postures, 83, 168; female, 3, 23–24, 94; male, 179 Bon Voyage Sim, 8n3 Boni, Alphonse, 47n2 Boni-Claverie, Isabelle, 36, 47n2, 65 Booba, 162 Boro, Chloé Aïcha, 147, 148, 151, 152, 154, 155 Borom Sarret, 72, 74, 167, 168 Boulane, Ahmed, 30n15 Bourguiba, Habib, 30n18 Bourquia, Farida, 11, 12 Bouzid, Nouri, 10 Box, Laura, 24 Bradley, Adam, 168 British Film Institute, 29n6 Bruzzi, Stella, 113 Buleli, Léonard N’Sanda, 95 Burkina Faso, 9n4, 169 Butler, Judith, 139 By the Grace of Allah, 19 camera, 16, 23, 26, 55, 56, 62n1, 81, 86, 90n38, 122, 123, 177, 179, 181; angles, 68, 86; camcorders, 34; camera obscura, 75; digital, 29n5; fixed, 59; handheld, 46, 62n1; lens,

Index 83, 87; movement, 15, 23, 25, 45, 56, 60, 83, 152, 154; position, 60; presence of, 15, 57, 79, 116; shots, 58; static, 56, 59, 124; and subjects, 6, 20, 22, 27, 75, 76, 85, 104, 105, 117, 119, 121, 137, 150; video, 145 Cameroon, 7, 9n4, 129, 130, 132, 134, 135, 139, 140, 141, 142; death squadrons, 133, 138; government, 133, 136; history, 131, 142; National Dance Company, 2; political system, 133; postcolonial, 133; Cameroonians, 134, 136, 138, 139, 141; Operational Command Unit, 129, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141; Southern, 8 Camp Thiaroye, 70, 72 Canada, 3, 14 Canal +, 12 capitalism, 13, 17, 57, 60 Caribbean, 36, 45, 148, 157n7 Carlsen, Erika, 95 Casablanca, 16, 25, 27, 28; riots, 132 Catholic Church, 133 Cazenave, Odile, 65, 66, 89n24 Ceddo, 72 censorship, 27, 62, 72, 114, 122, 126n2, 127n13, 153 Central African Republic, 9n4 Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM), 11, 12, 16, 18, 19, 27, 28, 28n1, 29n3, 29n6, 29n13 C’est possible (It Can Be Done), 149 Cette aveuglante absence de lumière, 143n1 Chad, 9n4 Challat of Tunis, The. See Slasher of Tunis, The Chez Ombalo, 176 La chienne de Tazmamart, 143n1 choreography, 176, 180; choreographers, 155, 176, 180 Chraibi, Saad, 30n15 Chronique d’un été, 62n1 cinéastes de passage, 12, 13 Cinéma numérique ambulant (CNA), 177 cinema verité, 51, 52, 62n1, 68, 79 citizenship, 35, 44, 46; dual, 12. See also France: French citizenship CNC, 29n6, 29n13 Code Personnel, 30n18

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Cohen, Jérôme Olivar, 29n11 La Colère dans le vent. See Anger in the Wind Colobane, 6, 75, 89n29, 164, 165, 166 Colobane Express, 66, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79 Colonial Harem, 24 colonialism, 20, 22, 24, 36, 59, 69, 75, 87n9, 88n12, 110n2, 148, 172n5; colonial Africa, 70; colonial conquest, 38; colonial context, 69; colonial discourse, 70; colonial encounter, 52; colonial history, 44, 45, 72; colonial institutions, 11; colonialists, 63n8, 167; colonial powers, 57, 68; colonials, 5, 163; colonial schools, 51; neocolonialism, 10. See also postcolonial era comfort women, 19, 21 Comité National des Droits de l’Homme et des Libertés (CNDHL), 143n3 communities, 1, 39, 43, 46; community solidarity, 108, 109; and filmmakers, 8, 19, 53, 55, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 153, 154, 156, 165, 176; global community, 17; health of, 7, 146, 147, 148, 151, 154, 155; international community, 15, 139, 140; marginalized, 20; minority, 45; national community, 39; rural, 58; sustainability of, 7, 146 Compagnie Africaine Cinématographique Industrielle et Commerciale (COMACICO), 3, 9n4 confinement, 6, 7, 74 Congolese, 95, 97, 100, 101, 103, 105, 107, 108, 110; men, 108; women, 102, 104, 108, 109. See also Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) contaminants, 148, 151, 152, 153, 154 Contras’ City, 5, 74 corruption, 102, 103, 106, 110, 125, 155 Coulibaly, Seydou, 6 Créteil International Women’s Film Festival, 51 Le Cri de la mer, 155 crime, 42, 95, 101–102, 106, 113, 115, 132, 135 Crosta, Suzanne, 2 cultural expressions, 1, 176 cultural heritage, 1, 2, 164 Dakar, 47n2, 55, 62, 63n9, 76, 77, 165, 172; coast, 162; downtown, 167; festivals, 51;

