On African Utopia Part 2: The Director’s Eye

“It is good to be at Cannes, but I wish Africa would create something of its own. We should not be eternal guests … We are not alone in the world, but we are our own sun. I do not define myself relative to Europe. In the darkest of darkness, if the other does not see me, I do see myself. And surely do I shine!” – Ousmane Sembène

On the window seat of an airplane, you’re able to get a view from the outside: to gaze at the immensity of the sky plunging down to, as it appears below, the very smallness of the urban landscape. You’re able to survey the world from a bird’s eye, actually even higher than a bird’s eye, as I doubt birds fly that high up. Point is, you are at a standstill. At a suspension in time. An in-between vantage point. The interlude.

While on the flight, the hum of the airplane brings about a singular sense of calm that you’ll maybe welcome with open arms. Maybe not. But you can take this time to think about what’s been sitting on the back of your mind. The grand scheme of things or smaller scaled plays, tossed drafts, and pursued endeavors. How you left the place you departed from and how you’ll find the destination you’re arriving to. Reshaping and sharpening the sorts of abstract troubles that seem to appear less clouded above land. Forging ahead.

The airplane is an insulated machine whose design informs limited interactions amongst people. It’s a kind of a mollifying bubble, a high-speed sphere into which one steps to exist, temporarily, in a state of peaceful inertness: the duration of the long-distance journey. Between the cabins, the passengers enter a daze of passivity that may be unhabitual in common spaces but required for smooth travel. You can see many faces engaged in various activities.

Some are restful, anxious, drowsy, contorted or elated. Some have their eyes fixed on the seatback screens, some face down their cellular devices. Some are turned to each other, having conversation. The flight attendant passes by with a tray, some instructions are uttered by the pilot, a baby cries, an old man is sound asleep. A trajectory of multiple hours at once is a starry-eyed opportunity to dive into an arena of distraction at length. It’s a dedicated time you can freely, unashamedly indulge in a media of choice. Or no media. But despite what you choose, you’ll have the assurance of not being interrupted.

Typically, I’d untangle my wired earbuds, decide on an album, press play and let the sonics reverberate. Or I’d sink into whatever book was lighting on life at the moment. If available, I’d swipe through the movie options on the plane until finally, satisfied with my pick, I’d immerse myself in a world of fiction. In exchange for the cerebral asylum, I’d forfeit my fulltime place in reality for a little while, and instead, I’d enter a realm that’s alluringly vast, encapsulating, and sublime: music, literature, cinema.

When observing the concept of utopia, why does it feel most natural for me to start with cinema?

Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of Ousmane Sembène.

It’s 1967. The Supremes are playing in radio stations. The afro’s in style. People are still allowed to smoke on airplanes. Senegal has had only 7 years of independence. Arbitrary on some degree, these elements may not have been distinctively in his mind as he sat in the airplane on his way to Cannes. That much is clear. Yet in a periodical sense, they do color the context in which he played. At this point in his career, Sembène is getting international recognition for his movie La noire de… or Black Girl (1966) and he is going to be a member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. He is 44 years old, and this is his directorial debut.

Sembène had caused some trouble in school and was kicked out at 14, without graduating. He then worked with his father, a fisherman, until 1938. In 1944, he was drafted in the French Colonial Army, and served with the Sixth Colonial Regiment in Italy and other regions. In1948, he moved to France to becoma a dock worker in Marseille. His political inclinations gradually strengthened, and after becoming a trade-unionist, he joined the French communist party in 1950. In 1956, he completes his first novel. All these experiences inform his cinematic work.

His first-feature film – the tragic story of Diouana who finds herself moving from Dakar to Antibes to work for a French couple – is inspired by one of his short stories because, at heart, Sembène is a writer. One could accurately describe him as a convert in that way. The world of literature, although beautiful, is also an exclusionary world. And where the hand of the writer reached its limit, the director’s eye was scintillating. His vision was larger-than-life, and the visibility he was afforded on paper, too limited to fully expand.

Sembène stumbled into filmmaking after realizing that it was a medium that could most immediately reach its intended audience, taking into consideration the high rate of illiteracy in on the African continent. Sembène wanted to touch people, African people. He wished to speak to them as loud as a sergeant speaks through a microphone. And looking at the tools in his possession, he realized that the transmission of knowledge could be most effectively performed with a camera.

Cinema gives us the ability to transport ourselves into another world. And he wanted to envision what this world was like. We have the ability to paint images, make others feel, hear, and understand us at a certain place and time. We can identify with what we see as if we ourselves are living through it, as if we ourselves are projected into that reality. Cinema can break down the walls and show us the possibilities. Images are powerful, and Sembène understood that in a very practical way.

A utopia is pluralistic: a collection of guiding lights that makes a singular one indefinite. But still, we need something to carry us to this ideal and mystery alike, under the assumption that it’s a better version than today. First, seeing ourselves in it is a necessity. And I mean seeing ourselves beautifully, honestly, radically. The portrayal of the tonality of our skins, the aesthetic quality of our bodies, not to be shown only when suffering, but to be shown with their full range of emotions.

