negash - politics and facets of identity, changing lenses in gaston kabore's cinema

8/11/2019 Negash - Politics and Facets of Identity, Changing Lenses in Gaston Kabore's Cinema

1/19

Social Identities, Volume 6, Number 3, 2000

Politics and Facets of Identity:Changing Lenses in Gaston Kabores Cinema 1

GIRMA NEGASHUniversity of South Carolina at Aiken

ABSTRACT: In spite of the resurgence of interest in the re-examination of the conceptof identity, the shaping of multiple identities can bene t from interdisciplinaryscholarly efforts and artistic insights. Based on a diagnostic political reading of cinematic text and an interview with the artist, this article draws some conclusions onthe shaping of multiple identities. Following a conceptual scheme of characteristiclocations of identity in a postcolonial setting, the study identi es four political formsof identity the global, the cultural, the ideological/political and the individual. Thosedifferent facets are con gured through ideological and discourse analyses of threecinematic texts and the declared intentions of Burkinabe lmmaker Gaston Kabore.

Strangely the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in whichunderstanding and af nity founder.

Julia Kristeva (1991)

I think that once you have understood a number of things, it is necessaryto try to retrieve your roots, without falling into the cliche of authentic-

ity and going back to the sources. Its not that, but its a real journey anda kind of reappropriation of oneself.Gaston Kabore (1994)

Introduction

In Buud Yam, the lm by Burkina Fasos Gaston Kabore, the hero Wend Kuuni,is repeatedly depicted as an intruding foreigner. He is falsely accused of beingone with the evil eye, a horse thief, and a rapist. His foreignness, whichmakes him a permanent suspect, is a persistent theme that challenges ourunderstanding of difference and the identity of individuals and collectivities. 2

Buud Yam, as Kabores earlier Wend Kuuni and Zan Boko, has won accoladesprimarily for its aesthetic and ethnographic sensibilities about the images of rural Africa. More than that, however, his lms provide us with the oppor-tunity to unravel the ambiguities involved in locating identity. 3 A politicalreading of Kabores lms enables us to come to terms with a number of dif cult questions about representation, identity, and agency. Do Kabores

lms speak for others or are they simply portrayals of certain AfricanISSN 1350-4630 print/ISSN 1363-0296 online/00/030285-19 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd


2/19


3/19


4/19

288 Girma Negash

Kwasi Weridu, who makes such a case, concludes: when we cannot as yetspeak of actual universals we can at least anticipate potential universals(Weridu, 1995, p. 9). Julia Kristeva advances another intriguing idea of univer-salism or cosmopolitanism. Oddly enough, her notion of a new sort of cosmopolitanism arises from the recognition of estrangement and alienationwithin us. Through the reconciliation with our estranged selves, in otherwords, we will be able to transcend bonds and boundaries. As she puts it socogently:

The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises,and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners,unamenable to bonds and communities. (Kristeva, 1991, p. 1)

One other approach of perceiving a global identity is through the recognitionof moral universalism that is best articulated by Immanuel Kant. He imaginedthe achievement of a universal civil society and formulated, as Kristeva puts it,the internationalist spirit of the Enlightenment in political, legal, and philo-sophical terms (Krisetva, 1991, p. 170). Closely associated with the develop-ment of such universalism is the advance of capitalism and modernisation incultures and traditions. Thus, identi cation with the global is part of theglobalisation process which is driven by the nature of the global economy.Simon During best describes the impact of globalisation upon cultural agents:

So the question is less, are cultures converging under globalisation?,than under what structures and pressures are cultural agents all aroundthe world making choices what to communicate or export, what toimport and graft, when to shift cross-border allegiances and targetmarkets/audiences, and when to reshuf e their own cultural repertoireto exploit, bolster, shrink or transform their traditions and heritages?.(During, 1998, p. 33)

