Editorial

« In which nostalgia
can I find my childhood
or on which cheek?
Who sang the monsters
against my sleep?
Me, the sea at arm’s length,
what madness! »
Tchikaya U Tam’si (Marines)

Let’s makes no mistake as we commemorate the abolition of slavery: the question of memory is not resolved simply by recalling souvenirs. The evocation of violence – that of both the slave trade and of the more contemporary conflicts – arrests and unsettles. « He is afraid that it happens again elsewhere, here, now, it is happening again« . This voice-over in Asientos (François Woukoache, Cameroon 1995), which both observes and is fearful of this century which tears itself apart, resounds long after the end of the film. It echoes the disgust and despair felt before the violence of the world, before the weight of time which erases traces without healing wounds, before the terrible falterings of History…
The film encounters an old man on the beach: « I am dead and you were not born, you want to visit, or see, go, look: you will see the sea, the sand… » The camera tracks along the Gorée walls, capturing the old man’s skin, his gaze. « I do not exist any more, do something for me, remember« . The process of memory is not a duty, it is a necessity. « For centuries, my brothers, your ancestors, have been crying and nobody has heard. » The Rwandan corpses are shovelled by a bulldozer… « You who have read so many books, who have compared so many figures, you who have retraced the paths of the slave ships, you still don’t know why the sea doesn’t reject its corpses« . Why go delving into the past? Thirty years ago exactly, people on the ’68 barricades chanted: « Down with the past ». One dominant trend in the cinemas of Africa is to teach us the contrary, they who incessantly interrogate memory… Is it not because they know how to root out substance to vivify the present, to imagine the future in the past? As the griots say, the present emanates from the past. Whilst the cinema of a Godard asks how?, these films strive to ask why? The why of a personal memory, a memory from the inside, not a History, but the histories of those who are in the making, pieced together again, recomposed, represented, the histories of each and everyone, of all the excluded, of the oppressed, of those peoples we dare to say haven’t got a History because they have not written their culture, and because they were colonized after being the object of a despicable commerce.
If, after 500 years of oppression, collective memory is lacking, preventing us from thinking in terms of gaining consciousness and of revolution, personal memory is becoming more important, deeper, bursting forth in all directions. « While there is a plurality of black movements« , Haïle Gerima said, « each filmmaker is a movement in him/herself« . Each filmmaker explores his/her memory, not a psychological memory of recollections, but a truly corporal memory, « the people of my arteries », as Chahine put it. This personal memory has nothing to do with the narcissistic introversion so often detectable in Western artistic expression: the memory of the self addresses the crisis of the group, the memory of an oppressed people addresses the memory of the world. Césaire’s words remain as compelling as ever: « Who and what are we? Admirable question« . We need to go and delve into our origin, our filiation. David Achkar, who died too soon in January 98, just before he began shooting his first feature in Conakry, directly addressed his father in Allah Tantou, explaining to him, even, what he could not have known in the cell he would never leave… Holding a dialogue with one’s origin, seeking in it that which enables us to resist the barbaric, that which enables us to refocus on the human and to face the steam roller of too many images, of the wretchedness of images of Africa, of the trade in sensational images which end up banalizing the horror. These tales of resistance are about a resourcing, as it always boils back down to that: these tales, which are very often the tales of women, are the histories of the struggles for freedom, of the affirmation of the self, of belonging to humanity. They tell us that hope is permitted. They whisper that dignity feeds off memory, and vice-versa. And that in order to digest the things others have done to the self, self-representation is vital. The images are useful, on the condition that we take our time.
The time: to accept the silence. To accept that the final shot of Asientos last over six minutes, which is nothing compared to the duration of the slave trade. To accept the silence, as it paves the way for being able to listen to the word, that word which allows us to contemplate the world. That of Fad’jal (Safi Faye, 1979), which is subtitled « Grandfather tells ». That of Yaaba (Grandmother, Idrissa Ouedraogo, 1989), on whose shoot the great Djibril Diop Mambety made Parlons grand-mère, in which, in guise of a dialogue, he repeats, chant-like, the words that sum up my argument: « Grandmother will avenge the child we have brought to its knees! » The problem for the filmmaker is to make this word a sign of refusal, a foreign language within the dominant language. To go rummaging beneath the myth to root out a lived present, rather than to pin it down as the colonizer did. The same colonizer who discovers them today, and who refuses them outright, systematically condemning the films as old-fashioned and academic as soon as they are timeless… Let us recall Deleuze again: « Fabrication is not an impersonal myth, but is not a personal fiction either: it is a word in action, an act of word through which the character incessantly crosses the frontier which separated his private business from the political, and itself produces collective utterances » (L’image-temps, Edits. de Minuit).
In this respect, Ceddo (Ousmane Sembène, 1977) is a model: before the forced Islamization in the eighteenth century, the ceddo, the people who refused dogma, affirm a word of resistance. The oratory sparring is thus a far cry from the verbose exchange the colonialists took it to be, seeing it as only time-wasting palaver: it is a memory, and gives coherence to the ceddo as a people; it forges a future. Recognizing the subjugation of her people, the princess kills the imam with tears in her eyes. Freeze frame: it is this image of her we have chosen to illustrate this dossier.