Just back from a week at FESPACO – the largest film festival on the continent held in Burkina Faso every two years. I went with two friends, Saheed and Judith, and we snaked our way up through Ethiopia, stopping in Niger, then arriving Ouagadougou.
I didn’t expect what I found there. A film about a Senegalese family torn between Italy, the US, and back home – halfway through the film I can’t breath, gasping at a sense of my own dislocation. Another film, the story of a young boy who in the fervor the Marxist revolution in Burkina Faso dresses up as a super hero and believes he’s invincible – until he learns the bullets don’t discriminate and I connect back with my own boyhood dreams and realize how many lay in shreds. Another film, a young man on the run for murder, cycling through his past lives – apprentice to a rainmaker, money collector for a fat woman freak show, leader of a revolutionary youth group, and as I walk out of the theatre I’m crying as I remember all the lives I’ve lived and how they make no sense – magic show cult member, rancher/farmer, civil rights activist, mining executive, writer lost in the deep crevices of race – and yet all of these lives are me and I need a way to cycle back through, just like the man in the film.
I went to FESPACO once before, and I go to the movies often, but this experience was different. Maybe it was being with friends: hours in the queues, talking through the films, discovering together. Or maybe it’s the place I’m at in life: desperate for stories to make sense of my reality. In any case I know I found my heart, in perhaps the most unlikely place, the deserts of Burkina Faso.
Peace and love, Alex
What an experience! This post strikes a real chord, not only with me, but–I’ll bet–lots of people. I think the effort to be coherent is the great challenge of modernity.
For a while, I thought the answer was to find the right job title. If I could just get a comma after my name and follow it with the right combination of nouns and modifiers, then I would suddenly make sense! That did help, but only a little bit because there are so many areas of life that lie outside of the job title, even if at cocktail parties that’s what you often get reduced to. At least here in the US.
So I consoled myself with the thought that, well I’m collecting all these different little parts of myself, but one day it’s all going to “lead to something.” Now that’s rapidly falling apart. I have no idea if all the ingredients I’m throwing into this big pot are going to add up to anything edible, or if I’m just throwing a bunch of stuff into a big pot and that’s all.
Thank you for writing this post. As I said, I suspect we are not alone. I suspect this schizophrenia is what being modern looks like.
Cinque,
Wow, thanks for your comment back. I know the journey of naming and commas and smashed together labels (maybe we should just be speaking German, they seem to make long hybrid words so easily). And yes, maybe this is the modern condition – interesting that it comes out so strongly in African cinema – the dislocation and the parts that don’t easily connect – that’s where I see this given voice to. Voices from the continent elucidating for the rest of us. Nice.