The second location of identity is at the cultural level in which the artist, in thiscase Kabore, describes through webs of narrative the distinctiveness of thelocales and lives of his people, making their stories intelligible to cinematicaudiences everywhere. Identity is thus achieved discursively, as a byproduct of narrative (Gergen, 1997, p. 9). This social constructionist approach to culturalidentity accommodates the mode of narrative the lmmaker adopts, his inter-vention as a cultural agent, and the manner in which he chooses to de ne theAfrican past and the present. The most noted aspect of Kabores work is hisappropriation of cinema for the tradition of oral and visual culture (Goldfarb,1995, p. 18). Goldfarb is referring to Wend Kuuni, but he could have easilyextended that observation to Zan Boko and Buud Yam, both of which employoral narrative techniques. Although the appreciation of auteurship is out of fashion, it would be ludicrous to ignore the agency of the artist, even when ourreading of meaning is based on the cinematic text. While auteurship tradition-ally denoted the stamp of personality and artistic style on a lm, in the case of African cinema auteurship may also be de ned by low budget lming. AsKabore recently pointed out in an interview, lmmakers often nd themselves

working alone.9

Also, the artists role in his social milieu and his interpretation


5/19

Politics and Facets of Identity: Changing Lenses in Gaston Kabores Cinema 289

of the realities of his time and place become part of the matrix of the culturalidentity, closely related to the ideological and political layer of identitymake-up.

The ideological/political location of identity is made up of the subjectivitiesand identi cations created under postcolonial and present conditions. Theconcerns and commitments of the lmmaker are ideologically inscribed in thecinematic texts providing understanding and mediating meaning. The artistalso happens to be the product of his culture, class, and gender background,and as such, in uences the representation of his images. This is all the moreimportant when we accept and apply auteurship to an African lmmaker suchas Gaston Kabore.

It is not far down the road to move from the ideological/political location

to that of personal identity. How do we de ne the personal self as opposedto the political self? Once again, the social constructionist approach is instruc-tive. The narrative or webs of stories bestow identity on the individual. AsGergen explains:

To paraphrase Wittgenstein, the limits of our narrative tradition serve asthe limits of our identity. In this context it is useful to consider theprocess of personal memory ones means of identifying oneself through the reports of personal history. (Gergen, 1997, pp. 910)

In order to draw some conclusions on the shaping of identities I will employa multiperspectival approach to lm reading, as Douglas Kellner suggests. 10

Such a methodological strategy as one would cut facets into a diamond todraw out its brilliance renders a combination of perspectival readings thatmay yield insights into the nexus between the cinematic works and theformation of complex ideas such as identities.

Wend Kuuni : Subaltern Voices and Artistic Subversion

The rst lm, Wend Kuuni (1982), is the story of a young boy with a strangedestiny who loses one family and nds another. The lm opens with a scenein a hut where a mother is kneeling over her half-asleep son, crying. We soondiscover that her husband, who is a hunter, has been missing for some thirteenmonths and presumed to be dead. By custom she is expected to marry againwithout delay. Consequently in order to avoid a forced marriage she choosesto run away with her son. The next sequence of shots shows a trader whodiscovers the boy in the bush and takes him to the next village for shelter untilhis parents claim him. The villagers discover that he is mute, and when theyrealise nobody is coming after him, they entrust him to a family who eventu-ally adopts him. The new parents give him a name Wend Kuuni, meaningthe Gift of God. They also have a daughter of the same age, Poghneere. Eventhough they have separate duties she, helping her mother with domesticchores, while he tends cattle with his father sisterly and brotherly affectiongrow between the two children. The mystery of Wend Kuuni is resolved when

one day, he stumbles into the body of a neighbour hanging from a tree. He is


6/19

290 Girma Negash

so traumatised by the event that he utters his rst word and proceeds to tellhis own story.

Wend Kuuni, like the two other lms by Gaston Kabore to be analysed here,is scripted in Mossi, the language most widely used in Burkina Faso. It alsooffers a glance at Mossi culture before the arrival of the Europeans. The natureand order of things are depicted in calculated structural rhythm and objectivecamera point of view, establishing relationships between husband and wife,mother and daughter in the domestic scenes; and public exchanges between thechief and elders, traders and buyers and villagers at an open court. Marie-Madeleine Chirol (1995) determines three types of scenes in Wend Kuuni:domestic scenes, scenes of exchanges and scenes in the bush; the scenes of exchange being an intermediary between the domestic scenes and the space

of the bush. She points out that the scenes of exchange act as a contretempscompared with the well-balanced organisation of the domestic scenes. 11

Order and moral authority are also depicted as part of the social reality behind which the story unfolds. After the trader discovers Wend Kuuni, theprocess of nding parents to adopt him becomes an elaborate system of investigation, consultation and decision-making. The village chief and counsel-lors shoulder the responsibility to live up to the communitarian value of beingtheir brothers keepers. A similar obligation to ones neighbour, however, failswhen a man intercedes to save a marriage in which a wife is estranged as theresult of her husbands impotence.

