"The Center of the World is Everywhere": Bamako and the Scene of the Political
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Scott Durham
The viewer of
If Bamako would thus seem to offer little to the critic in the way of
hermeneutic satisfaction—if, in other words, there would seem to be no truth
here to unveil—it is first of all, perhaps, because the “other scene” in
question seems to be placed immediately before us. For almost everything there
is to see in Bamako is given from the
outset, in the simple courtyard of a house in Mali (where the director tells us
he himself grew up) that provides the improbable site of a “trial” of
international financial institutions. In that trial, we see jurists on both
sides of the debate about neoliberal globalization cross-examine intellectuals
and experts. We hear arguments for and against the economic policies imposed
upon sub-Saharan
And this is, at least
initially, what most fascinates in
What are we to make of
Sissako’s staging of this nonrelationship? In part, the incongruous setting of
the trial serves to foreground the impossibility, from a political perspective,
of the event staged within it taking place outside the realm of mere political
theatre. It is, no doubt, quite unlikely, should the World Bank and IMF ever be
put on trial, that this trial would be held in such an unassuming place as this
courtyard of the director’s childhood, its solemn proceedings taking place
alongside the washing of laundry, the nursing of babies, the dyeing of cloth
and the morning ablutions of its residents. But, one is compelled to ask, is
this setting of the trial any more improbable than would be its enactment in an
actual court? Under what circumstances could one imagine officials of the IMF
or the World Bank actually being compelled to defend the consequences of their
policies in a court in even the most metropolitan of venues, be it
Indeed, the implausible
location of the trial never allows us to lose sight of the fact that it is
first of all intended as a symbolic act, even a provocation, which calls into
question what Sissako, like many other critics of the IMF and World Bank, sees
as the fundamental asymmetry that defines their role in the global system. The
inhabitants of
Leaving aside, for the
moment, the specific economic and social content of the claims made by the
plaintiffs in the trial, their case will thus turn on the denunciation of this
political and discursive asymmetry between the authority of the globalizing
technocrats at these institutions (whose expertise lends legitimacy to the
neoliberal project), and the unacknowledged objections of a population of
unwilling “debtors” (who, having rarely received its benefits, are nonetheless
condemned to bear that project’s consequences). Indeed, this asymmetry
constitutes the fundamental “wrong” or “tort”
(to use Jacques Rancière’s language) to which Sissako’s trial responds.3 Within the limits of the trial’s mise en scène, the critics of neoliberal globalization, and the
witnesses they call, speak as though they were on an equal footing with those
they accuse, who, outside the trial, occupy the commanding heights of
international trade and finance. To borrow once again the language of
Rancière’s La Mésentente, the
performance of the trial allows those critics to behave “as though […] a stage existed” in which they were recognized as
legitimate and equal interlocutors—as though, in other words, “there were a
common world of argument” (52). And within the confines of a discursive space
implicitly defined by the legal fiction of equality before the law, this
assumption might seem perfectly plausible. The law could, in this sense, be understood
as providing a form for the expression of a collective dream of equality. This
dream is, however, social and political before being juridical: the dream of a
popular justice, where the masters of global trade and finance would be placed
on the same footing as any citizen, and could thus be held accountable.
But, as I have already
suggested, the incongruous appearance of this trial in a family compound on the
periphery of the global system reminds us that this enactment of even a purely
discursive equality can appear in our conjuncture only as theatre. No verdict that it might pronounce (and the film does
not indulge us with the symbolic satisfaction that such a verdict might
provide) could be expected to produce an effect outside of the utopian “common
world” of its performance. If the inhabitants of the courtyard, although they
are often visibly moved by the power of the victims’ testimony, only
intermittently follow the process of the trial, it is perhaps not so much because
they have repressed or disavowed the collective wish that this utopian
performance might seem to fulfill, as because the staging of that wish unfolds
within a space—that of their immediate everyday experience—where its
fulfillment is as yet unimaginable. Indeed, the event with which the film
concludes—the suicide of Chaka (Tiécoura Traoré), the unemployed husband of the
bar singer Melé (Aïssa Maïga), whose failing marriage provides the
representation of life in the courtyard with its principle narrative focus—only
reinforces our conviction that, whatever the verdict, the ultimate sentence has
already long since been passed by the logic of the global system itself, not
upon the accused, but upon its victims.
