A Transcultural Characterization of Racial Freedom: Bush Mama and Touki Bouki
The works of Haile Gerima of Ethiopia and Djibril Diop Mambéty of Senegal are vindications of themselves and the racial climates from which they derive. Of all the elements that collide in the making of a film, their emphasis is on character—the character as a weapon, the individual as the greatest force against oppression, as the moniker of class subsistence and subversion. The eloquence of their renditions of identity comes completely from their own awakened consciousness, as artists at home or exiled but always aware of their significance in/of a culture not sufficiently equipped or revealed. Their authorial selves are made transcendent through the emphasis on empowered, independent women who go onward through the slow movement of water or the loud clash of gunfire, echoing and defending in the name of freedom. I will look specifically at the films Bush Mama and Touki Bouki, using the female protagonist as the vehicle en route toward self-ownership, disjunct from their male counterparts.
Part I: Haile Gerima
Haile Gerima moved from Ethiopia to the United States in 1967, at the age of twenty-one, where he eventually settled in Los Angeles and attended UCLA. He arrived there during a time of uprisings, in which mostly poor victims of police brutality responded with looting and uproar, [1] and this became reflected in his films. It was in the United States that he came to full racial consciousness, understanding a new humanism in himself and the lack of it in America and globally. He transitioned from theatre to film, seeing the latter as a more accessible conduit for change in its capacity for individuation and control. [2] In being denied access to screening for the unnerving, unbridled representation in his works (such as Sankofa’s look at slavery, a topic uncomfortable for most white distribution companies), he formed his own means of distribution; his “twenty-five-plus year as an independent filmmaker, producer, and distributor-owner of Mypheduh Films provides American film history and world cinema a fertile example of the limits of multinational capitalism and mainstream tastes.”[3] Gerima’s sense of self is so untouched and untainted a flavor as to provide completely new glances at the seemingly perennial race battle of this country.
His view of the character is essentially contingent upon his view of the black or African subject in a turbulent society: his approach is one that flows inside, out, resonating first on the personal and solipsistic level, and later expanding through the relations with the more brutal surroundings. He calls the collection of his characters a “military brigade with all their class stratification, created to serve my philosophical objectives.”[4] Just as his lack of acceptance in distributing arenas left him with a choice of being taken under a white man’s wing, or fending for himself, the world of his characters must battle between owning themselves and giving into the commands of a racialized, gendered, and class stratified society. But they always fend for themselves, because the strongest weapon to Gerima is vindication of one’s intrinsic and unconditioned consciousness, one that may be wrought with demoralization and destabilization from opposing forces, but that commands itself onward. The only way to respond to a society that stereotypes you into a suffocating, terrorizing mold is to shape yourself so far beyond it as to make your own mold. He says,
Storytellers always link and connect. To know yourself, you have to do many things, including reading, knowing the history of the planet, the world, where you place yourself in the people’s journey. How your people talk and laugh. What are things that make them sad, the different characters in your community?…Say something for yourself. ‘I want to vomit.’ In so doing, you vomit for a community that has to throw up…[5]
Image from Bush Mama (1975)
His ethics is predicated upon an empathy derived mostly from a self-education of culture, of being in the world as an African diasporic subject, reckoning both with his African roots—he aims to bring pieces of Ethiopia with him with each filmic endeavor—and the predicament of African American subjects. He says “to go on your own frustration, on your own dreams and fantasies, your own alienation and nightmares, and then you see if your voice finds the population that identifies with this state of confusion that you are in,”[6] because we are all colonized to some extent, and all confused to some extent.
Gerima’s 1975 film Bush Mama is in many ways an exploration of his character, as his speech in interviews shares distinctive substance with the film itself. His sense of urgency, his need to dispel, and his interminable emphasis of the self—wrought and formed by, always unwavering against society’s ills—peak through in the development of characters, their dialogue, and the strategic gaze of the camera. Since Dorothy is the protagonist, I will focus on her; amongst all the fervor of the film, its many unique voices and walks and looks, it is hers that consumes the frame most frequently and most acutely. She is the subject of most of the close-ups, and she is the victim to society we most feel, as she is both witness (she watches a man be gunned down on the street, and her own husband, T.C., go from a job application to a jail cell), and hero (she ceaselessly fights to get food for her daughter, to have the rights to her unborn child). It is her transformation that extends toward a reading of black American society, offering an awakening or enlightenment toward direct, resolute consciousness that acts before it contemplates.