The seeming incongruities in the lives of ordinary villagers and the ques-tioning of moral authority may be signs of deeper contradictions in a societywhich, at the time and place depicted in the lm, make Mossi life appear farfrom idyllic. Thus Kabores Wend Kuuni is not a retreat to the past nor is it amedium of opposition to the colonial. His counter-imaging with ethnographicdetails is not an ideological contestation but a subversive commentary on thesocial realities of a community in the past. 12 Two incidents illustrate this point.

Wend Kuunis mother is told at the opening scene that she will have to remarryas dictated by custom. The loss of her husband is perceived as a misfortune not brought about by destiny but by an evil source. The villagers accuse her of being a witch. The ugly scene of her accusers torching her hut to drive heraway, manifests an oppressive act, just as her escape denotes liberation. By thesame token, the dramatic recovery of voice by Wend Kuuni, in a deconstructivere ection, suggests a recovery of autonomy and identity freed from hiscondition of being narrated by the Other (Chirol, 1995, pp. 5354). An ideologi-cal reading of the recovery of voice would take into account the circumstancesof Wend Kuunis utterance and the audience involved. It is signi cant thatwhen Kuuni is excitedly telling his foster parents about the hanged man he haddiscovered in the bush, they do not seem to notice his recovery of speech only his sister Poghneere does. It is also to his sister that he tells his own story.Thus the liberating process is completed in the complicit knowledge of the twochildren.

An ideological reading of Wend Kuuni also reveals Kabores concerns for anhonest depiction of the social realities of the land of his ancestors and his way

of coming to terms with his roots in a search for authenticity. Aside from this


7/19


ideological interpretation, it is also important to appreciate the artists aestheticstrategy in the type of cinematic language and form he employs self-consciously. The most salient aspects of the critiques of Kabores work are onhis choice of using oral narrative techniques to recount the story of WendKuuni, modifying both Western cinematic language and oral narrative to suithis aesthetic agenda. As Goldfarb puts it:

This appropriation of the visual technology of western culture forAfrican pedagogical tradition subverts its implementation within thewestern colonial project. The cinema remains a pedagogical medium, but its narrow construction as an emblem of western culture is chal-lenged. In effect, Kabore constructs an alternative and non-western

(pre)history for the cinema. (Goldfarb, 1997, pp. 1920)What makes the lm akin to oral literature is the narrative elements of a taleand the use of an off-camera narrator. Yet Manthia Diawara argues that thelm achieves closure in a different ideological order than the oral tradition

might have (Diawara, 1987, p. 39). Oral tradition is employed by Kabore,according to Diawara

less to achieve a traditional/nostalgic closure and more to enumerate a

new narrative posing the conditions of resistance to traditional orderand the creation of a new one. (p. 44)

Thus, African directors like Kabore are distinguished from the traditional griotswhose narratives are concerned with disorder and the restoration of traditionalorder. 14

A neostructuralist reading of the cinematic text of Wend Kuuni is instructivein that it situates the lm in its historical, artistic and cultural context, but itfalls short of an expanded ideological criticism. While a political reading of Wend Kuuni cannot ignore the binary oppositions of voicelessness to voice, oldorder to new order, and orality to narrativity, the artistic and pedagogicalintervention by the lmmaker makes up for the rest of the cinematic discourse.

In his cinematic approach, Kabore manipulates time and space to re ectAfrican realities. Aside from wide-angle shots framing scenes of daily activities,long takes, and sparse editing, cinematic time is modi ed by sociological timein Kabores lms. This is not unlike Teshome Gabriels earlier observation that

Third World lms grow from folk tradition where communication is aslow-paced phenomenon and time is not rushed but has its own pace.(Gabriel, 1985, pp. 8385)

Kabore says he uses sociological time or real time in documentary fashion asa means of entering the fundamental reality of what people have experiencedsocially (Kabore, 1994). The ethnographic descriptions of African greetings andinterpersonal communication are part of his aesthetic considerations. Whetherhis attention to such details is consciously posited against Western cinematic

images of Africa, or set merely as backdrops for other ideologically relevant


8/19

292 Girma Negash

themes, it is hard to say. Francoise Pfaff for one concludes that Kabores lms(along with those of his compatriot, Ouedraogo)

were not made with speci c ethnographic intentions, yet their authors

concern to present accurate facets of their society made these worksvaluable tools for exploring components of Burkanibe culture, especiallyrural lifestyles. (Pfaff, 1996, p. 237)

Wend Kuuni gives voice to the marginalised such as women, children and thoseostracised by archaic customs and traditions and as such is distinctive as anevocative tale of empowerment. This ideological strategy is complemented bya subversive use of cinematic language that marries Western convention withAfrican narrative forms.