Writers are meant to create rooms for people to see themselves in. And African stories, in their structure, their language, and their message must be written so people can enter those rooms. That means exploring people’s pains, people’s wants, people’s dreams. That means creating with intention. That means opening the mind to the worlds of wisdom and knowledge to be learned from that side of the globe. Because these stories too, are worthwhile.

 

Interview with Dir. Manthia Diawara

L: Hello Professor Diawara, first I want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me. I’m very grateful to have you share your thoughts on African cinema. I find this topic very interesting, so I have many questions for you. We’ll see if we can get through them all… In any case, please answer them however you like. If that means deviating, feel free.

So, let’s start…

In your 1994 documentary “Sembène: The Making of African Cinema”  you incorporate excerpts from his discourse, clips from his movies, and at multiple points, we, the audience, even see you walk alongside him as you perform the role of interviewer. How was your experience working with Sembène? What surprised you most about him?

D: Well first of all…the film was made by myself and the Kenyan author Ngugi Wa Thiong’o who had a lot of affinities with Sembène Ousmane. They both are big supporters of the uses of African languages in African literature and…in cinema. Ngugi wanted to meet Sembène, and it was my pleasure to take Ngugi along. The framing, and the design of the film was conceived by both of us. Working with Sembène…well it was a pleasure. I mean he’s the most…let’s say impressive African filmmaker. He’s made many films. And he’s a pioneer. He, you know, is a very strong supporter of African self-determination, independence, and decolonization. So, both Ngugi and myself were very impressed by him.

L: Was there anything unexpected?

D: Well, the problem is, I had known Sembène for about 15 or 20 years before the filming. So, there was no surprise. I know that he’s a difficult guy [Laughs]. I know that he speaks his mind… I had read his books, I had been to his house several times, so I didn’t have surprises. If anything, he confirmed my views or my prejudice or whatever they were.

L: [More laughs] Got it, okay. So, the opening scene of the documentary is a shot of waves which for me represent change, especially within the patterns of cultural movements. In a static shot, the camera captures the ocean until Sembène enters the frame with his signature pipe – an introspective moment that maybe symbolizes him starting a wave of his own. I thought it beautifully set the tone. Sembène is undoubtedly recognized as a pioneer in his own right, but how you would personally describe the blueprint he laid for African cinema?

D: Well…this is a good question. Sembène had written some very important novels on Africa, including Le Docker Noir (1956), O Pays ,Mon Beau People! (1957), all the way to God’s Bits of Wood (1960)…some masterpieces. And then, on his own account, he travelled to Africa, from Senegal to the Congo – from one end to the other end – and realized that Africa at that time in the 60s, and perhaps now too, was an oral culture, not a writing culture. So, people did not know him. They were not familiar with his work. Therefore, he decided that he needed to go into cinema in order to reach people. He defined cinema in that sense: the shortcut between writing, the visual and the oral traditions. In many ways, coming to cinema, he was able to craft his own language in a way that was not very obvious in writing. Because he was writing in French, and that was not his mother tongue [Wolof], the syntax change from his mother tongue to the French language was always a difficulty for him to grasp…or not to grasp…but to Africanize, to Africanize the French language, because there is a serious resistance on the part of the French people to let anybody come and change the grammar or the syntax of the language. With cinema, there can be constraints because you have to know where to place the camera, where comes the light, especially on the black skin, what angles to use, but he was able to create an authentic language in cinema and create a model for future African filmmakers to use.

L: Definitely…and I agree with your point about the French language sometimes being difficult about change. It makes me think of the concept of domestication and foreignization in translation theory. Last night, I finished reading ‘The White Genesis’ (1965) and throughout, the language felt unburdened, defined mainly by Sembène, as opposed to polished in a way to appeal to some other tradition.  

D: Of course! Yes, and I think when he wrote Le Docker Noir, one could see the work of an editor in the background and also probably in O Pays ,Mon Beau People!  In the latter, he’s telling a story of his country, of his home, but the language was very much like a French person telling the same story. By the time he gets to The White Genesis, he was able to Africanize the French language. He was able to use the influence of the oral tradition to defamiliarize the text, to have more characters speak at the same time, to make it crowded basically, to tell a story as somebody would in Africa – a grandmother telling a story to the children. So, he could hear several voices, he could hear the rhythm also, of the story. He was already beginning to say, ‘I’m going to work on the language’ but then, that’s also around the time he decided to make films! The Money Order (1966) also has some passages that kind of testify to the Africanization or the Senegalization of the text… They were all making these kinds of efforts in African literature whether one is talking about Chinua Achebe who actually did not support writing in African languages or team Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Sembène Ousmane who felt that it would be better to just write in African languages instead of European languages. In many ways, cinema provided Sembène with an easy way to reach African audiences in their own languages.

L: And he holds up a mirror in that way…to being understood. In a literal sense, translation is a big part of the documentary on Sembène. Because Sembène speaks French and John Singleton – who made Boyz n the Hood (1991) and Poetic Justice (1993) – spoke English, you actively had to translate the conversations between the two. A really cool crossover by the way… But what I’m getting at is that the act of translating is something we should consider on a bigger scale. Translation allows for cross-cultural communication. If we’re thinking of finding mutual understanding, how do we wrestle with the diversity of languages within any single African country? For example, Cameroon has more than 200 languages. 