That he was able to use cinéma vérité methods, such as the early scene in which white cops harass several black men on the street, [7] goes to show the authenticity in Gerima's gaze: inasmuch as he fictionalizes the characters, their sights, and their plights, it is always based in a reality always happening beyond the frame of the camera. He actually drew inspiration for Dorothy’s character from a woman he saw in Chicago, who was evicted from her home in the dead of winter, [8] only further stretching the reality behind the characterization. He as much draws from pre-lived encounters as he provides an understanding of those constantly encountered, or allows himself an openness toward the unexpected, unelected encounter. Trinh T. Minh-ha calls this “inter-realities,”[9] the way in which a filmmaker not just captures, but communicates in an ongoing process with the subjects of a film and technologies of production. Just as the internal of the subject is received by the lens, and made an outward representation to be received by the viewer, the filmmaker himself engages with an internalization of that displayed before him—beyond the structures of his construction and production. The heterogeneity of their gazes is symbolic not just of his ability to read multiple cultural conditions colliding, but of a constantly expanding scope of individualized consciousness. The more prone he is to them, the more succinctly they may be portrayed.
In the beginning of the film, Dorothy is characterized by gossip surrounding her alcoholism: a symbol of having surrendered to the dangers and pains of existence, washing them away with an artificial sense of hazy darkness. She stays inside and drinks, she looks listlessly and impenetrably out the window, she walks aimlessly down the street, and she adorns herself with a wig. Just as Gerima seeks to extend the inner soul with the exterior platform, the lighting in the film fluctuates greatly—the shots vary between gravitation toward light and toward darkness, and the light is predominately natural. This light is her sobriety, her seeing the world through unfettered eyes and body, and the darkness is her intoxication. The light need not come from a fancy bulb, but from the sublime force of a sunrise peeking through a window—from the strength she harbors beneath the suffocated surface. Alessandra Raengo describes it as such,
…the film expands the conflict within Dorothy’s mind to its entire mise-en-scène,” with editing that “weave[s] together thoughts, imaginations, visions, and memories to channel Dorothy’s inner landscape, the difficulty of her choices, and the psychological and systemic violence that is constantly directed at her as she begins to form a different way of looking at her reality.[10]
Still from Bush Mama (1975)
This is seen even more lucidly in the soundtrack, which comes to echo her underlying suspicions, nightmares, and battles through the voices of social workers or unidentifiable voices providing narrative context. Rather than giving her an internal monologue, a transparent rendition of her stream-of-consciousness, he gives us a juxtaposed hodgepodge of voices, rendering reality seamlessly discordant. What we hear is not what we see, and we may never know what we are hearing just as much as we may never know what we may see next out the window or through the bars of a jail cell. It is like the recollection after a night of heavy drinking, when one has blacked out the clear thoughts of a full consciousness and finds only bits of the last news program they listened to on the radio. It enters only partially, and informs the atmosphere—gives shape—more than the mind—giving structure. This parallels the film’s lack of linearity in regards to the narrative, as the film jumps back and forth between time registers; it thus provokes a transmission of characterization that is jumpy, taking two steps forward, one step backward, like the child learning to walk. Her apogee of development is cathartic because of this intensely unexpected view of reality.
She enters a battle with the welfare officers who want her to abort her pregnancy; but insufficient means and the daily violence toward Black humans is a battle she wages, and wants to give the freedom for her unborn child to wage. Her husband is sent to prison, and during this time she communicates with neighbors and friends, all offering different perspectives toward racial strife. She appears mostly devoid of reasoning, of a clear incentive toward battle, maintaining mostly an inclination to rid herself of feeling with a drink. T.C. writes from his jail cell—he speaks the letters in voice-over and directly at the camera, stressing the significance of the oral narrative in African culture—of the need for seeing, despite the white man’s structure of keeping Black folks blind and silent; he says the words “seeing the light” to invoke truth: the full awakening is the light, not Dorothy’s present darkness of mind. But she does not know how to respond, let alone understand, his letters, because her reality is tangible. It is paying the rent, feeding her daughter, and fighting the war against those trying to kill her fetus. How can she imagine the metaphysical battle when she must meet so many physical ends in the course of one day? How can she imagine centuries ahead of her, based on the consciousness of the centuries past, when she hears the incessant ticking of the clock in her ear? While her furrowed brow hides it, she is riddled with fear. In this nominal stage, her reactionary methods are chimeric. Since we gain so little insight into her thoughts—we hear only a short letter of confusion in response to T.C.—I want to argue that it is her actions that bear the stamp of characterization, especially development. When a welfare officer visits her home, ordering her around, she picks up a glass bottle and smashes it over her head. Gerima shows this not just once, but again and again, stressing the fantasy not just as a comedic trick—we laugh because it is hitherto out of her character, surprisingly exclamatory and commanding—but for the sake of bringing fiction to reality. The replay works as a memory stamp, a she-could-have-done-this if it is made tangible, if we can look at the grace of its complete movement.