Zan Boko : Social Realism and De ning the Political Self

In the second lm Zan Boko, Kabore tells a dramatic story about the encroach-ment of modernisation on traditional life. A village man, Tinga Yerbanga, is being forced off the land of his ancestors by urban expansion, at the same timea wealthy urbanite wants to buy him off in order to build a swimming pool.Consequently a young journalist takes up Tingas cause by trying to expose theinjustice publicly on television, until his televisual expose is literally unplugged by the state censors. Zan Boko represents a bold criticism of the exclusion of rural people and state censorship as well as an ideological position thatvalorises African traditions. This representation is portrayed through imagesof village order contrasted with intrusions of modernity. Kabores socialcriticism is accentuated by his choice of cinematic language and discourse.

During most of the rst half of Zan Boko, Kabore depicts traditional Africanvillage life in ethnographic detail as it carries on unsuspectingly in the face of the new urban encroachment. The conscious use of camera and sociological

time articulates how things were, as in Wend Kuuni, but also how those thingsare falling apart. The lm juxtaposes point-of-view camera angles to gainspectators sympathetic identi cation with the elders. Tingas father admon-ishes his son to pay attention to his wife, who is in labour, reminding him thathe should seek the advice of the elders and the midwives. In the same manner,several sequences of shots establish Tingas wife as dutiful, as she maintains arespectful distance from her troubled husband. These images are comple-mented with dialogues that predictably re ect situational reactions from indi-vidual characters assuming traditional roles. When the father reminds his sonthat he should worry about his wife, the son replies, I know father. I have faithin the ancestors. One of his friends consoles him: Dont worry about her(wife), just trust the midwives and the elders. Such dialogues and imagesallude to how the integrity and the moral authority of the ancestors, traditionalleaders, and healers have remained intact prior to the intrusion of urban sprawlinto Tingas village.

The audience is drawn into complicity with Tinga who falls victim to thesurreptitious invasion of his homestead. Crosscutting brings to relief

the ideological collision between the two.15

Engineers from the city arrive to


9/19


survey the land, to conduct a census, and plan new constructions. A well-to-doneighbour sends his guard to coax Tinga into selling his land. Sequences of shots expose bulldozers ploughing the earth. A villager counsels Tinga to enrolhis children in the newly opened school. Another neighbour has succumbed tothe temptation of selling part of his land to buy a cart and a donkey. Chalkednumbers appear on the walls of the huts following the census. Modernity hastaken over and Tingas homestead has been circumscribed. Two cinematicimages stand out in this process of intrusion. The chief engineer and thesurveyors who are introduced unexpectedly, are made to look in attire andlanguage (they speak French) more like European adventurers in colonialAfrica than members of the same society. The chalked numbers on the huts areas equally alien and extraneous as the engineers. In a scene in which Tinga is

hosting his neighbours for dinner, one of them remarks: After a meal like thisI would have liked to sleep but these white numbers haunt our walls and chaseour sleep away. The chalked numbers become symbolic purveyors of things tocome as rationality rattles the ghosts of the ancestors, shakes up faith and trustin the traditional order, and ironically brings uncertainty into the lives of thevillagers. 16

In the second half of the lm, the villagers express marked concern abouttheir fate and that of their village. In one scene a villager asks pensively: whocan say what tomorrow will hold? His neighbour replies: I am apprehensive.The dialogues openly express the beginning of the end of their village life.Towards the conclusion of the lm an obituary of village life is sung by a griotat the village bar:

Ours is a sad storyWhat has become of us?Our land is deadKilled by the big cityOur ancestors are without a homeThe monster has triumphed

Kabores intent in Zan Boko is not so much to recount the story of thedisappearance of an idyllic village life but to condemn the new brazen valueswhile valorising some of the old. Traditional predictability is replaced by newuncertainties. A single shot of Tingas father sitting pensively in front of a hutchalk-marked with the number 327 juxtaposes contradicting images. The com-munitarian language of managing together, giving each other a hand,contrasts with a neighbours confession of selling half of his land that de es thetaboo of selling or exchanging communal land. The new value of privateproperty is taking hold. Even the reciprocity value of gift exchange is ques-tioned. When Tingas young son offers his toy car to the rich boy next door, the boys response is If I cant buy it I wont take it. These contradictions of valuesgo beyond mere description as the contrast between the rst half of the lmand the second is ideologically evident.