D: Well yes…so when I took my camera and went with Ngugi Wa Thiong’o to Kenya to make a film on his return back home 20 years later – when democracy arrived in Kenya, he wanted to visit home – the young generation of writers brought that question up. They basically felt that well…if you do it in Swahili, then what about the Kikuyus…or if you write in Kikuyus, how would the Swahili speak and be able to read you? Nguigi’s response or even Sembène’s response is that the translators could translate in as many of these Cameroonian languages as you have mentioned, but the writer should feel at ease speaking in the mother tongue and show expressions of creativity that are usually tampered. Or, to deploy creativity in their writing in English and especially French which is very resistant to any kind of transformation of the language. So, I think they are aware of that, and those problems have been discussed in many countries, in many places. They say when you use English or use French, these are predatory languages, these are imperialist languages. As you continue to mostly use French or English, more of those 200 languages in Cameroon actually will be disappearing, dying… So, it’s better to resist the hegemonic and dominant European colonialist languages and keep those languages alive. But it doesn’t mean that you are closing the door to French or to English. Just don’t let them dominate on the ground that we have too many languages to preserve.

L: Sembène argued for a form of cinema that was meant to speak directly to the problems of the audience, in that way, he rejected socialist realism. The problem of time is a pressing one, and pragmatism seems to be his answer. Do you think cinema should speak to reality as it was, reality as it is, or reality as it should be?

D: I think it’s the latter… Sembène is on the one hand, observing the existent reality, as Aristotle would put it. How do you transform this reality in order to emancipate the audiences and specifically the people who were maintained in a subjugated situation, people who were maintained in hierarchical positions  introduced by European colonizers. You cannot accept the stereotypes of yourself. You have to approach reality with the idea of transforming it, changing it to emancipate people, to decolonize people, to free people basically…to put it in short terms. So, Sembène’s reality in that sense was not, you know socialism realism… because that’s not reality as it is. Sembène’s reality was emancipatory realism.

L: What do you mean by emancipatory realism?

D: For example, imagine a gendered world where women’s world is supposed to be this and men’s world is supposed to be this, and then let’s say there is a feminist movement that considers this as a way of putting women in the kitchen, of making women inferior to men and the language actually reinforces this kind of mentality, it would be better for both men and woman to change the language and replace it with a language that is empowering for women, empowering to enslaved people, empowering to people that have been disempowered in that sense. That’s what I mean by emancipatory realism.

L: Now I understand… and speaking of women, they are very important in Sembène’s world. At some point in the documentary, Sembène mentions his two grandmothers. He says: “I owe a great deal to these two great women.” It’s evident that spending a lot of time with them, they left their mark on his identity. In his films, he views the woman as a pillar in the family structure. I’m reminded of Nikki Giovanni’s poem ‘Revolutionary Dreams’ in which she speaks of the role of the ‘natural woman’ towards herself, and subsequently towards the revolution. Sembène says it himself using another iteration: “Start in your own home and move on!” What position do you think he takes on the role of women in African society? Or how does gender affect the interpersonal?

D: Well…Sembène and many African men actually, whether they admit it or not, are raised by their mothers. Either because of polygamy or simply the way the family is set up, the mother plays a big role in the children’s lives. I recognize the burden of this on the woman,on the mother too. If you look at the first poems of Africans, people like Camara Laye, even people like Senghor in his ‘Femme Noire’ (1945), they are all poems dedicated to the mothers, to women. So Sembène is not unusual in that sense. People like Camara Laye… In the 50s, he’s a student in Paris, and when he’s thinking about Africa, he thinks about his mother. So that’s not unusual or even some kind of feminist role, it’s just a necessity because she’s the woman who raised you, who took care of you… “Femme noire, femme africaine, Ô toi ma mère je pense à toi”  that’s the kind of poetry that they were reciting, and several writers started their writing with that, at least in French. I don’t know how expansive that is in the English language or amongst English-speaking writers. So, the grandmother in Sembène’s life, she’s in many of Sembène’s novels: Kaya. But Sembène adds an additional element that is, I mean, many of us, call him feminist avant-la-lettre you know, so he is actually kind of proto-feminist in that sense. He realized that in many of these African societies, men were comfortable in their roles and woman played their role and there was no questioning. But as we know, history changes, and as history changes, the tasks may have diminished for men or for woman… In Sembène’s films you see women always working. But also,  all you have to do is go to any African town, or city, or village and you see women working. And often, these are not works that are actually valorized. People don’t recognize them, or they don’t see them. And Sembène makes those tasks visible to people and becomes a feminist in that way. He says that without these women, societies would collapse. Whereas some men can go to France, they can migrate, society is still there because women are maintaining them. This becomes a subject in many of his films.

L: In reference to what Sembène said about intellectuals and academic circles being virtually useless when it comes to doing anything useful in terms of making real change, let’s touch on the subject of echo chambers and how this bubble effect may give an illusion of progress. Sembène places “marginalized people” or “people who are crammed in between” at the center of the revolution. According to him, only they can bring about real change. Do you agree? And if not, how much do you attribute to the sphere of influence of abstract work?