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Dakar (Cont.) Independence Square, 166; neighborhoods, 75; residents, 61, 77; suburbs, 8, 161, 162, 165, 170, 172; postcolonial, 77, 82; theaters, 3; workers, 53, 59, 60 Dakar Vert, 146 Dallet, Sylvie, 68, 69 dance, 2, 8, 87n2, 162, 170, 171, 175–76, 179, 180; dancers, 155, 176, 178, 179, 180; women’s, 20, 23 Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 65 Dara J, 162 Dark Room, The, 30n15 de Antonio, Emilio, 98, 99 De Groof, Matthias, 55 Delorme, Christian, 40 Democracy in Dakar, 171n2, 173n9 Democratic League of Moroccan Women, 16 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), 6, 9n4, 95, 100, 102, 103, 107, 109; civil war, 7, 95–96, 105, 106, 107; leaders, 103; and reparation, 110n2; society, 109; and violence, 96, 97, 101, 103, 107–108, 109–10, 110nn1–2 depression, 136, 137 Derkaoui, Abdelkrim, 28n2 Derkaoui, Mostafa, 28n2 Des études aux miels (From Studies to Honey), 149 Des Histoires et des hommes (Of Stories and Men), 30n20 despair, 149, 152, 153, 155, 170 detention, 6, 15, 29n12, 30n15, 117, 118 development, 12; initiatives, 145 Dialemi, 176, 179–80 Diallo, Rokhaya, 5, 35, 36–37, 38, 40, 41, 43, 45, 46–47 Diawara, Manthia, 69, 72 didacticism, 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 28, 178 Diop, Alice, 148 Diop, Blondin, 168 Disizlapest, 162 displacement, 37; postcolonial, 5 divorce, 30n17 Djaïdja, Toumi, 42, 43 Djebar, Assia, 29n4, 65 Djinna, 29n6 Djobusy Productions, 175

Doc Gyneco, 162 docufiction, 71 documentary window, 72, 74, 75, 79, 83 Doha Film Institute, 29n6 Douala, 129, 132 drama, 68; docudrama, 53, 124; gangster, 124; melodrama, 68, 124; Shakespearean, 25 Dridi, Jalel, 124 drought, 52, 57, 58 drumming, 2, 176 Dry White Season, A, 70 Dubai Entertainment & Media Organization, 29n6 Dubois, Andrew, 168 Dzongang, Albert, 139 ecocriticism, 152, 157n6 École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), 51 ecology, 8, 145, 155, 156, 178, 179; ecological catastrophes, 153; ecological changes, 145; ecological discourse, 151; ecological issues, 148, 149, 153, 154, 175; ecological representations, 149, 153; ecological systems, 152 editing, film, 15, 26, 29n5, 40, 68, 70, 75, 116 Ekane, Anicet, 139 El Bou, Hassan, 117, 118–19, 120, 127n7 El Hob, 25, 30n20 El Quessar, Rita, 27 Ellerson, Beti, 1, 2, 38, 73, 88n20, 89n23, 96 emigration, 14 Emitai, 72 Ennadre, Dalila, 5, 12, 16, 17, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 30n20 environment, 176, 178, 180; and activism, 146; environmental catastrophes, 155; environmental degradation, 148; environmental impacts, 149, 150, 152; environmental irresponsibility, 154, 155; environmentalism, 153; environmental issues, 8, 146, 147, 149, 176; environmental justice, 147; environmental reform, 153; environmental threats, 8; and filmmakers, 7, 56, 147, 149, 151; individualistic, 61; protection of, 146; social, 77; urban, 16. See also ecocriticism equality, 19, 35, 37, 38, 40, 44. 101, 103

Index Equity and Reconciliation Commission (ERC), 15, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119–20, 127n4, 127n10 Escale à l’école des sables, 155, 156, 176, 179 ethics, 21, 75, 85, 90; of care, 67, 82. See also silence: ethics of; testimony: ethics of ethnicity, 14, 44 ethnofiction, 71 ethnography, 28, 51, 55, 59, 90n35; domestic ethnography, 67, 81, 85, 86; ethnographic filmmaking, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 62, 168 Europe, 2, 12, 35, 36, 45, 52, 149, 163, 171, 172n6; diaspora, 9n5, 164; Europeans, 63n8, 172n8; migration to, 14, 17, 30n19, 149, 165 European Commission, 139 European Community agreements, 178 European Development Fund, 57 European Union, 139, 153 exclusion, 4, 13, 35, 43, 52, 77, 108, 136, 142 expatriates, 163 extra-diegetic viewer, 20, 22, 23 fables, 72, 119 factories, 16, 17; factory workers, 116 Fad’ jal (Grandfather Recounts), 50 Fadma, 19, 20, 21–22, 23, 24 families, 6, 11, 16, 17, 82, 108, 109, 118, 150, 154, 163, 172n6; family compounds, 56, 61, 77; family honor, 6, 90n39; family members, 56, 61, 81, 82, 86, 116, 117, 133; family origin, 55; family ties, 39, 61; of victims,15, 120, 125, 130, 132, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140–41, 142, 143n3 Fanon, Frantz, 106 Farewell Mothers, 29n11 farming, 17, 52, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 145, 152; monoculture, 52, 57, 60 Fatal Assistance, 4 Fatma 75, 29n4, 30n18 Faye, Safi, 50–51, 52, 53, 56, 58–59, 60, 62, 148; narrative voice, 55–56, 58, 61; style, 4, 53, 54; and subjects, 5, 55, 57, 62 feminism, 10, 98; Black, 62; feminist agenda, 27; feminist language, 19; feminist theory, 97. See also activists: feminist Ferhati, Jillali, 30n15 Ferro, Marc, 68