The title of the lm, Zan Boko, and its symbolic use in the lm, is the mostdirect commentary on the question of cultural identity, however. Zan Boko

(meaning literally where the placenta is buried) refers to the communal


10/19

294 Girma Negash

homestead of Tinga which is being contested in this lm. When Tinga lamentsthat he and the rest of the villagers are being treated like strangers on the landof our ancestors, and the griot sings our ancestors are without a home, onereads signs of alienation from a particular place of birth. Attachment to landcan also be associated with the earth in which the placenta is customarily buried in Africa (Negash, 1982, pp. 28192). 17 Closely associated with this senseof primordial attachment is the belief that land is considered ancestral extending the right of birth to the right of inheritance. The traditional Africanreligious belief of the closeness of the ancestors to the elders, and the spirits of the recently dead to the living, reinforces this essentialist and foundationalmyth. Critical attention to Zan Boko has so far concentrated on this social realistcriticism of modernisation, the repression of dissent by the state, and the

exclusion of the peasantry by the privileged classes (see Manthia Diawara,1992, and Dickson Eyoh, 1998). However, a political reading of Zan Boko canthrow light on the meaning of identity as perceived by the lmmaker. Kaboreengages in social criticism on one hand, and the valorisation of traditionalvalues on the other. In so doing, he acts as a witness to the disappearances of village life, and along with that, the collective memory of a people (interview,1994). To what extent then does Kabores art inform our understanding of theshared meaning of identity in the African setting?

The relevance of the notion of identity can be evaluated in the imaginarycommunities created by the artist, as well as his identi cation with and hisperceived role in those communities. Beyond the vagaries of modernisation,class and state oppressions, Zan Boko re ects the artists immediate concernssuch as the rural-urban gap, the disappearance of village life, the preservationof the collective memory of a people, to all of which he says he is a witness.It is these identi cations, both conscious and unconscious, with his imaginedcommunity that make up his political self. As Kabore puts it in his own words:

You have to nd a way of reconnecting with who you are, takingeverything into consideration The problem is that there is a sort of competition between the source of your so-called modern education andall this heritage that you often lose touch with. When you have lived inthe town, you no longer possess the initiation rites, which were a meansof enabling you to comprehend the universe through the canons and theframe of reference of your society. You dont have that. So you are oftenoating between two universes completely different and very often,

somewhere, you are lacking in identity. (interview, 1994)

Buud Yam : Universalism and Transcending Estrangement

Buud Yam (1997), Kabores most recent lm, is a sequel to Wend Kuuni and afurther exploration of identity and self-discovery. When the story picks upsome 12 years later, Wend Kuuni is a strong young man living in a lovingenvironment with his adopted parents and sister, Poghneere. As in WendKuuni, Kabore begins Buud Yam with studied establishing shots of Wend Kuuni

showing off his equestrian skills while Poghneere and her girlfriend are


11/19


looking on admiringly, of children at play, and of mothers carrying outdomestic tasks, painting a cinematic fresco of a serene village life. Underneaththis virtual harmony, however, fault lines appear in the community, whichKabore had already situated in Wend Kuuni.

The event that sent Wend Kuunis mother to her death and his exile ispicked up in Buud Yam, where Wend Kuuni is still held with suspicion anddistrust. Young men in the village are gossiping about him. Then his sisterPoghneere has an ominous dream which she relates to him:

I had one of those dreams last night! A long one long and strange. Iwas afraid for you, and for me. That snake That young man whodisappears like a ghost, the trip you make that seems endless, that bottomless hole in which I fall and that man whos following you

Some of those visions turn into reality. One of Wend Kuunis friends in thevillage dies after being bitten by a snake. Poghneere succumbs to a mysteriousillness. Consequently Wendi Kuuni has to leave on a long journey to nd ahealer to cure his sister.

The arduous trek on horseback in search of the healer constitutes the bulkof the story line and serves as a prop to determine the spatial, temporal, andsupernatural dimensions of the narrative. Spatially the journey takes himthrough forests, savannah grasslands and desert. He comes across severalmarket places, which, in Africa, are crossroads between different peoples andlandscapes. In the desert, traders in a caravan, who speak a different language,rescue him. Wend Kuunis journey takes him from the village to the frontierand back, de ning the ethnography of Burkinabe locality.