What Sissako makes visible in
this strangely double space—where the implicit claim of each speaker to
equality within “a common world of argument” coexists with the lived experience
of inequality, without any language, code or narrative capable of “transcoding”
(to use Fredric Jameson’s term)4 between them—is thus, first of all, a failure of mediation.
This failure is initially foregrounded as a problem of aesthetic form, in the
incommensurability between the generic codes that govern the distinct lines of
action that unfold in the space of the courtyard. It is as if Sissako were
unable or unwilling to find an overarching narrative capable of linking the
trial’s theatrical confrontations over the injustices characteristic of the
system as a whole to the local stories of the everyday struggle for existence
of those who live alongside but outside it, such as that of the singer Melé and
her disintegrating marriage, or that of the young man awaiting death in a room
just off the courtyard. To the extent to which the relationship of this theatre
of popular justice to these everyday narratives is presented here, it is, as we
have seen, first of all presented as a nonrelationship. For if the possibility of
a relationship would seem to be suggested by the juxtaposition of its terms, the
realization of that possibility seems to await the story capable of weaving the
two, not only into a common space, but into a shared narrative world.
This possibility is, however,
realized in one place in Bamako: in
the film-within-a-film, Death in Timbuktu,
the “African spaghetti Western,” where the agents of international capital and
their African collaborators are represented as a group of marauders visiting a
reign of terror on the ancient Malian city, as they gun down the inhabitants
(notably including a school teacher, emblematic of those civil servants deemed
superfluous by structural adjustment policies), whose only defender is a lone
black cowboy (Danny Glover). This narrative might be said to succeed in
representing the connection between the individual sufferings of Africans and
the reigning powers in the world financial system, which effectively condemn
many of them to death. But it does so only allegorically, by transposing the
two distinct narrative worlds that fail to communicate in the courtyard, where
they merely coexist, into the generic code of yet another narrative universe, a
supplementary world where alone the elements of the first two can be brought
together.
This third narrative world—that of the Western, or, rather, its postmodern pastiche—appears at a sufficient distance from the world inhabited by Sissako’s courtyard dwellers, whom we see watching Death in Timbuktu on television, that they can respond to the deaths on screen, not with anger or compassion, but with the slyly complicit laughter of postmodern irony. This may be taken, at least in part, as an implicit satirical commentary on the contradictions inherent in the relationship of African films such as Bamako to the public in a country like Mali, which, because of what Sissako himself describes as an almost non-existent distribution system, is less likely to have access to his films than to the more widely available metropolitan mass-cultural products of the sort that his film-within-a-film allegorically rewrites.5 But this interlude of parodic satire also provides, as a sort of counterpoint, an exemplary sketch of an aesthetic strategy that Sissako declines to pursue elsewhere in the film, where the allegorical inscription of the actions of an individual or collective character (such as Timbuktu’s marauding gunmen) serves to represent the intervention of a global system (the reach and complexity of which is too vast to be readily imaginable in relation to the existential experience of a single individual or group) within a localizable narrative space.6
Indeed, this is the narrative
strategy of an important forerunner of
But this “meaning” of
Ramatou, as a mythic figure of capital descending upon the village from some
global beyond, is not, by itself, enough to sustain our interest in her story.
That story is only compelling because it is also that of an individual, with
her own history and grievances. Indeed, at the literal level of the narrative,
that individual history is representable, and her motivations are explicable
(without any reference to the “elsewhere” of the global system of which she is
the emissary, and in accordance with the conventions of a more classical
realism), entirely in terms of her relationships, as an individual woman, with
the other inhabitants of this particular town.7 The power of Mambéty’s film to convey the effects of the
global system in terms of individual experience thus turns on the deftness with
which he imperceptibly switches gears between these two possible readings of
Ramatou’s story—the “global” and the “local”—each of which alternately serves
as the explanation of her actions. For she appears in Colobane both as an oppressed
member of the community who has been unjustly cast out (and has returned to
that community in order to demand justice from it) and as the embodiment of a
world system that, as the absolute negation of the world of that community, is
unimaginable within it, except as the mythic figure of a power from beyond that
world.
The function of Ramatou’s
character within Mambéty’s allegorical narrative is, in other words, to mediate
between these two poles, and thereby make each translatable into the language
of the other. Whatever the other virtues of this narrative,8 Hyenas can thus
be said to offer, at the level of narrative form, an attempt to resolve,
through non-realist means, the aesthetic impasse faced by realism in the global
system, as it attempts to carry out the seemingly impossible task of
representing the logic of an unimaginably vast global totality in and through
individual and local experience.
