{"id":108035,"date":"2017-02-22T18:28:22","date_gmt":"2017-02-22T23:28:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=108035"},"modified":"2017-02-23T12:01:51","modified_gmt":"2017-02-23T17:01:51","slug":"the-right-to-speak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/22\/the-right-to-speak\/","title":{"rendered":"The Right to Speak"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cAfrica was colonized, and so is its cinema,\u201d Sidney Sokhona wrote. His films aimed to change that.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Still from Safrana<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The first time we see Sidney Sokhona, the director and star of Nationalit\u00e9: Immigr\u00e9<\/em><\/a>, he is on his knees. Two French bureaucrats sit behind a desk, not bothering to look at him as they conduct their interrogation, mechanically writing down his details and finally handing him a piece of paper, which he takes in his mouth before crawling away on all fours. The paper bears the name of his public-housing assignment. His submission symbolizes the inhumane treatment he\u2019ll face in his new home, and the politeness with which he will be expected to endure it.<\/p>\n

Hybridizing documentary and fiction, Nationalit\u00e9: Immigr\u00e9<\/em> reaches occasionally into the surreal, as in this first scene. The film was shot between 1972 and 1975. With no money to pay another actor, Sokhona, a Mauritanian immigrant in his early twenties, was forced to play the lead role himself. As the story begins, Sokhona arrives in Paris, having traveled in the trunk of a car. His fantasy of city life, as thin as it is\u2014\u201cFinally, I will see with my own eyes the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, which I have seen so many times at free movie screenings organized by the French embassies in Dakar and Nouakchott\u201d\u2014never materializes, and neither do job opportunities, despite the prayers and lotto tickets to which he pins hope. Sokhona centers the film on the real-life rent strike undertaken by the rue Riquet shelter tenants in those years, in opposition to abusive and dangerous housing conditions. Voice-over explains: \u201cImmigrant workers were already living and working in the most inhumane conditions. But then five people died in Aubervilliers, victims of the owners of this slum. One week after this atrocity, two black Africans were pulled from the Ourcq Canal with fractured skulls.\u201d Over an image of two bodies under a sheet, the voice insists, \u201cSo for us immigrants, the situation presented itself like this: we had to organize ourselves to struggle or we would all perish.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

A few years later, in 1978, Sokhona published an essay, \u201cOur Cinema,\u201d in Cahiers du cinema<\/em>, calling for an African cinema that would cease to be tokenized, ghettoized, and defanged by subsidies. The lack of infrastructure and facilities, he explained, keeps African film indebted to Europe, limiting its quality despite filmmakers\u2019 efforts. \u201cAt any time and in any country, to talk about films is to talk about money,\u201d he wrote. \u201cAnd for a film, once it is made, to earn money so that its director can make another film, it has to be distributed.\u201d That Sokhona\u2019s films have languished in obscurity (in spite of Nationalit\u00e9: Immigr\u00e9 <\/em>having shown at Cannes in 1976) adds a retroactive bitterness to the statement. This month, Spectacle Theater has been hosting the first-ever New York City screenings of the film<\/a>, along with his second feature, Safrana (or, The Right to Speak)<\/em><\/a>, from 1976.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfrica was colonized, and so is its cinema,\u201d Sokhona wrote. His films subvert traditional documentary and ethnographic models, using a variety of overt explanatory devices\u2014voice-over, radio segments, text, classroom scenes, interviews, speeches\u2014to identify the way information is kept and deployed. His tongue-in-cheek didacticism gives the films a nuanced skepticism appropriate to the postcolonial moment, when the values of the colonizing West\u2014freedom, equality\u2014were glaringly absent in day-to-day life.<\/p>\n

Safrana<\/em> braids multiple framing conceits into a complex story of four West African men working in France. Perhaps to emphasize their collective experience, each character is named after one of the actors\u2014but not after the actor who plays him. Before long, fed up with the menial labor and overt racism, they quit their jobs and decamp to the French countryside, where they learn agricultural techniques from peasants who\u2019ve resisted mechanization. The African men aspire to bring the knowledge back to their native countries. The commune they envision became a reality when one of Safrana<\/em>\u2019s actors, Bouba Tour\u00e9, founded a community called Somankidi Coura on the Senegal River in 1976. It exists to this day, a success that radically undermines the inherited values of postcolonial global capitalism in proving that industry and exploitation are not the only means to achieve stability.<\/p>\n