For him basically, because of his ideology as a Marxist, he believed the only way Africa could progress is through women, and all the marginalized people who are oppressed by everybody, dismissed by everyone. There’s a need to include everybody to move forward. So, when Sembène insist on the people who are crowded in the middle, he says that until we have the marginalized as the heroes of our stories, there’s no way forward. His novels, his films, are all centered around those groups. I think he’s trying to make us see that we are ignoring the part of Africa that could have the most significant contribution to its development. The role of an artist is to kind of provoke the imagination. To kind of tease us and make us see things that we don’t usually see. In doing that, art may aesthetically affect you or maybe exaggerate a situation, and so on… By telling us that, he’s trying to make a point, if that somehow that strikes somebody, myself or another intellectual… I don’t want to speak for anybody else – but I think that everyone should actually have some contribution to the growth of the society. If you marginalize the elite, and render the elite useless, or marginalize the middle class, then what you also end up doing is to romanticize ‘the wretched of the earth’, as Sembène would say. But in society, I think, everybody should have a contribution. And in the same way, I think that goes for all tasks, whatever you’re writing about whether realism or very abstract writing or you’re trying to write fantasy. When you leave one single one out, you risk diminishing society. But Sembène would tell me, ‘That’s not what I’m saying, what I’m saying is Africa has diminished herself by inheriting the European stereotype of herself and by only valorizing people who are Europeanized against the wretched of the earth, and that needs to change…especially if we want Africa to go faster. Otherwise, it’s going to take forever.

L: That’s right… When I think of the question of the marginalized, I understand that he’s pointing to the fact that intellectuals can kind of create this world that is disconnected from reality and that’s definitely not something to fall into…if you mean to have real impact. So, how do you glue these together? Theory and practice? And not make it feel void?

D: Well, in Africa, if you look at the first movements of decolonization, wherever it emerged, Cameroon, or the Congo with Lumumba or Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, and in many different parts of Africa, when you look at decolonization…they insisted on the role of the intellectual to open the eyes of the people to the needs of the revolution. So, the intellectual, whether it’s a playwright, or a schoolteacher or a religious leader, their role was to actually make the themes of the revolution desirable to the masses. Make the masses come to the fold and participate in the revolution. Otherwise, the politicians, the intellectuals, the church, the mosque and so on were not enough. It’s the basic Marxist discourse of base and superstructure. You have the superstructure – that’s the elite, the owners of the factories, the means of production – and then you have people at the bottom, the ones doing the work. In the classic Marxist terms, you would say the base determines the superstructure. But the way it should be is that it not only  determines the superstructure, but the superstructure also returns to the base and influences the base. So, you have a kind of circular thing as opposed to have a linear thing and that’s what Sembène was doing. I think when he’s talking about the marginalized and the oppressed, he’s talking about the base. If you have your teacher, your artist, they make the revolution, your nationalist feelings…they make them palatable to you. And, as you accept it, you’ll agree to work with it. But if you only say ‘Oh it’s just the superstructure that determines the base’ that makes it a one-way street. But it’s not. I think it really goes around and around and they need each other.

L: I see… So, we’re talking about the role of the artist at length, and we often talk about the role of the artist in terms of defining its purpose. There’s an infographic on “The Callings & Roles for Collective Liberation” made by The Slow Factory  that was really inspiring for me to see. It sort of demystified the mosaic of social work and showed how we can all contribute to it in some incremental way. Working together well means embracing what we each have to offer, and that goes for the artist. The gift of creation is something so precious, but l wouldn’t want to be blindsided in that way…Do you think art has a responsibility to be political? Is there something the director’s eye should be inclined to look at?  

D: Well, the thing is every artist is political. But it also depends on what you mean by political. If you take a poem and somebody says ‘The flowers are beautiful’ it is political in a way… There are people who don’t see flowers at all. Metaphorically or not. They don’t see them. So, if you mean political like ‘I want Kamala Harris to win the election so let me do my art so she can win the election’ again that is too literal. So, art is political, there is… I mean in the 50s there was this big movement called Art Engagé so maybe political in the sense that the art that weds itself to a particular goal and then the art tries to teach it to the audiences and so on… That’s still with us in many ways. The other day, I was trying to tell the class that Sembène and Spike Lee have that in common…they reach a point where they say, ‘Wake up!’ They’re trying to wake the audience up. They’re saying ‘You have to get up. We can’t continue this; this is killing us! I can’t stand it anymore!’ In many ways, the audience could say ‘I don’t want to wake up! I have other things to do. Why do you want to tell me to wake up? Why do you didactically want to tell me that?’