If Bamako, for its part, refuses to attempt a similar resolution of
this aesthetic problem—if, with the parodic exception of its “African spaghetti
Western,” it does not seek to elaborate an allegorical narrative frame capable
of weaving the global and the local into a single story—it is in part because
it refuses to elide the disparity between these two moments of the global
system in the name of offering a coherent representation of that system as a
whole. Rather, to the extent to which it attempts a realist representation of
the global system, it begins with this disparity itself as an unsurpassable
reality that it must confront, even if it is not yet capable of coherently
narrating or representing it. In this aspect,
As I have already suggested,
this impasse is no less political for being aesthetic, since it reflects the
pervasive difficulty in the neoliberal era of imagining any role for politics
in everyday experience other than that of an outside force which, to borrow
Nietzsche’s phrase, comes “like fate” (which is to say, like Mambéty’s Linguère
Ramatou) to impose its “conditionalities” upon us from without. But unlike Hyenas, Bamako, rather than pursuing an aesthetic resolution of this
underlying contradiction, reframes the problem by foregrounding the very
disparity that gives rise to it: the nonrelationship between the logic of a
totality that determines what it will impose upon society from some
transnational elsewhere on the one hand, and, on the other, the lives of the
governed, who have no part in the governance of the social whole, except that
of assuming its accumulated debts. Rather than attempting to mediate between
the extremes of this disparity,
The
figure in
But this shift in focus is
not without its own formal implications as well. For it leads us to turn from a
first reading of Bamako--focused
primarily on the limits, within the present conjuncture, of any dialectic of
representation which might attempt, in its depiction of a global situation, to
mediate between the individual or local case and the laws of the totality--to
reading the film as a staging of the pragmatic conditions, limits and effects
of an act of enunciation that would call the structure of the totality itself,
along with its system of governance, into question. For this intervention
obliges us to ask: in what form, and to what effect, can the complaints of
those condemned by the structures of the global system to unrelenting
pauperization be heard within—or, indeed, beyond—the discourse concerning that
system’s governance?
But the scandal of this
witness’s intervention goes beyond the paradox of staging a trial in which the
refusal of the reigning authorities to recognize a complainant as a party to
the dispute turns out to be the very wrong to be adjudicated. A further scandal
lies in the fact that, at this moment, this complainant, whose intervention has
no place in the legitimate forms of political discourse, nonetheless comes to
provisionally express the grievances of society as a whole. To be sure, the
community on behalf of which he speaks does not yet exist as such. Indeed, the
potential members of that community are collectively defined by the reigning
institutions of the global system, just as this witness is defined by them
individually, only negatively—as those who, since they are recognized only as
inheritors of debts whose benefits they have never received, count as less than
nothing.
But that community, which can
neither rely on national or international institutions to represent it, nor
refer to a representable class or party that might incarnate it as a collective
body, is nonetheless momentarily called into being by the enunciative act of
this uninvited witness. This potential collectivity does not appear, to be
sure, as the object of a representation of the existing social totality. For it
is not as yet even a part of that whole, against which it can only assert
itself as a virtual community of debtors, endowed with nothing more than the
authority of its suffering. And yet the image of this potential collective
momentarily emerges as an affective reality in response to the peasant’s
appeal. From the beginning of his complaint, both the proceedings of the trial
and the work going on around it come to a halt, as both participants in the
trial and those who had been more or less casual observers are equally
transfixed by the astonishing appearance on the scene of this figure who belongs
neither to the juridical world of the court, nor to the familiar local world of
the courtyard. As the emotional intensity of his lament progressively builds,
we see, in a series of reaction shots, a corresponding wave of emotion rise as
it passes through the crowd, encompassing not only the judges and observers
whom he directly addresses, but also those who had been more or less indifferently
going about their everyday affairs around it. As this witness sings and cries
out his complaint, we see each in turn listening as if transfixed, as all eyes
are drawn at first to the source of this unexpected interruption. But, as his
singing continues, gazes turn reflectively elsewhere, eyes closing, turning
down or toward the distance, as if each hears expressed in this anguished
irruption of a memory of suffering within the political space of the trial—an
event in itself exceptional enough to interrupt both the procedure of the trial
and the rhythm of domestic labors—the effects of a whole string of catastrophes
he or she has lived in isolation.