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Fesman, 161 Festival Panafricain du cinéma de Ouagadougou (FESPACO), 1 film de quartier, 74, 76, 77 film festivals, 15, 34, 146, 147. See also individual names of festivals film industry, 1, 11, 145, 175, 177 film noir, 116 film schools, 8n1, 11, 51, 52, 71 fishing, 178; large-scale, 153, 178; overfishing, 154, 176, 178; small-scale, 145, 178 Flaherty, Robert J., 4, 53 flashbacks, 86, 89n30 folktales, 66 Fond Francophone de Production Audiovisuelle du Sud, 29n6 Fonds Sud, 29n13 For a New Seville, 14 Le fou du roi, 143n1 Fou Malade (Malal Tall), 162 Foucault, Michel, 100, 141 France, 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 22, 25, 28n2, 29n6, 29n13, 35, 41, 44, 46, 51, 60, 62, 62n1, 65, 72, 116, 139, 149, 162, 169, 172n5, 177; and discrimination, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40; French army, 19, 20, 21, 22; French authorities, 24; French cities, 12, 39; French cinema, 46; French citizenship, 47n2; French Constitution, 35; French culture, 39; French distribution companies, 9n4; French government, 172n5; French identity, 35, 38, 44; French film industry, 1; French language, 3, 4, 5, 13, 29n8, 40, 54, 60, 119, 127n8, 163, 170, 172n6; French people, 36, 41, 42, 45, 46, 166, 172n5; French republic, 41–42, 35; French Republicanism, 36, 39, 40, 43, 44; French Revolution, 38; French Senate, 44; French society, 35, 37, 39, 46; French suburbs, 162; and immigrants, 37, 38, 39, 40; and minorities, 39, 45; and racism, 42, 45; southern, 42 France Ô, 35 French West Africa, 9n4, 72 Frith, Nicola, 42 Gabara, Rachel, 67, 71, 73, 88n22 Gabon, 9n4, 154, 175, 176–77, 178, 180

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Gandhi, Mahatma, 39, 43 Gardies, André, 57 Gates, Henry Louis, 168, 170 Gay, Amandine, 9n5, 36 gaze, 3, 6, 20, 45, 52, 53, 55, 57, 65, 76, 137, 152; academic, 24; of ethnographic film, 59; masculine, 20, 24; Orientalizing, 20; viewer’s, 79 Gbowee, Leymah, 146, 156n4 Gbowee Peace Foundatiion Africa, 156n4 gender, 6, 14, 88n19, 96, 109, 110, 148; bias, 6; equality, 35; equity, 22; gendered perspective, 96, 97, 100, 101; identity, 5; inequity, 17; issues, 68; minorities, 72; politics, 73; roles, 54, 61. See also violence: gendered Genini, Izza, 12, 14 Gerima, Haile, 89n30 Getino, Octavio, 68, 69 Give 1, 41, 46 Glissant, Edouard, 163, 164 Global South, 66, 126n1 globalization, 17, 66 Godard, Jean-Luc, 114 Golden Wolf of Balolé, The, 148, 151, 155 Goob na nu (The Harvest Is Over), 50 Grand Master Flash, 162 Grimzi, Habib, 42 griots, 163, 165, 168 Guelewaar, 166 Gueye, Marame, 162, 172n6 Hachad, Naima, 140 Hachkar, Jamal, 30n20 Hachkar, Kamal, 29n11 Hadid, Tala, 12, 13, 15, 23 Haffner, Pierre, 51 halqa (the circle), 26 Hamadi, Dieudo, 6–7, 96, 101, 104 Harrington, Henry, 157n6 Harrow, Ken, 86 Hassan II, 14–15, 29n12, 117, 118, 132, 133, 134, 141 hip-hop, 161, 163, 168, 170, 172 Hollande, François, 41, 42, 44 hooks, bell, 57 House in the Fields, 13, 15, 23

housing, 40; policies, 39 human rights, 8, 15, 16, 35, 37, 42, 130, 139, 140, 146, 147, 154; abuses, 140, 141; activism, 35, 37, 139; organizations, 131, 133. See also Human Rights Defence Group (HRDG) Human Rights Defence Group (HRDG), 143n3 Humans of New York, 27 Hyenas, 6, 66, 79, 164, 165, 166 I Loved So Much . . . , 19, 24 I Wanna Tell You, 5, 16, 19 Identités de Femmes (Women Identities), 12 identity, 35, 46, 47, 89n30; Arab-Muslim, 14; communal, 148; double, 36; identity construction, 35, 38; identity signaling, 117; negative, 136; postcolonial, 10. See also France: French identity; gender: identity; Morocco: Morocan identity Idols in the Shadow, 19 Il était une fois . . . Naneth, 175 Ils Sont fous, on s’en fout, 6 Imams Go to School, 121 immigrants, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44; illegal, 17. See also immigration; Maghreb: Maghrebi immigrants immigration, 36, 38, 39, 44, 45. See also immigrants In My Father’s House, 12, 163 inclusivity, 8, 19 indexicality, 83, 88n17, 90n37, 90n39 Indivisibles association, 35, 38 industries, 39, 153, 155; chemical, 145; mining, 145, 150. See also film industry injustice, 57, 172n5; social, 10, 13; state-sponsored, 15 Instance Équité et Réconciliation. See Equity and Reconciliation Commission (ERC) l’Institut de Formation aux Techniques de l’Information et de la Communication, 157n9 L’Institution de la Francophonie pour le développement durable, 149 integration, 38, 39, 43, 44, 125 intimacy, 15, 23, 28, 55, 75, 81, 87n2, 179; sexual, 25 invisibility, 37, 123, 133, 136, 142, 150, 154