L: I’ve been thinking about this a lot. There’s only 24h in a day, so to tell people to carry the weight of a revolution on their back and save Africa is absurd, needless to say, unrealistic. It’s the realization that you can only do so much but at the same time there’s so much you want to do? I don’t know…it’s difficult. But that shouldn’t discourage the people thinking that we can change the world, I just think growing up is seeing that there are important constraints…

D: I think what is most important is to hear every voice. The echo of every voice deserves to be heard, and for a long time, black people’s voices have been silenced and when they start screaming, they have been marginalized. Your generation’s role is to make us hear those voices. To basically not just make the oppositional oppressive forces hear those voices but to make the old generations hear that Africa is no longer what they used to think as Africa. What was true yesterday may not be true today or in 50 years. So, your generation has a crucial role in that sense. What I know is tied to a specific context, to my age, to where I have been. There are places where I have not been and there is a truth there that I don’t know. And somebody needs to write about that and let me know…I think that’s what makes art important. Art is alive and always changing, transforming with the context.

L: Yes, art is an expression of the context and also people’s identities, so that’s why it should never be suppressed. My next question is about the Laval decree. The Laval decree issued by Pierre Laval was instrumental in preventing African directors to film in French colonies. It was only in 1960, when the colonies gained independence, that the ban was lifted. This decree is largely attributed to the late development of African cinema. What effect do you think this had on the formation of national identities? In other words, why was it so important to take the camera away from the colonized?   

D: There is a very artistic film which called Les Statues Meurent Aussi (1953) that was banned. The director made critiques of colonialism, and he’s not even black. Now it’s on YouTube everywhere. But there is no official French papers saying it’s been unbanned. When French or Belgian saw something that didn’t go their way, they would just ban it basically. So, when we come back to your point, in the original question, when the ban was lifted and African filmmakers started to pick up the camera themselves like in ‘Afrique-sur-Seine’ (1955), filmed in Paris, with Paulin Vieyra and Mamadou Sarr, and you see Africans behind the camera and so on, I think it’s very significant. It’s significant because you go from being an object to a subject of creation. And when people begin to see from your point of view, you’ve created power. People have been so afraid of the camera. In fact, if you look at the Belgian Congo there were worse. Them, they didn’t even want the missionaries to make films with flashback for Africans because they said, ‘This will really confuse them, they’re not that intelligent.’ They knew the power of cinema’s ability to subvert the mind of people. That’s why they didn’t want to show certain films in Africa. And so, whether we are in the U.S with African Americans or Africa, to own your image and to show your own image the way you want to show it is a strength.

L: Aimée Césaire wrote that: “Colonialism is based on psychology”. A clear example of that is The Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment, a project of about 35 films produced in order to educate bantu people but were akin to other forms of brainwashing. The stories, which were structured around the trope of a “wise guy” winning over a “stupid guy” and were dumbed down in order to be ‘more comprehensible’ to the local populations. How do you think cinema today can work to deconstruct postcolonial/neocolonial frameworks?

D: When I said Belgium, I was referring to the missionaries who created these experiments. What they were doing, was using cinema to teach primitive people about Christianity. They didn’t want anything to get in the way. In fact, I wrote about this… I wrote about this because it was so blatantly racist. It was so obviously racist… No flashbacks, no point of view, ‘Don’t give the camera to Africans’…The Bantu Kinema Experiment was just racist.

L: In the classroom, Sembène says to the students, “I myself prefer literature to cinema. But in our time, literature is a luxury. We want to compress history and maintain our oral tradition. So, cinema is an important tool for us.” With the conditions that were set by the systems in place, he endorses cinema as a more adequate tool for the African perspective to shine through, both in honoring ‘the spoken word’ and its ability to reach people. In turn, why do you value the visual medium?

D: You know actually, unlike Sembène, I don’t make a distinction. I think he’s wrong on this subject. There are some things that I can only write and some things that I can only film. For examples, my projects lately – and I guess I can include the Sembène film in these – my project lately was to make films that otherwise, would not have been made. I made films on people that I considered philosophers of the black world. I just finished one on Angela Davis, before that I made one on Edward Glissant, and I made several films like that. So that’s one point. I don’t make hierarchies; I don’t hierarchize film over literature. One medium has things to offer that the other doesn’t. Each have their drawbacks. We were just talking about the French language… or the English language and their characteristics, well the same applies in cinema. And almost anybody can make a film now. There’s many ways. Cinema has been very much demystified with the new technologies. So, when it comes to why Sembène said I prefer literature, I think it’s because literature you have the chance  to be more subjective, you have the chance to have an interior monologue. In one word, you have the chance to be poetic. Literature is assumed to be the best domain of expression. Expression par excellence, it would be poetic. But there are films that are very poetic as well. You have to know when a film is poetic and when it just going very fast and trying to tell you a story or to scare you, or other things. But I don’t agree with the notion. I don’t read in the categoric hierarchies between one and the other.

L:I wanted to talk about your filmography. It includes an eclectic array of investigative avenues. In your documentary ‘Rouch in Reverse’ (1995) on Jean Rouch, you introduce ‘reverse anthropology’ through the exposition of his legacy, in ‘Who’s Afraid of Ngugi?’ (2006), you explore the aftermath of making language your craft, in ‘Négritude, a Dialogue between Soyinka and Senghor’ (2015) you invent a conversation these two men. There’s range of conceptual skills applied there, and I feel like I do see certain patterns, such as the idea of ‘displacement’ and ‘identity loss/retrieval’. Is that accurate? If not, what themes do you find yourself most drawn to? 