Whose fate is being decried
or lamented by the voice of this uncalled witness, and the flood of accumulated
anger and grief that it pours forth? Does it express the individual suffering
of this man alone? Does it lament the fates of those who have testified before
him, or those to whose reactions the camera cuts away as he speaks? Does it
express the shame and anger of the economic migrant who was forced to leave his
companions’ bodies exposed in the desert, the longings of the young man dying
(very possibly of AIDS) in the isolation of his room, or the despair of Chaka,
whose solitary suicide on a road outside the collective space of the courtyard
seems already to be announced by his mournful song? Sissako’s editing of this
sequence invites us to understand that his lament expresses all of these at
once, as if it were the memory of all of these individual sufferings distilled
into a single lament—as if those hearing
it, both within and outside the discursive space of the trial, found echoed in
this cry a common memory of wrong, which passes through the collective it calls
together in a single wave of grief and indignation.
Not
that this witness represents that collective which, as we have seen, does not
yet exist as such. Nor, indeed, is his own fate represented, in terms that
might permit his addressees (including his cinematic spectators) to identify
with it, still less to rewrite it as an allegory for the social whole.
Sissako’s strategic withholding of the translation of his discourse invites his various publics to receive his song as it is performed as a pure
asignifying affect, in relationship to which its meaning and its frame of
reference are secondary. But it is precisely the
isolation of the affective power of his song as such from its signification
which permits his performance to intercede between all of the heretofore individual
wrongs suffered by those auditors, by placing them momentarily into an
indeterminate, but nonetheless intensive, relation.
He appears here, in other
words, to use Deleuze’s term, as an “intercessor.”11 His intervention makes it possible for what might otherwise
be lived as a series of private griefs to be expressed as a collective
grievance, insofar as they are the effects of one and the same event: that of
the sentence imposed on a global population of debtors by the IMF and the World
Bank. But his cry of protest, as itself an event in its own right, also gives
rise to the powerful fiction of a possible world, in which what had previously
been lived as a series of individual wounds can be experienced as immediately
political. That is why this prolonged song or cry, as Sissako remarks, has no
need to be translated, any more than one needs to translate the silence that
precedes it (DVD interview). For the value of this expression of each of these
individual griefs as moments of a single affective movement—and the standard
according to which it must be “judged”—lies not in its capacity (or failure) to
represent each in terms of a global situation, but in its power to leap beyond
itself: both in its ecstatic movement among the individuals who are drawn by it
into the collective experience of grievance it announces, and in the affective
overflow of the borders between the juridical world of the trial and the world
of everyday life. Its role is not to represent the relationship between
individuals and the emerging collective, nor the relationship between that
collective and the space of a political discourse that excludes it, within the
frame of an overarching totality. Nor is it limited to staging the
undecidability of those relations (although it is not the least of its merits,
as we have seen, that it does do that as well). The effect of this
intercessor’s cry is, more fundamentally, to unleash a “movement of world” (to
use Deleuze’s term) in which each individual is affected by his or her
potential relation to the others, as each, in response to the cry that passes
through them all, comes to echo or resonate with the others. In response to his
call, they are momentarily drawn into a movement toward a new common world that
arises out of their relation—a world in which their individual griefs appear as
a collective matter.12
This movement, like the cry
that sets it in motion, finds its most powerful echo beyond the space of the trial
and its political theatre in Melé’s tearful repetition of the song that she
sang joyfully at the beginning of the film, and which she sings for the second
time toward its end, when the trial is over. “… It is,” as Sissako observes of
this second performance of the song, “as if she had participated in the trial,
as though she is aware and wants to show her support for what was said there….”
(DVD Interview). Indeed, this affective response to the trial, beyond the
circumscribed space of its performance, is all the more powerful in that it
comes from one of those non-participants who, as Sissako remarks, had
previously been indifferent to its theatre. Here, the irruption of the
suffering of everyday existence within the space of politics would seem to find
its counterpart outside the trial: Melé’s song, sung in a domain normally
excluded from political debate, her place of work, is involuntarily but
affectively performed as a sort of testimony given after the trial, a public
performance of a grief whose experience has become interwoven with the
political, even if it initially appears, and is expressed, outside the
institutionally sanctioned space of politics.