Index Islam, 29n8, 39, 164, 167; extremist, 114; Islamists, 14 Ismaïl, Mohamed, 29n11 Israel, 10, 14, 126n2 Ivory Coast, 9n4, 47n2, 65 Jawhara, Prison Girl, 30n15 Jawjab, 26, 27, 30n25 Jawjabat, 27, 30n25 Jay, Martin, 69 Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 54 Le Jeu de la mer, 66, 74 Jewish population, 13, 14 Joint Property, 116 Kaddu Beykat, 4, 5, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 58, 62 Kamal, Kamal, 30n15 Kaplan, E. Ann, 98 Karman, Tawakkol, 156n4 Karmen, 87n2 Kassari, Yasmine, 17 Kavka, Misha, 101 Keïta: The Heritage of the Griot, 70, 168 Kellé, 156, 176, 179 Kelly, Joselyn, 95 Keurgui, 162, 168, 169, 170 Khattari, Majida, 37 Khiari, Bariza, 44 Kilani, Leïla, 4, 7, 15–16, 17, 118, 119, 121, 126, 127n4, 131, 134, 136, 138, 139, 142, 143; and politics, 115, 120, 129, 130, 132, 133, 135, 141; style, 116; and subjects, 23, 117 Kilifeu (Mbessane Seck), 162, 165, 167 King, Martin Luther, 36, 37, 40, 41, 43 Kino-Pravada group, 34, 62n1 Klein, Melanie, 99 Kouyaté, Dany, 6, 70 Label Vidéo, 29n6 Lagtâa, Abdelkader, 28n2 Lamar, Jake, 44, 45 landscapes, 8, 145, 146, 152, 155, 156; autonomy of, 151 Lanzmann, Claude, 29n14, 90n38 Laraki, Abdelhaï, 30n15

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Laudati, Ann, 95 Le Blanc, Guillaume, 136 Lebanon, 19, 126n2 Lejeune, Philippe, 87n7 Levine, Alison, 39 Lewat, Osvalde, 4, 7, 129, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143 Life Is a Struggle, 29n3 Ligue Camerounaise des Droits de l’Homme (LCDH), 143n3 linguistics, 4, 14, 97, 98, 110 literacy, 125; illiteracy, 11, 16, 17, 25, 66, 155; nonliteracy, 57, 59 literature, 163, 164; and the environment, 157n6; and filmmaking, 65; oral, 53 Lô, Ismael, 162 Loftus, Maria, 71 Lomé, 3 loneliness, 130, 131 Lorey, Isabel, 136 Le Loup d’or de Balolé. See Golden Wolf of Balolé, The love, 23, 25, 30n20, 176, 180, 181; love stories, 5, 63n6 Lumière, Louis, 51, 52 Lumumba, 70 Maady Kaan, 155, 156, 176 Maal, Baba, 162 Maathai, Wangari, 146, 153 madness, 77, 79, 82, 86, 90n39, 119, 120; politics of, 6 Maedl, Anna, 95 Maghreb, 1, 8, 26, 38, 46; Maghrebi documentarians, 29n4; Maghrebi immigrants, 12, 42; Maghrebi people, 20, 24, 29n7 Mahzen, 7 Maidou, Prudence, 180 Makeba, Miriam, 175 Mali, 9n4, 169 Mama Afrika, 146 Mama Colonel, 6, 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 110n2 Mambéty, Djibril Diop, 5, 6, 66, 74, 79, 164, 165 Mandabi, 72 Man Sa Yay (I, Your Mother), 50