Her apotheosis is met toward the end of the film, when she finds her daughter being physically, if not sexually, assaulted by a police officer. Suddenly, the violence is not on the street out her window, it is not a forewarning, but it is lying on her bed, and it is being done to her flesh and blood. This ultimate moment, in which she unblinkingly enforces violence upon the violence, defending another at whatever cost necessary, is her awakening, her looking into the light. Her character comes to suggest “a nascent self-conscious militancy whose end game is the realization of personal and collective self-determination,” in which, “women are at once mothers, lover-companions, and freedom fighters in the struggles ahead.”[11] It is at this time that she is also interposed with the poster of an Angolan freedom fighter, who holds her baby in one hand and a gun in the other, and she removes her wig, showing her authentic hair. The image is rack focused, so that we see Dorothy in the United States, against a war of mass incarceration and police brutality, and the Angolan woman, taking on colonial forces in Angola. This traversing of time and space externalizes Dorothy’s position, making it not just personal, but collective and worldly. It goes beyond a parallel, toward a sense of union, through which all of those in the struggle are togethered, just as T.C. argues for “togetherness.” The way in which she relates to, even becomes the epitome of, the woman in the poster, as she fires the gun for one child while holding a baby in her womb, marks her transition from passivity to revolt—from internalization to externalization, seeing the world day-by-day to seeing the system that operates yesterday, today, and tomorrow upon many with similar plights. Racism is not located, contingent, or specific, but transcontinental, appearing in different hues but holding the same systemic roots. Dorothy’s transition from seeing herself as a woman to seeing herself as a member of a much larger community is the coming into racial consciousness, to an understanding that to fight is to see, speak, and move in the army of intellectual and physical revolutionaries around her.
Still from Bush Mama (1975)
Part II: Djibril Diop Mambéty
Djibril Diop Mambéty began making films in his home of Senegal at the age of twenty-four, but denied the title of “filmmaker,”[12] preferring instead to be a picture-maker. His humility was part of what went into the construction of characters that express a timeless, distinct resonance that carry confidence and an uncanny ability to meet their desired ends through any means available. He focused on the marginalized (it calls to mind Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticia’s poster that reads “seja marginal/ seja herói,” or “to be marginal is to be a hero”) because he believed that they offer an opening point toward the larger world, a conduit of sorts toward collective change. Like Gerima, he saw change’s origins in the individual, with dreams surfacing as possibilities, and worked with his personal ethics through not just mirroring his characters to them, but making ironic renditions to unveil inconsistencies in the fabric of his society. Just as Bush Mama asserts that “money-love” is the basis of slavery and danger, money is his enemy, “the enemy of humankind.”[13]
Mambéty made Touki Bouki in 1973, only two years before Gerima’s Bush Mama. While Anta and Mory travel together in the story, sharing the frame for the majority of the film, it is Anta whom I want to investigate as the protagonist. She does not become so through the quantity of her speech or movement, but rather through the quality; she serves as the reality check to Mory’s fantasies, telling him to “stop dreaming”[14] and calling the shots in regard to their adventures. It is she who thinks of the plan to steal the money garnered by the wrestling match, choosing the blue chest, only to find that it holds unnecessary ‘treasures’ and a skull. Mory declares that they should travel to Europe, escape their languid poverty by stealing money from those privileged others around them. This comes to symbolize an extension of Mambéty’s personal external gaze, as he “was primarily an urban African who looked outwards toward the West in negotiating his cultural identity, rather than looking inwards towards a timeless, rural Africa for an ‘authentic’ cultural identity,” [15] yet he constructed his own timeless, chimeric universe, and Anta and Mory are by no means Westernized. Instead, their quest is a journey to a fantastical beyond that does not exist—the fantasized dream of a Western exile-made-apogee. The result of looking outward ends up consisting in the externalization of the innards, a knowing of the characters through their unwavering dreams. This is also a testament to Mambéty’s “naïve faith in his characters’ capacity to overcome all the odds stacked against them,”[16] which is quite simply a faith in humankind.