This makes it all the more
striking that this wave of collective passion, which, as we have seen, achieves
its most intense expression in the complaint of Zegué Bamba, and then finds a
powerful echo in Melé’s song, is broken by the event with which that song is
juxtaposed—the suicide of Melé’s husband, Chaka. Chaka’s death on the roadside
takes place outside the private space of his family (where we have seen him
caring for the couple’s daughter), outside the local collective space of the
courtyard, and outside the political discourse of the trial. It thus
exemplifies the very anomie Chaka alludes to earlier in the film in his
interview with a journalist covering the trial. Having argued in a previous
interview that the worst effect of structural adjustment policies is the
destruction of the social fabric, he is asked by the reporter to repeat his
statement for the record, as Chaka’s statement has accidentally been erased. But
Chaka, with an air of resignation, declines to say anything further, insisting
that no one would listen to his grievances in any case.
This suggests that, just as the intervention of Zegué Bamba implicitly affirmed the right of each to be heard, even if he or she cannot yet be fully understood, Chaka’s suicide would seem to represent the ultimate abandonment of the hope of being heard in the structures governing the current global conjuncture. It may thus be taken as one possible verdict on the trial itself, which, in light of this shocking event, risks being dismissed retrospectively as an ephemeral and ineffectual dream of protest, from which the suicide’s pistol shot might be said to awaken us. Indeed, is not Chaka’s suicide immediately followed by the disappearance of the tribunal from the courtyard? When we return from the road where his body lies, as yet undiscovered and unattended, we see the chairs from which the judges had presided stacked up, and discover that the participants and observers of the trial have been transformed into a stunned and passive crowd of mourners. After a brief prayer, we see this crowd solemnly but quickly disperse, in part through the lens of the diegetic cameraman, Falaï, who, having been on hand to record the collective’s theatrical emergence, is also there to document its disappearance, as it trails after the bier bearing the body out of the courtyard.13
In their wake, the mourners,
who had so recently been engaged in a theatre of justice, have left this
quotidian space which has been returned to its banality, as a solitary man
takes up the rugs on which they had been seated, amid the clotheslines and their
drying laundry. The trial—together with the arguments of the advocates and the
testimony of its victims—has perhaps been nothing more than theatre after all.
For the collective that its dramas had briefly called into existence has
evaporated. The last shot of the film lingers on the gate out of which the
crowd has departed, perhaps inviting us to consider the consequence of its
disappearance from the space where the complaints of everyday existence had
found a sufficiently theatrical expression to appear as political contestation,
perhaps also to reflect on the possibility of that provisional community’s
eventual return.
For this space remains
haunted by the two parallel events whose effects have been played out within
it, and by the two incompossible worlds which those juxtaposed but divergent
events have conjured up before our eyes. On the one hand, there is the
uninvited witness’s act of enunciation, and with it the emergence of the
movement of affective attraction that draws together a collective which does
not yet exist as such, but which, borne by an ecstatic wave of grief, has nonetheless
briefly emerged on the scene of politics to affirm its political visibility. On
the other hand, there is the act of suicide that takes place, not only outside
of the realm of politics, but seemingly beyond the limits of sociality, an act
which precipitates the disintegration of that same collective, and its
dispersion from the site of contestation. Two worlds, then, coexist as memories
within the same space, where we have lived through the duration of a passage
from one to the other.
In a sense, we have returned
to a situation analogous to the opening of the film, where two noncommunicating
worlds are presented side by side within a single space. But the problem of how
to think their coexistence has, by the end of the film, been formulated in a
new way. Between the two, there is no longer only the abyss of a nonrelation,
as between the noncommunicating spheres of the global system. There is also the
potentiality of a passage from one world to another—a potentiality that is
lived affectively either as a movement of ecstatic passion that overflows its
limits, giving rise to an image of collectivity, or as the collapse of that
same movement in a catastrophic blockage of communication that depopulates the
space of potential collectivity, leaving behind only an empty theatre of
sociality, devoid of collective actors. At the end of the film, the problem of
thinking the relationship between the political realm of the trial and that of
everyday experience is thus no longer posed as that of mediating between an
“elsewhere” and a “here” that could be represented as spheres or moments of a
single global situation. Rather, we are called upon to think the passage
between the incompossible worlds that appear as coexisting potentialities of a
single space immediately before us. In the first, the collective, in affirming
its own existence, lays claim to a new form of appearance which reimagines the
relation of the political to what had heretofore been excluded from it; while
in the second, the collective disappears altogether from the scene of the
political.