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Man Who Mends Women: The Wrath of Hippocrates, The, 95 Manyole, Honorine, 96 Mapping Journey Project, The, 18 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 36, 40 Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racism, 36, 39, 47 Les Marches de la Liberté (Steps to Liberty), 5, 35, 36, 40, 46 Marcus, Daniel, 34 marginalization, 2, 3, 6, 13, 20, 52, 68, 76, 156, 165, 166, 168, 169 Marianne noires, 36 Marks, Laura, 43 Marokkiates (Moroccan Women), 5, 26, 27, 28 Marrakchi, Laïla, 30n20 marriage, 30n17, 54, 108 Marseille, 36, 39, 72 masculinity, 17, 105, 108, 123, 124, 180 Masuku Film Festival—Nature and Environment, 146, 175, 178 Mauritania, 9n4 Mbeke, Monique Phoba, 148 Mbembe, Achille, 134 Mbida, Thérèse Bella (Sita Bella), 1, 2, 8n2 MC Solar, 162 McCabe, Daniel, 96 Mdidech, Jaouad, 30n15 Memory in Detention, 30n15 Merkuria, Salem, 4 Mesnaoui, Ahmed, 29n3 Meterns, Charlote, 95 #MeToo! movement, 28 Miano, Leonara, 9n5 Michel, Thierry, 95 migration, 18, 149, 162; illegal, 17; policies, 5 militancy, 50, 72, 89n23 Ministry of Information, 28n1 Ministry of the Interior, 28n1 minorities, 13, 39, 45, 72, 73 mise en abyme, 16 mise-en-scène, 46, 53, 62n1, 83, 107 modernity, 11, 70, 142, 148; postcolonial, 75, 76

modesty, 87 Mohammed VI, 15, 16, 114, 116, 120, 140 Momo, Jean de Dieu, 141 Mona Saber, 30n15 monarchy, 119, 129, 131, 141. See also Morocco, Moroccan monarchy Monenembo, Thierno, 7 Le Monologue de la muette, 66, 74, 75, 76, 77, 81, 89, 155 montage, 40, 41, 46, 59, 62n1, 75, 79 Moolaade, 168 Mora-Kpai, Idrissou, 149 Morin, Edgar, 62n1 Morocco, 5, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 25, 26, 30n15, 38, 116, 117, 130, 131, 132, 141; and filmmaking, 19, 23, 27, 28, 29n6, 29n11, 29n13; history of, 10, 29n8, 118, 119, 142; and missing persons, 120, 129, 134, 137–38, 139, 140; Moroccan armed forces, 20, 22, 136, 138; Moroccan citizens, 11, 13, 14, 18, 115, 120, 133, 135, 136, 139; Moroccan government, 133, 134, 136, 140; Moroccan identity, 10, 13, 14; Moroccan men, 24; Moroccan monarchy, 11, 114, 132, 133, 138, 140; Moroccan production companies, 12–13; Moroccan society, 13, 16, 17; Moroccan women, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 20, 24, 27, 28; postcolonial, 10, 133; post-independence, 114, 119; and sovereignty, 129, 135; and tyranny, 130; and violence, 132, 142. See also Hassan II; years of lead Morocco: Body and Soul, 14 Moscow, 11, 28n2 Mossane, 5, 50, 53, 62 Moufflet, Véronique, 95, 107, 108, 110n1 Mouline, Abderrah-mane, 28n2 mourning, 7, 137, 140, 142 Mouvement des droits de l’Homme et des libertés (MDDHL), 143n3 Mudawwana (reform of the Personal Code), 14, 16, 17 Mukwege, Denis, 95 music, 2, 14, 44, 87, 163, 165, 170, 171, 172, 175, 176, 181; musicians, 44, 116, 162. See also hip-hop; rap La Musique des films (Film Music), 149

Index Muslims, 11, 14, 20, 146, 167; Muslim culture, 14; Muslim identity, 14 mutual support systems, 57, 61 Nacro, Fanta, 6 Naficy, Hamid, 37, 38, 47 Nanook of the North, 4, 53 narration, 99, 118; first-person, 71; linear, 77; self-narration, 117; testimonial, 36; voice-of-God, 5, 70, 98, 102, 103. See also voice-over Narrow Frame of Midnight, 13, 29n6 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 40 Ndala, Mamadou, 96, 102 Ndour, Youssou, 162 necropolitics, 134 Nejjar, Narjiss, 30n20 neoliberalism, 17, 66, 67, 79, 103 New Arab Manifesto (NAC), 10 newspapers, 42, 58, 60, 124, 139, 161 newsreels, 11, 34, 87n9 Niang, Mame-Fatou, 36 Niang, Sada, 2 Niang, Thione, 41 Nichols, Bill, 71, 72, 74, 85, 96, 97–98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 109, 110 Niger, 9n4, 149, 150, 153, 157n9 Nigeria, 129, 151, 156n5 Nigger Business, 4, 7 Nixon, Rob, 152 Nizar’s Spectrum, 30n15 Nkogue, Nanette (Naneth), 175 North America, 12 Nos lieux interdits, 128, 132, 134, 135, 137, 142, 143 Nuba of Mount Chenoua, 29n4 La Nuit de la vérité, 6 Nussbaum, Martha, 127n10 objectivity, 52, 54, 58, 62, 98 Olney, James, 157n7 On the Edge, 116 Open Window, An, 6 orality, 163, 169. See also literature: oral L’Orchestre de Minuit, 29n10