The banishing of his mother and her eventual death, the loss and recoveryof his voice, and his childhood intimacy with his adopted sister are retold inskilfully edited ashbacks. After the rescue by the desert traders, his identityis con rmed in a dramatic encounter with the very same trader who discov-

ered him as a child after his mothers death in the forest (in Wend Kuuni). Thetrader becomes a vital link to Wend Kuunis past by setting him on the rightcourse to nd the healer in Buud Yam.

While the spatial and the temporal dimensions are physically limited, thethird aspect of the journey de es time and space. It is magical and spiritual,depicted in other-worldly voice-overs, ashbacks and juxtapositions of images.Wend Kuunis trek brings him to encounter tokens of goodness and evil. Anold woman gives him shelter for the night, but he has to attend to her becauseshe is sick; he keeps the re burning to keep her warm through the night. Hiscare earns him her gratitude, her blessings, and a gift of yarn that will latersave his life. The spirit of his sister guards over him throughout the travel. Inher dreams she seems to know exactly where he is.

At one point, he is able to avoid the temptations of the devil (in the formof a beautiful woman at a river crossing) thanks to a forewarning and hissisters omnipresence. 18 Altogether, the audience can perceive that certainguardian spirits have protected Wend Kuuni at every step of the trek.

There is yet another transcendal level of reading of Buud Yam which goes

beyond the spatio-temporal and spiritual dimensions discussed so far. The


12/19

296 Girma Negash

journey represents a larger quest for truth seeking an allegorical pilgrimage.In this case, Wend Kuunis epic travel and search is for self-discovery. 19 Hissubjectivity is af rmed not only by his sister who believes in him, even whenhe is branded as an outsider and an Other, but also by the sick old woman andthe trader who saved him when he was a boy. The healer whom Wend Kuunimanages to bring back to the village, heals not only his sister but extends hishealing hands to all the villagers, bringing the community together once again.The healers blessing is complemented by the repentance of those who sus-pected him of having the evil eye. Intolerance is in retreat even if WendKuunis self-discovery is not quite complete at the end of Buud Yam, when hestill wonders about the whereabouts of his father who never returned fromhunting when he was a child.

If audiences, even those far removed from Burkina Faso, see the universal-ity of communal bond, the power of healing, the ugliness of bigotry andestrangement from ones community in the images of Buud Yam, theiridenti cations with the universal are based on many grounds. Kabore wants toreach audiences around the world not because he prefers to universaliseAfrican cinema but because he believes in the universals that are inscribed inhis lms of African speci city. In a recent interview with Jude G. Akudinobi,Kabore asserts:

universalism is an illusion invented by Hollywood, to subdue thecinematic expressions of the rest of the world. As long as you speak tothe human condition, to fear, illusions, dreams, you will be understood by audiences from the South Pole to North. So, we must continue toplant this tree of speci city. (Akudinobi 1999, p. 36)

Recognising differences and then transcending them may be philosophi-cally understood, but Julia Kristevas notion of nding the foreign within usis instructive in recognising the universals in Buud Yam even when the

peculiarities are inscribed contextually in an African setting.

Postcolonial Resistance and Multiple Identities

These three cinematic works can be regarded, in themes and content, aspostcolonial nationalist responses to the contested idea of the African past. 20 Inthe traditional African village depicted in Wend Kuuni and the rural Africanscircumscribed by the encroaching of urbanisation in Zan Boko, identity isaf rmed by the unquestioned assumption that the individual is part of acommunal whole bound by kinship and custom. On the surface Wend Kuunire ects the individuals place in a moral and social order. As in other artisticworks in postcolonial societies, the concept of the individual or personal selfis undermined. The rst half of Zan Boko also seems to suggest that there is noseparation between the social identi cation factor and the self. A closer look atKabores works, however, reveals the beginning of a breakdown in identityfactors. In Wend Kuuni, the mothers escape from patriarchal oppression andthe complicity between the children, Wend Kunni and his adopted sister, in

the face of the deafness of their parents are instructive of this incipient


13/19


individualism. Similarly, in Zan Boko the irreversible march of modernisation,as exempli ed by the selling of the ancestral land, is an attack on the oldidenti cation factors of ancestral (read territorial) and communal (read ethnic)land. Furthermore, a reading of these two lms can be seen as a projection of the lmmakers individual search for identity.