D: So, you just put a system in my thoughts that I don’t see myself in [Laughter]. And that’s okay… You see things that I don’t see. I know what drives me to do these films… It’s the fact that I don’t think they would be done otherwise. That’s the main reason. You know, one thing about being a professor is that there are gains and losses. When I came to this country I was working and studying. I remember my professors encouraged me to do my master’s because I wanted to drop out and write. And then they encouraged me to do the PHD and then they underlined…the question behind all of that is that well at least you will have a job whereas as a writer you may start this, this, this, and this…. So, you jump to today because that was maybe 40-30 years ago. I think it was a good choice, but it had drawbacks. But the positive is, I make a very good living and therefore, I’m free to make the films that I want to make. The films that would not have been done. The disadvantage is that sometimes it makes me lazy with regard to my writing, and that makes me suffer because if I don’t write, I don’t feel good about myself…

L: Why say you’re lazy when you’re making all these films?

D: Well as you know, I make the films because I feel like nobody is going to make them. And then when I start making the films, I usually can finish them in a year. But writing books… I have like 3 novels, and I need to sit down and fix them, and I don’t know when I’m going to do it. So, in a way, the privilege that I have can just keep me making a film after another film, but I think that I need to sit down and write, And I’m not doing that. And that’s what I mean by lazy. [Laughter]

L: I Maybe lazy is not the right word… I think you may just need time to write.  

D: Ah well I’m a sadomasochist, I need to torture myself in order to get to doing things.

L: Fair, fair. I specifically wanted to talk about your essay film ‘AI: African Intelligence’ (2022). You put a lens on the inhuman aspect of algorithms which is something I’m very interested in. Especially seeing how much technology can control our perception. Your blend of the archaic and the modern is unexpected, in that it allows us to split right down the middle to where we are. Can you speak more about your intentions with this project? 

D: In the beginning ‘AI: African Intelligence’ was not my idea. There is a festival in a small town in Austria…well maybe it’s not a small town but I assume…the town is called Lens. Out of the blue I received a letter from them inviting me to this festival that is always on AI. Because I write essays, they invited me to come and talk about how people in the humanities see AI. And this would be maybe, 5-6 years ago. I just wanted to go there and say: ‘Look man, leave me alone I don’t know anything about any of this.’ But I went there and just said things that come to my mind, the usual critiques… And they responded well. They said: ‘This is very interesting. Can you invite some artificial intelligence experts to visit your studio?’ Now I don’t have a studio. I have a house in Senegal, so I just invited them there, they came, and we had conversations on the topic. But at that time, I told myself: ‘You have to do something that challenges you. Now that you got yourself in this trouble, you can’t just satisfy them, how can you satisfy yourself?’ So that’s when I began to look around. If these people come to my house in Senegal, what would I show them? So, I began to look around but actually what I found out was actually not something I saw, it was something I heard. Every night, around my village I hear drumming. I hear people drumming. But usually, I just ignore them. I’ve been there for more than 10 years and never went to see what these drums were about. Turns out they were actually possession dances. That’s what they are. People dance because it’s a healing process. They go to see a priest or priestess because the psychological problems cannot be solved by the hospital, the European hospital and clinical therapy.

L: So, it’s a form of therapy?

D: Oh yeah, it is. It’s largely psychological. For people who are having either nightmares about some things or who cannot have babies, those kinds of problems. So, there were some priests who are very famous in the region, and I saw it and thought: ‘Well they may be seeing things in the dark… in a way they built data with behavior patterns they observe and create algorithms to treat the problems the people who come to them for. Maybe that’s what computers are trying to do, except when computers do it, the data they amass are data that actually are biased…I mean you know the story. Making this film was a sort of challenge to myself. I was a kid growing up in a Muslim society, and you stay away from those drums, they’re evil. They are the devil’s work. ‘Don’t go there.’ I’m sure Christianity is the same thing. You want to stay far. So, what happened is, I wanted to challenge myself and dig into it. So, I went to see them, I interviewed the priestess who had to be at least 90 years old. But when she was possessed…she danced like an 18-year-old girl. And she’d tell me, ‘It’s not me dancing, it’s the spirit doing that’. So basically, I brought these people to explain digital technology and AI. I didn’t know much about it. So, I was simultaneously learning that and learning about these African rituals that I had never seen in my whole life, and the film was a combination.

L: I wanted to bring up something you said multiple times in prior interviews: “Fanon taught me how to think. and Glissant liberated me.” A little bit of research led me to the concept of creolization that Glissant embraced. It seeks hybridity that is, the blend of different element to catalyze unexpected results. He also defines the act of existing and extending (être et étandre) as a philosophy for innovation. I very much resonate with this philosophy. What impact did they have on your own vision of things?