“I think the center of the
world is everywhere,” remarked Sissako during a visit to Izola, in Slovenia.
“When I'm in Izola, I think the center of the world is here.”14 If a courtyard in Bamako
becomes, for the duration of a trial, the center of the world, it is not
because this place has any special privilege over any other, but because it is
in this space, for the time of this event, that the logic governing the whole
world is contested by a part of the world that has no part in its governance.
But the very form of that contestation—an enunciative
act which, by calling the virtual collective it addresses into being, sets in motion a “movement of world”—confronts us with
the question: For what collective, and of what world, will this place be the
provisional center?
If, as
the ambiguous conclusion of Bamako reminds
us, this question is as yet largely an open one, it is no doubt due in part to
the scarcity of collective actors on the global stage able to contest the logic
governing the global system as a whole. But this question has, meanwhile, only
become more pressing with the rapid spread of a systemic global crisis, as the virtual
community of debtors becomes increasingly visible even within the metropole’s
great citadels of international speculation and finance, which have
complacently flattered themselves that they governed from the world system’s
stable and immovable center. Indeed, in the present crisis, the cry of Sissako’s
film—with its appeal to a collective that does not yet exist, together with its
creation of an affective, if ephemeral, image of that collective--now
reverberates with a new intensity, not only in Africa and the global South, but
within the metropole itself. The problem of representing or mapping this new
global situation—in which, with the economic collapse of Iceland, the reach of
the IMF’s policies of structural adjustment extends from the global South to
the Arctic Circle—will undoubtedly be posed anew, and in new forms, as this
crisis unfolds. But, as we have seen, Sissako’s
film does not only lead us to reflect on how Bamako’s various publics might map their own respective places, either
in relation to this new global situation considered as a whole, or in relation
to the ambiguous place of the film’s uninvited witness, whose cry reverberates
within and beyond its fictive theatre of justice. It also obliges us to ask in
what form, and under what conditions, new collective actors might emerge to
respond to its call.
Scott Durham is Associate Professor of French at
Northwestern University, where he also teaches Comparative Literary Studies. He
is the author of Phantom Communities: The Simulacrum and the Limits of
Postmodernism (Stanford University Press)
and the editor of a Yale French Studies issue on Jean Genet. He is currently writing two books, with the working titles Eurydice’s Gaze: Historicity, Memory and Untimeliness in Postmodern Film and The Archive and the Monad: Deleuze
and the Resistance to Postmodernism.
Notes
1 This quote is from the interview appearing on the DVD
released by New Yorker Video (2008) (hereafter referred to parenthetically in
the text as “DVD Interview”).
2 Sissako’s text appears in the booklet accompanying the DVD
released by New Yorker Video (2008) along with other short texts by other
African intellectuals and representatives of civil society critical of the
policies imposed by the so-called “Washington Consensus.” For an extended
critique of those policies from an insider’s perspective, see Joseph E.
Stiglitz, Globalization and its
Discontents (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2002).
3
See Jacques Rancière, La
Mésentente: Politique et Philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1995), translated in
English by Julie Rose as Disagreement:
Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press, 1999.) Parenthetical references in the text will be to the English
translation.
4 On transcoding, see Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 40.
5 As Sissako says of Bamako’s
own distribution in the interview on the New Yorker Video DVD, “Unfortunately, the
question of the distribution of this film is a difficult question, as for any
African film, because the distribution networks that once existed on this
continent are dead [.... ] So today the visibility of the film in Africa will
be a difficult matter….” (I have modified the translation given in the
subtitles.) This situation, he goes on to argue, is itself partly attributable
to cultural policies imposed as a result of “structural adjustment.”
6 For a discussion of a number of permutations of this problem,
see Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical
Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992).
7 Most immediately, the origin of those grievances may be
traced back to the injustice inflicted on her by her former lover, Dramaan
Drameh, who deserted her and their child for a then wealthier woman, but,
considered in a broader context, they are inseparable from her mistreatment as
a woman by the patriarchal establishment of the town, which connived at this
injustice.
