Contemporary African Cinema by Barlet Olivier

Author:Barlet, Olivier [Barlet, Olivier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781628962703
Publisher: Michigan State University Press

CHAPTER 4

Memory and Reconciliation

There is no better homage

to all this past

—at the same time simple

and composed—than tenderness

the infinite tenderness

that aims to survive it.

—Léon-Gontran Damas, in the film Des Noirs et des hommes, by Amélie Brunet and Philippe Goma (France, 2010)

4.1. Forgive, Not Forget

Populations who have frequented the abyss do not boast that they are chosen. They do not believe they engender the power of modernities. They live the Relation, which they decipher as the forgotten abyss comes to them and as their memory is strengthened.

—Edouard Glissant, Poétique de la relation: Poétique III

4.1.1. The Vitality of the Past

Which memory

but that perforated by roads of fiery substance.

—William Souny, Sahan

“Yesterday is in the arms of tomorrow,” as Tchicaya U Tam’si poetically put it in Phalènes. The future stems from the past, just as the past bears the future. Memory is inscribed within this dialectic, which is declined in the present. But without images, the past is overpowering and doesn’t allow the future to be invented. “Cinema constructs memories”; citing Godard in Bye Bye Africa (0901), 1 Mahamat-Saleh Haroun reaffirms the essential function of cinema, namely, being the memory of a people from whom it has been stolen. “The more Africa falls into oblivion, the more we must recall it to the memory of the world” (9501). If the dream of a decolonized Africa present on the world stage is melting into the depths of the night, emerging from the darkness requires a reviving of memory and a reseizing of the original meaning of decolonization, as Achille Mbembe proposes. In Kuxa Kanema: The Birth of Cinema (Portugal, 2004), Margerida Cardoso revisits a dream of cinema. The people we see on the screen—the makers of independent Mozambique’s cinema—recognize that they were ideologues at the service of an idea, a conception, a party. And they are reproached for it today. But they accept responsibility for having believed in this. Opening with images of Samoro Machel’s speeches, the film concludes on the same images, having come full circle. This man was the incarnation of an idea—that of a country, but also that of a politically engaged cinema, at the service of the people. The nostalgia felt is not that of a lost ideological model, but of the end of a commitment, in today’s ambient sense of resignation: “Deprived today of its own image by a television that is not at all Godardian, people are forgetting their past and present. No one talks about dreams any more,” concludes the film (3049). If it is to restore a community that is on its feet, the task that faces memory is to turn the page of illusions and intolerance and to walk, as Fanon suggested, “all the time, night and day, in the company of men, all men.” 2

So what has become of this now-forgotten independence energy? That is the question that Monique Mbeka Phoba asks in Un rêve d’indépendance/To Dream of Independence (DRC, 1998). Mbeka Phoba addresses history, not by delving into the archives, but by taking up her

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