Together, Safrana<\/em> and Nationalit\u00e9: Immigr\u00e9<\/em> chart an evolving political consciousness. \u201cI am an immigrant,\u201d Sokhona says in the latter. \u201cI am the same one who came clandestinely to France, to work the assembly line. I am the same one whose grandfather was deported to the Americas during the slave trade. I am the same one whose father died in the Ardennes during World War II, a war in which he took part without knowing why.\u201d That film ends with an empowering success: the rent strike wins the migrants relocation to a safer shelter. But there\u2019s an important caveat: the new home is surveilled and controlled by the police. Safrana<\/em>, meanwhile, begins with a quote from Mao, and its four heroes call one another \u201ccomrade.\u201d The film ends not with reform but revolution, as the voice-over states: \u201cFarming might not be the only answer for immigrants. It\u2019s one way of examining our political awareness \u2026 When everything is to be done, the stakes are high \u2026 Faced with this danger we must fight for appropriate farming that can feed mouths and create jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

<\/a>

From the Criterion Collection poster for Black Girl<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Sokhona wasn\u2019t the first to film the stories of African migrants in postcolonial France. Ten years prior, in 1966, Ousmane Semb\u00e8ne made Le Noire de\u2026 <\/em>(Black Girl<\/em>)<\/a>, which follows Diouana, a Senegalese woman working for a rich family as household maid. At first she\u2019s elated to leave Dakar, but in Antibes, she feels trapped, having been promised a more attractive job and the opportunity to see France. \u201cFor me,\u201d she says in voice-over, \u201cFrance is the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom, and my bedroom.\u201d Paternalized and exoticized, she undertakes her own strike, refusing to leave her bed. But for Diouana, a woman and a domestic worker, the cause is far lonelier and more vulnerable than the kind featured in Sokhona\u2019s films. To get her up, the white man offers her money; she collapses as if the bills hurt. Her voice-over, distraught and angry, says, \u201cNever will I be a slave. I didn\u2019t come here for the apron nor the money.\u201d In Sokhona\u2019s films, warnings of danger and reports of violence come over the radio and from the mouths of French Leftists, but there\u2019s no direct conflict depicted. Semb\u00e8ne\u2019s film is more familiar, having had wider distribution in the West; it ends with Diouana slitting her wrists.<\/p>\n

In all of these films, the enemy is not just the police and the overt racists, but the \u201cprogressive\u201d whites who want authentic rice with maf\u00e9<\/em> cooked by an African maid, and the leftists attempting to coopt and represent the immigrant cause. The French critic Serge Daney lauded Nationalit\u00e9: Immigr\u00e9 <\/em>for its expos\u00e9 of the neglectful left, writing, \u201cThe immigrant, the ideal proletarian with only a mattress in a slum to lose<\/a>, found himself burdened with embodying, through his individual life experiences, the various phases of a thoroughgoing \u2018crash course\u2019 in self-awareness, as already recognized and indexed by Western Marxism.\u201d<\/p>\n

One character in Nationalit\u00e9: Immigr\u00e9<\/em> offers a history lesson on the systemic oppression of immigrants. Sokhona\u2019s camera reveals the speaker: a white hippie Frenchman wearing a dashiki. He speaks from a chair in the middle of the woods, far from the lived experience in overcrowded shelters and factories.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/a>

From Nationalit\u00e9: Immigr\u00e9.<\/i><\/p><\/div>\n

<\/a>

From Safrana<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the past two weeks, the U.S. has seen more than six hundred\u00a0immigrants arrested and detained by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security released documents outlining Trump\u2019s plans to increase deportations by stripping undocumented immigrants of their right to privacy and enlisting local police forces to find and detain them. These memos are disturbingly similar to France\u2019s 1972 Fontanet-Marcellin directive, which also left immigrants at the mercy of police\u2014a directive that caused the very organizing movements Sokhona documents in his films.<\/p>\n

Organizers on the left must be aware of who is vulnerable. Last week saw a sort of general strike, a \u201cDay Without Immigrants,\u201d in which immigrants and those in solidarity stayed home from work and school. But who\u2019s following the precarious fate of those who were fired the next day: the eighteen Tennessee workers at Bradley Coatings, Inc.; the twelve restaurant workers in Oklahoma; the thirty JVS Masonry employees in Colorado, the twenty-one Encore Boat Builders in South Carolina?<\/p>\n

Daney, the critic, might as well have been referring to today\u2019s American left when he wrote, in the seventies, that French leftists \u201cwere to be confronted by the bourgeoisie\u2019s cynical negligence of their own laws \u2026 The activists failed to grasp the\u00a0legal system as an authoritative body where something actually takes place.<\/em>\u201d Sokhona, in films that deserve a wider audience now as much as ever, presents the devastating scope and the still-unfolding legacy of that authority.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sarah Cowan is a freelance writer and a video editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She lives in Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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