Djibril Diop Mambéty during the filming of Touki Bouki (1973)
The most compelling aspect of Anta’s characterization is fostered through Mambéty’s sense of time and identity: both are not static, but plastic entities that cannot be captured simplistically. She wears mostly androgynous clothes, and her voice is authoritative and deep to the point at which gender is not merely ambiguous, but made futile. Clothes themselves are made futile, as she removes her shirt in a statement of supreme comfort with her chest, revealing her skin for direct contact with the sun—the light. When she does so, she does not look toward or around her, but steadfastly ahead, always carrying a sense of direction. As they make their final escape after a robbery, she drives the motorbike, leading the stolen car behind her. And when they dress up in their stolen clothing, she dons a pink suit and smokes with the air of a person who knows riches more than herself; her identity is a performance, and she does it with guile. While Mory is one of those “figures from communities made up by ephemeral encounters, the uprooted whose identities are gaudy and fractured, whose only bonds are money and debts. Always ready to spin a fable, this version of humankind can construe life only in the present,”[17] Anta is an ephemeral entity reaching toward the beyond, as she boards the boat regardless of Mory’s reluctance and departure. If her direction was predicated upon him, it is consistent and persistent despite him.
One of the most characteristic shots is the one in which they share space on the beach, after making love on the rocks and deciding upon their journey overseas. Mory lies on the sand, but Anta stands with her arms outstretched, leaning back and forth so as to gain balance on one leg. She is many times looking outward, toward the ocean, and it is through this that Vlad Dima makes a rich argument that the two characters are renditions of cardinal symbols: Anta is the water, and Mory is the earth. “The power and fluidity of the water medium opposes the stability of the land, of the earth, and in the sex scene there is a constant movement between water and land.”[18] They are thus divided not just through their physical properties, with which they already lack general correspondence in their subversion of gender norms, but metaphysically, as they hail entire elements autonomously and relatively. Anta is the source of cooling to Mory’s recklessness and impulsivity, while also being the ebb and flow that guides them in the course of their quest. While she aims and directs, he prefers to stop and profess his altitude in moments of success: to undress and scream, “A boy as tall as me should be king, but I’m not.”[19] Like a tree’s trunk maintaining stability amidst a wind ruffling all of its branches and leaves, it moves to and fro, but its center is static. He chooses not just to stay on the land, but he continually mimics it, carrying the emblem of the defeated animal (the horns) on his motorbike, as an earthly icon. To be the water, to be Anta, is to carry oneself onward, to “defeat money”[20] and imbue the magic that is cinema [21] by being magic itself.
Still from Xala (1973)
Part III: Their collision and sublimation
The two filmmakers find unison in their orientation of space: both of their films introduce the landscape, with establishing shots, as its own character. Bush Mama uses the metropolis, the loud and busy streets of the Watts area of Los Angeles; and Touki Bouki uses the landscape of Senegal, its roads, trees, and rooftops. In this way they are characterized through site-specificity as a stabilizing force that interweaves the characters together; it is not just their backdrop, but their literal grounding, scenery, and connection to the forces of nature—all of that beyond the immediacy of interpersonal human relation. The physical grounding shots are reminders of where these characters come from, the spaces in which they are shaped, and how they continue to be informed by their environments. As they are prone to the city’s griot or pickpockets, the environment is also prone to them, like the cattle in Touki Bouki who are either ridden upon and herded, or slaughtered to be eaten. The characters have the power to command as much as they are commanded by.
Still from Touki Bouki (1973)
Still from Touki Bouki (1973)
The directors share a perspective of what Mark A. Reid calls a “womanist postNegritude” understanding of social phenomena, which “rejects analysis that is determined by a singular or hierarchically constructed identity politics because such identity constructions maintain racial fantasies that deny the fluidity of transracial understanding.”[22] While their films are read most deeply through the lens of their respective cultures, they are transcendent in their portrayal of universally identifiable women. A transracial understanding is one that radically enriches the boundaries in vision, allowing access to women, feminists, either black white or gray, as both spectator and figure in their own social scenario. Gerima’s characters are such that they illuminate specific predicaments, and individual responses to them, but are so far-reaching as to overcome the walls constructed by capitalism. They all stand for something larger than they are, and thus draw to them the possible revolutionary sensibilities of any and every creed. Mambéty’s Anta floats in and out of society’s exuberance through the donning of stolen garb, and justifies her freedom through her specifically selected outfit. It is hers but it also not hers, and thus her plasticity is the opportunity of being beyond class boundaries.