D: I think in class we talked a little bit about this… People like Fanon were making a new world. Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Sembène Ousmane…They were teaching us to think in a kind of  binary manner, a kind of oppositional manner. Black versus white. It’s not that they created that, white people created that and then they came and reversed it against them. They were talking in terms of colonization. We are colonized and we need to be liberated and you are the source of all our problems. They became actors in the independence movement. And that dialectic, I learned it from Fanon. It’s a very rigid one, because it’s either you are with me, or you are against me. You are either assimilated or you are doing resistance. So, it’s either or…either or… And it always fits into being and becoming. For someone like Glissant every time you meet somebody, you are becoming. You become, but without losing what you were. You become somebody else and so on. So that’s what’s liberating about Glissant. Glissant himself – and you’re right by calling it creolization – would not have called it ‘hybridité’. ‘Hybridité’ is biological. Glissant said no: ‘Je ne parle pas d’hybridité parce que c’est biologique.’ Whereas creolization is conceptual. It’s something that always happens in processes. It never stops. Being is identitarian, and an identity is closed. Usually, identity closes you in a circle. Whereas creolization is an opening. ‘Agit dans ton lieu et pense avec le monde’. You are always open to the world. The door is always open to become something else. That’s what’s important to learn from people like Glissant. Whereas earlier, in my Fanonian thinking, and in the thinking of many thinkers in black studies in the US, it was mostly identitarian. And the biggest warning that we had was not to lose your identity. You had to really be strong and hold on to your identity. There are positive elements to that, sure, but why be closed in a circle, in that you only want the same, never the difference…

L: What are your thoughts on the notion of utopia? Is it even worth discussing? If so, what does it mean to you? Are you working towards a utopia of some sort? Where the universal meets the particular, how do you ascribe what you do on the daily to a greater purpose?  

D: The universal and the particular, I can say something about. Utopia, I think, is about becoming. I don’t go past it. Être et étandre. Becoming has become very important to me and I took that from Edouard Glissant. The problem with the universal, again, with AI, when they build this data, they universally apply this data. There is a disregard of people’s particular cultures. And so many of the people that I considered mentors, whether we talk about Glissant, Fanon or Césaire or Maryse Condé or Angela Davis, all these people lead to the fact that the universal is only someone’s particular. There is no such thing as a fixed universal. So, if you develop something in Cameroon and I can use it, somebody can use it in Japan and in other places then it becomes universal. But the universal from the early philosopher, from Plato to Aristotle, the claims thar we all have to see that this is the way the world is, that is actually constraining, it’s determining people’s identities and its colonizing. But even the particular, remember again, should never be closed. If the particular becomes closed, then it becomes like identity and that just gets you…You can’t have identity without exclusion. So, becoming is more important.

L: So, if there can’t be a fixed utopia, we each construct our own?

D: Yeah, and it gets richer you know. Now you get exposed to all these things you know…it’s only better for you. That’s becoming. Otherwise, you get into these traumas because you have locked yourself into something that may not necessarily be true…

L: In the soundtrack of your life, what song would simply have to be included? 

D: Oh God…You know that’s so difficult because I’m always humming some song to myself. All the time. In fact, people in the elevator with me get surprised, they think I’m kind of crazy. But I’m actually just passing the time… It can’t be one song because again, every day may bring in some song that I heard somewhere and find myself repeating.

L: Do you listen to a lot of music?

D: Oh yeah…I’ve written a lot of In Search of Africa (1997) and We Won’t Budge (2004) with music. I believe in music. So, I don’t have one song…I don’t. Again, talking about…I mean you call it hybridité – I stay with your language, you don’t need to change it… So, when I’m in Mali or Guinea, there is a song… Sory Kandia Kouyate’s Douga. It’s a praise song from the 13^th century, for the defeat of Soumaoro Kanté, the Kind of Sosso. I’ll be listening to the words and the choral musicians, and I say, ‘Oh my god, this is the best song in the world.’ And that’s because I’m in the Mali zone or Senegal and so on…And then, I’ll be in France, and I’ll be listening to Jacques Brel, and I will say ‘This is the best!’ And then I go to the US, and the US is even crazier because sometimes, it’s just a jazz tune by…I don’t know…Duke Ellington or John Coltrane or Miles Davis…I listen to them very often… I could also look at myself as a young man in Bamako listening to Jimmy Hendrix, Rolling Stones… So, let’s say I just love music.

L: Me too! Throughout the years, you’ve travelled a lot, so what’s your favorite city?

D: Favorite city…In We Won’t Budge I said, when I’m in Bamako, a week later I get so bored I want to be in Paris. And when I go to Paris, and I see French people doing certain things I want to run away to the US again. Come to the US, I see racism manifesting itself in some stupid way and I want to leave right away… But in the 90s, I was going to Bamako a lot, Paris, and New York but today, I hardly go to Bamako. Paris I only go when invited; I don’t go for pleasure. And New York, I mean sometime my apartment is empty for 4 years and there’s nobody there. Now my city becomes wherever it’s easier to go to a café, have a drink, and something like that. But at some point, it was Bamako, Paris, New York. In fact, that’s how they translated the book We Won’t Budge. When the French people translated the book, they couldn’t use the words Nous Pas bouger. The book talks a lot about immigration, and Salif Keita had a song called Nou Pas Bouger and because of copyright reasons and they couldn’t title that the book, so they called the book Bamako, Paris, New York  instead. But the original title was a way of telling white people: ‘I ain’t going nowhere’. That those immigrants, they should just get used to them. Europe doesn’t belong to just them. It belongs to everybody. Because Africa has always belonged to everybody even though sometimes it feels like it belongs more to white people since they get all the resources and exploit.