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Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, 29n6, 149 Orientalism, 20, 37, 126n1 Orlando, Valérie, 66 ostracization, 6 Otsobogo, Nadine, 8, 147, 153, 154, 155, 156, 175, 176, 177–81 Ouazzani, Fatema Jebli, 11, 12 Our Forbidden Places, 4, 7, 15, 23, 29nn13–14, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123 Ousmane, Sembene, 9n7, 70, 72 Ouvrir la voix, 36 P’Bitek, Okot, 169 Palcy, Euzhan, 70, 175 Panh, Rithy, 29n14 paranoia, 99, 101, 102 Paris, 11, 28n2, 36, 39, 42, 44, 51, 121, 132, 149; suburbs, 35, 45 La Passante (The Passerby), 50 Patrick A “Le Geste,” 155, 156, 176, 179 patriotism, 7, 103, 105, 107, 108–109 Peck, Raoul, 4, 70 performativity, 4, 5, 37, 67, 68, 71, 73, 77, 82, 85, 86, 113 Petit à petit, 51 Pfaff, Françoise, 65 Pierre-Bouthier, Marie, 119, 127n11, 132, 141 Planet Earth, 145 Plantinga, Carl, 85, 90n39 poetry, 66, 102, 180. See also taasu Poland, 28n2 police, 42, 45, 89n26, 100, 101, 104, 105, 121, 122, 125, 166; and the army, 138; brutality, 46, 167; and the sovereign, 129, 135, 138; and the state, 130; violence, 39, 139, 172n5 politics, 60, 89n29, 115, 123, 148; and filmmaking, 13, 129; of memory, 135, 141. See also agency: political; assassination: political; Cameroon: political system; gender: politics; Kilani, Leïla: and politics; madness: politics of; necropolitics; prisoners: political; protests: political; rights: political; violence: political pollution, 152, 154 polygamy, 30n17

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pornography, 24 Positive Black Soul (PBS), 162, 172n6 postcolonial era, 37, 89n25, 89n29, 100, 108, 110, 137; postcolonial Africa, 68, 72; postcolonial Arab world, 19; postcolonial cities, 74; postcolonial condition, 163, 164; postcolonial context, 129; postcolonial dispensation, 69; postcolonial exotica, 74; postcolonial perspectives, 73; postcolonial power, 96; postcolonial states, 74, 79, 102, 138; postcolonial subjectivities, 96; postcolonial subjects, 106. See also Cameroon: postcolonial; Dakar: postcolonial; displacement: postcolonial; identity: postcolonial; modernity: postcolonial; Morocco: postcolonial; Senegal: postcolonial; violence: postcolonial poverty, 5, 7, 89n29, 148, 153, 155, 161, 170 Pray the Devil Back to Hell, 146 precarity, 136, 137, 138; precarization, 130, 135, 136, 138 press, the, 114, 131 prisoners, 15, 30n15, 117, 127n10, 132; political, 14, 29n12, 118, 129. See also prisons prisons, 14, 30n15, 120, 122, 123, 125, 134, 135, 171n3; Kalat M’Gouna, 115; Kenitra, 117; Tazmamert, 117, 132, 143n1. See also prisoners prostitution, 19, 20, 24 protests, 45, 57, 73, 171, 172n5; political, 164, 168; protesters, 166, 167; protest movements, 46, 161 Public Enemy, 162, 173n9 Pugsley, Bronwen, 67, 68, 73, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 90n39, 90n44 Qatar, 13, 29n6, 171n3 race, 148; relations, 46 radio, 16, 60, 163, 171n2; stations, 161 Radio-Télévision Marocaine, 12 radioactivity, 151, 152; radiotoxins, 150 Ramdani, Abdelaziz, 29n3 Ranger, Terence, 63n8 rap, 161, 162, 163, 167, 168, 168, 169, 170, 172n6, 173n9; performers, 162. See also hip-hop; names of individual groups and performers

rape, 6, 95, 101, 104, 106, 107, 121 Reading, Nigel, 46 reflexivity, 56; cinematic, 62n1; self-reflexivity, 37, 105 Région Ile-de-France, 29n13 Regional and International Festival of Guadeloupe (FEMI), 35 Renov, Michael, 72, 73, 75, 81, 82, 85, 87n5, 89n31, 90n35 reparations, 42, 104, 105, 109, 110n2, 121, 127n11, 133; reparative position, 99, 100, 102, 110 La Révolution n’a pas eu lieu (The Revolution Did Not Happen), 25 Revolution Won’t Be Televised, The, 162, 163, 164–65, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171 Rhalib, Jawad, 30n20 rhyme, 169, 170 Riesco, Beatriz Leal, 86 rights, 22, 23, 123, 131, 132; civic, 36; civil, 35, 39, 41, 45; equal, 13, 17, 40, 41; political, 24; suspension of, 133; voting, 37, 40; women’s, 16, 17, 146; workers’, 154. See also human rights Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 67, 87n3 Rosen, Philip, 69, 89n25, 90n37 Rossman, Sasha, 67 Rouch, Jean, 51, 62n1, 79, 88n17 rural areas, 16, 50, 52, 53, 54, 58, 59, 60, 61, 66, 70; rural residents, 57, 153; and urban areas, 61, 70 Saint Louis, 162 Samset, Ingrid, 95 Sané, Alioune, 162 Sankofa, 89 Saourou, Didier, 172n6 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 47n2, 63n9 Sarzan, 6 Saxton, Libby, 90n38 Scott-Herron, Gil, 163, 168, 169 Scramble for Africa, 38 Le Seau de poissons (The Fish Bucket), 153, 176, 178 Sedgwick, Eve K., 99 Selbe et tant d’autres (Selbe and So Many Others), 50, 53, 62