8Given the film’s biting portrayal of the gender and
political relations that existed in the town before its complete assimilation
into the global system, these virtues include an implicit rejection of any
notion that an uncritical affirmation of the “traditional” or “local” might be an adequate response to multinational
globalization. On this point, see Richard Porton, “Mambéty’s Hyenas: Between Anti-Colonialism and the
Critique of Modernity” Iris 18
(1995), which foregrounds Mambéty’s refusal of any “essentialism” or simplistic
“binarism” (98).
9 She summarizes his lament, which lasts for three minutes in
the film (but which Sissako says was itself cut down from twenty minutes of
improvised performance), in three questions: “‘Why don’t I sow anymore? When I
sow, why don’t I reap? When I reap, why don’t I eat.’” For his remarks cited
above, see Sissako’s interview with Ali Jaafar, “Finding Our Own Voices, “ in Sight and Sound, v.17 no. 2, February
2007, pp.30-31.
10 Spivak’s lecture, “Rethinking Comparativism,” delivered at
Northwestern University March 8, 2008, discussed Bamako, among other texts, in a further development of questions
raised in her Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), especially those raised on translation
in the first chapter of that book, “Crossing Borders” (pp. 1-24).
11 On the concept of the “intercessor” [intercesseur] in Deleuze’s thought, see Pourparlers 1972-1990 (Paris: Minuit, 1990), 165-184. It is
translated in English as Negotiations:
1972-1990, by Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995),
121-134 (where “intercesseur” is
translated as “mediator,” despite the latter’s rather un-Deleuzian dialectical
overtones.) The role of the intercessor in Deleuze’s thought is not to
represent or exemplify, nor is it, as Ronald Bogue observes, “simply to
advocate for the other,” “but also to ‘go between’ (Latin: inter+cedere), to assist
the other by intervening in the other’s world and producing creative
interference [….]” As Bogue points out, this concept in Deleuze has at once
ethical, aesthetic and political dimensions: it is linked to the ethical
imperative “to affect and be affected” by the other, “to suspend, as much as
one can, the categorization and comprehension of the other,” in order to
disclose “the undetermined, hidden possible worlds that are expressed in the
affective signs of the other”; to the aesthetic aim of mobilizing “powers of
the false” in order to produce new forms of truth; and to the political imperative
to give expression to unactualized potentialities immanent in the social field,
in the name of a “people to come.” See Ronald Bogue, Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics (Aldershot, England and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2007), 13-14.
12 Deleuze’s notion of movements of world develops out of his
discussion of “states of reverie, of waking dream, of strangeness or
enchantment” in which the virtual potentialities unactualized in a situation
(potentialities paradoxically disclosed by the blockage of a character’s
immediate possibilities of acting upon that situation) are no longer attributed
to the dream of an individual subject or character, but become visible in a
virtual movement of the world surrounding that character, as in an “implied
dream.” (See Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 58-64; Cinéma
2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit, 1985), 80-87. According to Deleuze, such movements of world, which perhaps
find their supreme development in the musical comedy, depersonalize the powers
called up by the dream, which thereby take on a collective dimension: “There
takes place a kind of “worldizing” [mondialisation]
or “societizing” [mondianisation], a
depersonalizing….” (English trans. p. 59; French p. 80). This
becoming-collective of the virtual powers mobilized by the dream, one might
add, bears an undeniable, if often only implicit, political charge: it is
indissociable, for example, from the utopian dimension of the musical as a
form. In Bamako, of course, we are
not transported into anything like the dream-world of an “enchanted
proletariat” (as Deleuze says of the world of Busby Berkeley) (60; 82-83).
Here, by way of contrast, it is the improbable event of the trial itself, in
this everyday space, and, above all, the appearance of this uninvited witness
within it, which, like the improbable movement, in the musical, from walking to
dance in an ordinary street, provides the point of passage from the actual to
the virtual. But Zegué Bamba’s performance--which draws previously individual
griefs into an ecstatic movement passing through an emergent collective, and thereby
give expression to its heretofore nonexistent world--expresses, no less than
the “world” of a musical number, the experience of a virtual community, for
which those previously private sufferings have been “worldized,” at least for
the duration of that performance.
13 Falaï, in his attempts to film both lines of action in the
courtyard throughout the film, despite being forbidden to do so, may in part,
of course, be seen as a stand-in for the filmmaker himself.
14 “Abderrahmane Sissako explains Bamako,” http://www.isolacinema.org/2007/en/node/1961.