Mbye B. Cham says that filmmaking is born and bred as the child of African political independence,[23] and since Mambéty and Gerima focus so intently upon characters as the life force of the films, making them their respective bailiwicks, the growth tracked by all in Touki Bouki and Bush Mama come to be the babies born from independence—in Senegal, in the United States, and beyond. Gerima’s focus is transcultural and even transcontinental, and Mambéty’s is primarily Senegalese (with Europe as the imagined, unseen other), so they form a bridge between being/seeing at home and exiled, elsewhere—and for Anta, the journey from one to the other, ultimately independently. She is the emblem of her country’s freedom, while Mory is that of its regressions and stagnation.
Mambéty’s recurring theme of money that runs throughout Touki Bouki, and many of his films, is their very source of universalization, reaching and relating to all societies prone to capitalism’s heavy armored hand. It is money that separates us, builds hierarchies, breeds corruption, subordination, greed, and thus most of his representations are “human drama[s].”[24] That money which is also a source of difficulty for him and Gerima, and most African filmmakers, in constructing and promoting their work, makes the iconography a self-reflexive one—using the medium to reflect upon the medium’s necessities and processes of inequities. Mambéty prefers to entirely disregard the location from which he receives funding, [25] prioritizing instead where they are made, what their substance is of and for. The uniting string for the two directors is their “aim to take their audiences on a journey along with the protagonists so that the characters’ coming into awakened consciousness is a motivating model for the possible spectator.”[26] As we watch Dorothy free her mind through her body’s movements, and Anta free her body by following the flow of the water that she so embodies, we come to believe in the dream of self-ownership as a key to racial awakening—and thus, radical being as a transgression of the racist forces of capitalism. Making the water inside travel along, or against, the current of the water outside.
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Mark A. Reid, Black Lenses, Black Voices: African American Film Now (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2005), 106. ↩
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John L. Jackson, Jr. and Haile Gerima,” Decolonizing the Filmic Mind: An Interview with Haile Gerima,” Callaloo33 (2010), 27. ↩
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Mark A. Reid,Black Lenses, Black Voices, 117. ↩
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Haile Gerima, “Thoughts and Concepts: The Making of Ashes and Embers,”Black American LiteratureForum25 (1991), 343. ↩
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Diane D. Turner and Muata Kamdibe, “Haile Gerima: In Search of an Africana Cinema,” Journal of Black Studies38 (2008), 981–2. ↩
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John L. Jackson, Jr. and Haile Gerima, “Decolonizing the Filmic Mind,” 31. ↩
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Allyson Nadia Field et al., ed., L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 140. ↩
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Ibid, 334. ↩
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Ibid, 255. ↩
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Allyson Nadia Field et al., ed., L.A. Rebellion, 304 ↩
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Allyson Nadia Field et al., ed., L.A. Rebellion, 215–17. ↩
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Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 124. ↩
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Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Questioning African Cinema,125. ↩
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Touki Bouki. Film. Directed by Djibril Diop Mambety. World Cinema Foundation, 1973. ↩
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David Murphy and Patrick Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directors (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 2007), 95. ↩
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David Murphy and Patrick Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema,108. ↩
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Imruh Bakari and Mbye B. Cham, ed., African Experiences of Cinema (London: British FilmInstitute:1996), 247. ↩
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Vlad Dima, “Aural Narrative Planes in Djibril Diop Mambety’s Films, Journal of Film and Video64(2012), 47. ↩
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Touki Bouki. Film. Directed by Djibril Diop Mambety. World Cinema Foundation, 1973. ↩
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Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Questioning African Cinema,128. ↩
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Ibid. ↩
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Mark A. Reid, Black Lenses, Black Voices, 106. ↩
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Imruh Bakari and Mbye B. Cham, ed., African Experiences of Cinema, 1. ↩
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Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Questioning African Cinema,125. ↩
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Ibid,129. ↩
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Allyson Nadia Field et al., ed., L.A. Rebellion, 26. ↩
May 2020. Vol nº1