Gaston Kabore, like many other postcolonial artists and intellectuals, hasreacted to the past in order to de ne the present. He responds to a recon-structed past (as he himself becomes complicit with that construction) asgenerations of intellectuals in Africa have done. African artists used theirtalents to recreate communities to identify with. This is evident in the politicalnature of their work and the representational techniques they adopted. WhatAli Mazrui observed about the African writer applies to Gaston Kabore as well:

The matters that affected the community assumed extra importance tothe artist. And so the modern pen responding to an ancestral urgeanalysed social forces rather than personal, individual concerns.(Mazrui, 1982, p. 8)

Thus Kabores works re ect this concern for the community in the themeshe highlights colonial impact, alienation from the ancestral land,modernisation, oppressive traditions and the like.

Kabores ideological position and his social criticism locates the artists rolein society as he broadly identi es with the political man shaped by historicalcircumstances and existential choices. The political man can be both anAfrican traditionalist and a critic of both present and past social conditions. Itwill be fruitful to look into both the conscious and the unconscious dimensionsof the artists creativity by recognising the former in his activism and the latterin the collective unconscious. 21 The political self gives voice to the powerless,to those subject to patriarchal domination in Wend Kuuni, and to the excludedrural people in Zan Boko. At the same time his identi cation with the political

in uences the substance and content of his work, the form and techniques of his art, as well as his potential audience. Thus, Kabore reminds us of the urgentresponsibilities of the lmmaker in Africa:

if African lmmakers dont play their role as consciousness awakeners(sic), maybe tomorrow Africa will be a culturally condemned continent,with citizens who bodily live in Africa but are mentally displaced because they will have been showered with images conceived andthought by other people. (Givanni and Bakari, 2000, p. 188)

In Wend Kuuni and Zan Boko, Kabore employs the imaginative use of abstrac-tion and recreation. In his ctional return he creates images and narrativesinformed by folklore, customs and memories. Zan Boko is an elaboration of anallegory representing the ties to ancestral land (Boehmer, 1995, pp. 19499).Kabore uses oral tradition in Wend Kuuni not in search of authenticity but toful l his ideological agenda. He also modi es lm language (i.e. the use of documentary form and sociological time) for a purpose. Yet there is a hair-splitdistinction between the political man and the social man in the given and

expected roles Gaston Kabore lls.


14/19


15/19


loyalty to a collectivity. When Kabore claims that he uses his imagination tocommunicate to my people, this constructive element becomes transparent. Bythe same token what and how to communicate to his audience and critics couldalso demonstrate this type of subjectivity. In spite of the potential of massaudience for cinema in Burkina Faso, the distribution problem limits the extentto which Kabore will be in uenced or will react to how the majority (to whomhe refers as my people) de nes his works. This leaves in the main the elites,who are both the critics and audience, and the foreign audience as those whocould possibly de ne the contours of his artistic expression. Kabore does notproclaim a distinctly African cinema in form and content making hisidenti cation to his people, his work and audience politically dynamic. In arelatively stable Burkina Faso where he is not swept by political currents,

Kabores activism is in his role as critic and in advancing the cause of cinemain the receptive environments of the lm festivals of Ouagadougou and otherforums of the Third Cinema.

Gaston Kabore proclaims he is on a long journey of reappropriation of theself in the postcolonial conditions of his society and of his place in it. That journey is uncertain, although he points out the necessity of retrieving his ownroots. In what he considers to be his responsibility as a man towards your (his)own life and towards the life of others, he has a certain number of choices of relationships and identities corresponding to his vision of life and artisticsensibilities as represented in the three lms analysed here.

Girma Negash may be contacted at the Department of History, Political Science andPhilosophy, University of South Carolina-Aiken, 471 University Parkway, Aiken,S.C. 29801, USA, e-mail: [email protected].

Notes

1. I am grateful to Gaston Kabore who consented to be interviewed duringthe Seventh Regional Film Conference on African Cinema held at Loudun,France, 713 February 1994. My thanks also go to Sara Gueret for hertranscription of the interview in French and her helpful comments.

2. The quotation in the rst epigraph is from Julia Kristevas Strangers toOurselves (1991) in which she presents an intriguing examination of the self.After giving credit to generations of thought from early Stoicism toChristianity, from the Enlightenment to Kantian internationalism, Kristevaraises the rhetorical question Might not universality be our own foreign-ness? as an alternative examination of what we call universal. I adopt thisnovel conceptual prop to identify one of the locations of identity I discussin this paper.