L: You’re a director, writer, art historian and professor. If you weren’t doing what you’re doing now, what would rather you be doing? Any alternative route you’ve considered?  

D: So, when I was growing up, people in my culture – I don’t know if they have an equivalent In Cameroon, they always were doing business. They travel to other people’s country; they hustle. So, my father was a translator in some diamond offices, first in Guinea – that’s why I went to Guinea – and then in the Congo and so on. So, when those guys came back home, either from France or other places, I used to admire them a lot. So, I said maybe I’ll be like these guys. But I outgrew it. I really don’t see another alternative for me, except to write.

L: Why are you drawn to fiction?

D: Well first because in essays and theories, you are world-making, you’re trying to make the world. You’re trying to explain the world to people, and you are also obeying – at least in my case – when you have to write an essay for certain magazines. Just by agreeing, you are entering into the framing of what kind of essay they expect from you whereas with fiction, you just do what you want to do, and just get lost in it. And once you do the first page, you’re not in control anymore. The writing begins to control you, and it’s only later that you can come and fix it, put some coherence in it…

L: Do you have any piece of advice for young directors trying to find the kind of stories they want to tell?

D: I think my advice is, just write. Just sit down and write and something will happen. I think its arrogant but it’s very important to have confidence in yourself. When I left Mali. I was very confident, I was saying: ‘I wanna go to Paris, I know my Mallarmé as good or even better than any French person or my Baudelaire’. And when I went to France, racism was such that nobody was interested in me. So, I left France, but I didn’t lose the confidence. So, you gotta stay confident, you gotta believe in yourself, you gotta keep doing your work and I mean, in the world of creativity you’re not gonna find people who will – I mean it can happen – but it’s rare that people will love you right away for your writing. It takes time to do it. Keep doing it. Be confident. Your confidence is important. Is it a contradiction you think? Being confidant, and being humble?

L: I don’t think it is. I think confidence and humility are two different things. I always stick by the Socrates quote, ‘To be wise is to know nothing’ That to me is humility. Confidence is being able to perform, even when you fear.

D: So yeah, do your thing. Believe in yourself. And also learn to block people. You know, don’t let people stir you from your track. Do your thing. And be fair, be generous but when you’re doing your writing – well actually this is another contradiction – be selfish.

L: Who were some of your inspirations early on? And what are some films you would recommend for someone looking to get into African cinema?

D: Well first of all, when I was getting into film, there were no African filmmakers within my scope. Today it’s different because we have tons of African filmmakers, even Nollywood films are wonderful. I’d say it was maybe Blaxploitation movies…There were black filmmakers in this country that made films like Shaft (1971), Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) or Super Fly (1972). Hollywood was, according to many historians of cinema was going bankrupt, so it’s been said that blaxploitation movies saved it, and gave it a little push when they let black filmmakers make these action movies. They were very macho. It’s Harlem and it’s a lot of good music by Isaac Hayes, by Curtis Mayfield… Funk music was in style… Blaxploitation was a major genre for me. But to be honest with you, I was also watching B-movies of Hollywood; Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson… Gangster films like every other boy, and the jazz music in those films… Actually, it’s music that influenced me more than movies. But moral of my story is…I saw a lot of films.

L: Now that you mention Nollywood. It’s now grown into this huge industry, plenty of amazing directors are coming out of Africa. It’s amazing to see the direction it’s going. What do you think about its voice in this day and age?

D: Nollywood was actually an eye-opener. In 2006, I became curious about it. So, I went to Ghana – I was lucky again because NYU asked me and another person to go to Ghana and open the NYU campus there: NYU Accra – and the two years I spent there, I watched a Nollywood film or at least two or three or four every single day.

L: Every day?

D: Every day. And there was this movie channel called M-Net from South Africa, so they bought all these Nollywood films… I wrote about this in my book, New forms of aesthetics and politics  (2010) because Nollywood was so ridiculous! Yet as a film professor I thought: ‘This is what they did at the beginning of Hollywood.’ Sometimes they don’t know where they place the camera. Or they don’t care. Somebody will come from the rural area with his wife and then because of the city he dumps his wife and finds a noble woman and then that woman will betray him and he reunites with his original wife and they do sacrifice and then you will see a doorman structurally in all the movies and then the doorman sees everything and at the end…I mean you see the first shot, you know what’s going to happen, but you are obsessed with it. So, I thought film language and I said: ‘These people are good’ The camera was very bad, they didn’t have any grammar or cared about what Hollywood was doing but because they were doing some format that resembled the reality of Africans, everybody was watching. It was so crazy but so fascinating. For two years, I’d watch a movie every single day. I would teach, come home, and everybody knew what I was going to do. I’d just go sit, have my wine, and watch Nollywood movies. So yeah, these films were very interesting in that sense. If you want to become a filmmaker you have to watch lots of films, beyond taking film classes. Of course, they can tell you about the grammar and film language and sure that’s useful, but most importantly, watch films.