Index self-confession, 67, 71 self-determination, 100, 103, 106, 107, 110 self-inscription, 67, 72, 73 self-knowledge, 7, 67, 81, 147 Sembène, Ousmane, 9n7, 70, 72, 74, 76, 77, 88n17, 89n30, 166–67 Senegal, 8, 9n4, 50, 77, 90n44, 157n9, 161, 162, 169, 170, 172n6, 179, 180; authorities, 62; history of, 72, 167; policies of, 57; postcolonial, 74, 75, 76, 81, 86, 87n2, 90n35; Senegalese people, 35, 38, 41, 59; society, 61, 66, 67, 86, 90n35, 169; west-central, 52 Serengeti, 145 Serer region, 50, 51, 52, 54, 62 Serhane, Abdelhak, 143n1 sex, 23, 24; bisexuality, 27, 28; homosexuality, 28; sexuality, 27, 75, 179; sexualization, 5; sexual orientation, 27 sexism, 62, 148 sexual harassment, 28 sex workers, 21, 24. See also prostitution Shakespeare el Bidaoui (Shakespeare in Casablanca), 25 Shamablanca, 25 Sia, the Dream of the Python, 168 Sidet: Forced Exile, 4 Sidi Moumen, 16 silence, 4, 6, 37, 82, 83, 117, 118, 133, 134, 136, 137, 139, 152, 153, 164, 165; codes of, 85, 87; ethics of, 68, 83; silenced groups, 17, 52, 54, 57, 74, 127n10, 133, 141, 143 Silent Monologue, The, 9n7 Sirleaf, Ellen Johnson, 156n4 Sissako, Abderrahmane, 66 sisterhood, 74, 76, 77, 83, 109 Sisters of the Screen, 73 Slasher of Tunis, The, 116, 121, 122, 124, 126 slavery, 42, 89n30; slaves, 37, 76; slave trade, 41, 108, 163 social class, 136 Solanas, Fernando, 68 Soldier Girls, 85 Songe au rêve, 155, 176, 179, 180 songs, 23, 170. See also music; rap Soumahoro, Maboula, 46 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 15

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sovereign, the, 129, 132, 135, 138, 141; sovereign power, 142, 172n5; sovereignty, 134, 135, 138, 141 Soyinka, Wole, 129 space, 4, 6, 23, 24, 42, 43, 44, 58, 60, 76, 77, 98, 104, 137, 148, 164, 176, 177, 179; articulations of, 46; communal, 61; cyberspace, 28; domestic, 54; familiar, 3; interstitial, 37, 38; profilmic, 79; public, 3, 27, 168; and reparation, 104; rural, 59, 60; and time, 25, 43, 57, 152, 155; transactional, 85; urban, 28, 53, 59, 61, 163 Spain, 5, 17, 30n21, 149 stereotypes, 8n1, 35 stigmas, social, 6, 11, 86, 90n44, 101, 120 subjectivity, African, 54; female, 2, 3, 54; intersubjectivity, 19, 22, 67 sub-Saharan Africa, 1, 8, 36, 44, 45, 46, 90 suffering, 7, 103, 132, 136, 137, 150, 152, 153, 154 Sundance Institute, 29n6 superfluousness, 85, 131, 134 Support Fund, 11, 29n3 Survie, 139 Sustainable Development Prize, 149 Sutherland, Efua Theodora, 1, 2, 8n2 Syad, Daoud Oulad, 30n20 Sylla, Khady, 6, 9n7, 65, 66–67, 73, 74, 75–76, 77, 79, 86, 89n24, 89n30, 148, 155, 163, 168, 169; as author, 65, 66; style, 68, 76, 81, 85, 90n39; and subjects, 77, 82, 83, 85, 87 taasu, 66, 87n2 taboos, 28, 82, 85, 86, 90n39, 141 tagg performance, 168 Tahiri, Zakia, 30n20 Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai, 146 Tallmadge, John, 157n6 Tamazight language, 13 Tam-Tam à Paris, 1, 2 Tangier, 17, 116 Tangiers, the Burners’ Dream, 17, 116 Tarr, Carrie, 39 Taubira, Christiane, 41 Taubira Law, 41, 42, 46 Tazi, Mohamed Abderrahman, 28n2, 29n3