3. Buud Yam (1997) received the Etalon de Yennega at FESPACO (thePan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou), the largest

festival on the African continent. It was also projected at Cannes in 1997


16/19

300 Girma Negash

(Quinzaine des Realisateurs). While Wend Kuuni (1982), Zan Boko (1988)and Buud Yam (1997) are the three lms treated in this paper he has alsodirected Rabi, Un arbre nomme karite, Nuit africaine, Tour du Faso and Madame Hado.

4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks distinction between Vertretung and Darstel-lung is instructive. She de nes Vertretung as stepping in someonesplace to tread in someones shoes. Representation here means speakingfor the desires and needs of somebody or some cause. It is a politicalrepresentation. Darstelllung , on the other hand, is re-presentation or por-trayal. Re-presenting or placing there is therefore either proxy or portrait,in Spivaks conception.

5. IRIS is a journal on lm theory and the relation of image to sound. It

devotes each issue to a different aspect of lm theory or history. IRIS no.18 (1995) was devoted to new discourses of African cinema.6. I am indebted to Jasper Goss for reinforcing my overall concern about the

depoliticisation of postcolonial discourse. Jasper Goss (1996) brings thisargument home by concluding that postcolonialism has brought forth acomplete and thorough reduction of discursive activity so that all socialand cultural forces are denuded of anything but self-referential context andare completely depoliticised (p. 7).

7. To summarise Douglas Kellner (1993), an ideology critique presumes thatlm is not an innocent entertainment but a political artifact tied to ideol-ogy, agenda and such; that you can read lm politically to decode what itcommunicates; and that it should be conceptualised as a contested terrainof ideas and culture. Discourse analysis is used here as Susan Hayward(1984) describes it. She takes lm as a language in and of itself in which,for example, a basic unit in lm is the image, and its functional role is thesame as that of speech acts, p. 277.

8. Shaun Gallagher maintains Concepts of Person, Self, Personal

Identity: Bibliography and texts, an on-line research source at:http://www.carnisius.edu/. The site includes on-line bibliographies andtexts on the subject from various disciplines.

9. It is the lack of resources in this case that forces the African lmmaker togo it alone. Kabore says, its true that African cinema has been, and willcontinue to be for very much longer, an author cinema (Speciale, 1997,pp. 611).

10. Douglas Kellner (1993) claims that a multiperspectival method will pro-vide an arsenal of weapons of critique, a full range of perspectives to focuson cultural artifacts, p 83.

11. Chirols reading in this particular case does not do justice to the overallintent of normality in which both balance and incongruity should be thenatural order of things, even in pre-colonial Africa.

12. This is in reference to Kabores statement, in an interview with FrancoisePfaff in Twenty- ve Black African Filmmakers, where he establishes the factthat he was not depicting an ideal African society.

13. Chirols analysis of the missing narrative is an excellent example of a

deconstructionist scholarship (Chirol, 1995, pp. 5354).


17/19


18/19


19/19


Pfaff, F. (1996) Africa from Within: the Films of Gaston Kabore and IdrissaOuedraogo as Anthropological Sources, in Imuri Bakari and Mbye B. Cham(eds) African Experiences of Cinema, London: British Film Institute.

(1988) Twenty-Five Black African Filmmakers: a Critical Study with Filmographyand Bibliography, Westport: CT: Greenwood Press.

Radhakrishnan, R. (1993) Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity,Special Issue: Post-Colonial Discourse, Callaloo 14 (4): 750.

Sherzer, D. (ed.) (1996) Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonial Perspectives from theFrench and Francophone Worlds, University of Texas Press.

Shohat, E. and R. Stam (1994) Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, London: Routledge.

Speciale, A. (1997) Memory, Nature and Chance, Ecrans dAfrique.

Spivak, G. C. (1990) Practical Politics of the Open End (interview) in ThePost-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, New York: Routledge.Tomaselli, K.G. (1995) Theoretical Perspectives on Cinema in Africa: Culture,

Identity and Diaspora, Visual Anthropology, (7): 297329.Turner, J.W. (1997) Continuity and Constraint: Reconstructing the Concept of

Tradition from a Paci c Perspective, The Contemporary Paci c, 9 (2): 345.Zachs, S.A. (1995) The Theoretical Construction of Cinema, Research in African

Literatures, 26 (3).

negash - politics and facets of identity, changing lenses in gaston kabore's cinema

Documents