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Index

Tcheuyap, Alexie, 2, 137 Tchouaffé, Olivier Jean, 1 Tchumkam, Hervé, 172n5 Terrab, Sonia, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30n20 terror, 29n12, 131, 132, 133, 134; terrorists, 44 testimony, 83, 100, 119–20, 137, 139, 171n2; ethics of, 130, 137. See also narration: testimonial; voice: testimonial Testito, 50 They Were Promised the Sea, 14 Thiam, Aïcha, 155 Thiam, Momar, 6 Thiat (Cheikh Omar CyrilleToure), 162, 165, 166–67, 168, 170 Thiaw, Rama, 8, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 171 third cinema, 69, 72; Third Cinema manifesto, 10 This Is Congo, 6, 7, 96, 97, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109–10 Tinghir-Jerusalem: Echoes of the Mellah, 29n11 Togo, 8, 9n4 Too Black to Be French, 36, 47n2 torture, 7, 14–15, 29n12, 116, 118, 120, 132, 135, 138. See also Association Chrétienne pour l’Abolition de la Torture (ACAT) Touki Bouki, 79, 165 Touré, Sekou, 6 transparency, 115, 117, 126; of film, 113, 116, 117, 122, 123, 149; of government, 114; of history, 118, 119; transparent documentation, 113, 114, 119, 126; transparent representation, 7 Trop noire pour être française. See Too Black to Be French tropes, 38, 47n2, 85, 122, 126; genre, 121; visual, 70, 86 Trouillet, Caroline, 44 Tuareg rebellion, 149 Tunisia, 10, 29n4, 38, 114, 115, 116, 122, 126n2, 127n13; Tunisian citizens, 123; Tunisian society, 123, 125, 126; Tunisian state, 121 television, 18, 171n2; channels, 12; documentaries, 16; production, 19; shows, 101. See also 2M 2M, 25, 30n20

tyranny, 130, 134; documentation of, 129, 141; state, 131, 136; victims of, 135 Ukadike, Frank, 69, 70–71, 73, 88n22, 165 Une affaire de nègres, 129, 131, 134, 135, 137, 138, 141, 142, 143 Une Fenêtre ouverte, 66, 67–68, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 81, 85, 86, 87, 89n24, 90n39, 155 unemployment, 39, 46, 162, 169, 170; youth, 156, 161 United Arab Emirates, 29n6 United Kingdom, 29n6 United Nations, 12, 139 United States, 29n6, 41, 43, 95, 162, 164, 169, 170, 171 uprootedness, 14, 131, 134, 163 urban environments, 3, 16, 56, 74, 75, 79, 89n29; urbanization, 61. See also rural areas: and urban areas; space: urban vagrancy, 6, 77 Van de Peer, Stefanie, 22, 43, 127n13 Van In, André, 29n14 Vertov, Dziga, 34, 62n1 video, 34, 46, 66, 68, 73, 79, 81, 168, 175; promotional, 117, 121; video games, 124, 125 villages, 52, 53, 57, 59, 149, 150, 161; and the city, 61; communal village spaces, 61; and outside world, 60; village compounds, 56, 61; village life, 53–54, 147, 148, 153; villagers, 52–53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63n9, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 165. See also Amazigh: villages violence, 68, 82, 99, 103, 130, 136, 172n5; domestic, 101; gendered, 103, 121; nonviolence, 37, 39, 40, 44, 146; political, 114, 115, 118, 120, 130, 132; postcolonial, 96, 106; sexual, 96–97, 100, 101, 104, 107–108, 109–10, 110nn1–2, 111n4, 125, 126; slow, 147, 150, 152, 153; social, 114, 115; solutions to, 108; state, 3, 117, 120, 136, 142; symbolic, 120, 124; against women, 4, 7, 108. See also Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): and violence; Morocco: and violence; police: violence; rape voice, 5, 6, 11, 24, 26, 37, 57, 58, 66, 74, 96, 109, 110, 130, 133, 142, 145, 153; African, 52,

Index 54; male, 20; narrative, 54, 153; role of, 97; testimonial, 85; public, 54; women’s, 6, 20, 54, 55, 62, 72, 73, 105, 148, 155. See also narration: voice-of-God; voice-of-the-text; voice-over voice-of-the-text, 97–98, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105, 110 voice-over, 2, 3, 19, 20, 21, 37, 40, 45, 46, 54, 55, 58, 72, 74, 76, 106, 118, 123 Volet, Jean-Marie, 66 voting, 41; voter registration, 46. See also rights: voting voyeurism, 55, 74 Vues d’Afrique, 149 vulnerability, 136, 137, 141, 155 Waberi, Abderrahmane, 77 Wade, Karim Meissa, 171n3 Wade, Abdoulaye, 8, 161, 162, 166, 167, 170, 171n3 Walker, Alice, 62 Walls and People, 12, 29n6 Wangari Maathai & the Green Belt Movement, 146 Wangari Maathai Tribute Film, 146 war, 22, 105, 111n6, 126n2, 133; civil, 133, 134, 146; colonial, 19; war rhetoric, 105, 108; war stories, 20. See also Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): civil war; World War I; World War II Wazana, Kathy, 14

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Weira, Amina, 147, 148, 149–51, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157n9 When Men Weep, 17 When the Dates Are Ripe, 29n3 Where Are You Going, Moshe?, 29n11 Willemen, Paul, 69 Winston, Brian, 87n7, 90n43 Wolof language, 4, 5, 6, 76, 161, 170, 172n6, 179 Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, 146 Women, Peace and Security Program, 156n4 Women’s League, 16 World Festival of Black Arts, 51 World War I, 44 World War II, 38, 39 Xala, 72 Yaoundé, 3, 8n2 Yatfu, Jojo, 173n9 years of lead, 7, 14, 15, 16, 29n12, 114, 115, 118, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135 Yen a Marre (We Are Fed Up!), 161, 162, 163, 166, 168 Youssoupha, 162 Zad Moultaka, passages, 116 Ziguinchor, 162 Zineb Hates the Snow, 121 Ziyara, 14

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