Laura Mulvey, 'The Carapace that Failed: Ousmane Sembene's Xala (1974)'
In: Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace. Edited by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999, pp. 400-420.
The germinal ground in which the African cinema developed in the postcolonial period was the Francophone sub-Sahara, above all in Senegal and Mali, and first of all, with Ousmane Sembene. Geographically, this area has its own cultural traditions dating back to the old Mande Empire, founded by Sundiata in the eleventh century, and which revived in resistence to French colonialism, as the Dyula Revolution, under Samoury Toure in the late nineteenth century. It was not until Independence in 1960, when the French were abandoning most of their African colonies in the hope of holding on to Algeria, that the conditions for an African cinema came into being. Sembene’s work, first as a writer, then as a filmmaker, crosses the 1960 divide and is also divided by it. During the 1950s, Sembene had made his name as an African novelist, writing, of course, in French. His first novel, Le Docker Noir (The Black Docker, 1956), was written while working in the docks and as a union organiser in Marseille. Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu (God’s Bits of Wood) was published in 1960 (after a number of others), based on his experiences during the famous 1947-48 strike on the Bamako-Dakar railway. Then, in 1961, immediately after Senegal achieved Independence, he went to the Soviet Union to study at the Moscow Film School and his first short film, Borrom Sarret, was shown at the Tours film festival in 1963. La Noir de… (Black Girl), released in 1966, was the first full-length feature from the sub-Sahara.
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In Sembene’s film Xala (1974) the question of language is at the political centre of the drama. The economic division between the indigenous entrepreneurial elite and the impoverished people is reflected in a division between French and Wolof. The elite use French to communicate among themselves and as their official language. They speak Wolof only across class and gender lines and treat it as inferior and archaic. In the novel Xala (published by Heinemann Books as part of their African Writers series in 1976), which Sembene wrote up from his script while searching for funds for the film, the young people on the Left have developed a written equivalent for the Wolof language and are publishing a journal in their native language for the first time. In the film, Sembene sets up a parallel between two figures, who are quite marginal to the story but significant for its politics. One is a young student selling the new journal; the other is a peasant, robbed of his village’s savings, which he had brought to town to buy seed. Both get caught in the police round-up of beggars that forms the film’s central tableau and become integrated into the beggar community. Any moves towards cultural and economic advance and self-sufficiency from the people themselves are dashed in the polarisation between the entrepreneurial elite and the underclass it creates.
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The recent revival of interest in the origins of the term ‘fetishism’ has drawn attention to its conceptual contribution to the European polarisation between primitive and civilised thought and its consequent moral and intellectual justifications for imperialism. In other words, the concept of fetishism cannot be dismissed because of its compromised place in exploitative exchange and imperialist ethnography. On the contrary, the concept and its history can throw light on the ‘enormous misunderstandings’ between Europe and Africa. William Pietz has discussed the origins of both the word and the concept in a series of articles in the journal Res. [5] He shows how the word emerged in the cross-cultural encounter between West African and European Christian cultures in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. It was a ‘novel word that appeared as a response to an unprecedented type of situation’, [6] of relations between ‘cultures so radically different as to be mutually incomprehensible’. [7] Pietz argues that the term bears witness to its own history. To reject the term completely, as purely and simply a relic of colonialism and imperialist anthropology, is to ignore its historical specificity and the cultural implications that go with it. Pietz demonstrates that fetishism is a debased derivation of the Portuguese fetiçio, which means ‘witchcraft’, in turn derived from the Latin facticium which means, ‘artificial’, something made up to look like something else. Feitiçio was generally applied by the Portuguese to beliefs and practices that they neither could nor would interpret, but encountered in their commercial relations. In the pidgin of middlemen, who settled in West Africa and became the soi-disant experts on native customs, the word became fetisso. Pietz notes: ‘It brought a wide array of African objects and practices under a category that, for all its misrepresentation of cultural facts, enabled the formulation of more or less non-coercive commercial relations between members of bewilderingly different cultures’. [8]
The lore and practices that developed around the concept of the fetisso was then inherited, wholesale and to a second degree, by the Dutch traders who arrived on the West Coasts in the very late sixteenth century and had gradually ejected the Portuguese by 1641. The Dutch Calvinists brought the Reformation’s deep, anxious hatred of the superstitious and idolatrous practices of Catholicism.
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Although the particular discourse of sexuality on which Freud’s theory of fetishism depends cannot be imposed carelessly on another culture, Sembene’s juxtaposition of the psychosexual with the socioeconomic is explicit. He uses the sexual as the point of fissure, or weakness, in the system of economic fetishism. El Hadji’s impotence is a symptom of something else, a sign of eruption of the unconscious onto the body itself. In Freud, the fetish enables the psyche to live with castration anxiety; it contributes to the ego’s mechanisms of defence; it keeps the truth that the conscious mind represses, concealed. When the fetish fails to function effectively, the symptoms it holds in check start to surface. In Xala, the fragile carapace collapses under pressure from class politics and economics but these pressures are expressed through, and latched on to, sexuality, working on the body’s vulnerability to the psyche. For Sembene, class politics determine events over and above sexuality. Sexuality plays its part in the drama as the site of the symptom, the first sign of a return of the repressed. In his representation of repression, Sembene makes full use of he double entendre that can condense its political and psychoanalytic connotations.
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The circulation of European commodities in a society of the kind depicted in Xala, caricatures and exaggerates the commodity fetishism inherent in capitalism. Rather than representing an enigma that may be deciphered, politically and theoretically, to reveal its place in the historical and economic order of things, the commodity’s ties with history have been effectively severed. The chain of displacements that construct the concept of value are attenuated to the point that all connection with the source of value, basic to fetishism, are irredeemably lost in the movement from capitalism to colonialism. Floating freely outside its own economy, the gulf between luxury objects monopolised by a Third-World elite and the labour power of the working class in the producing country seems vast. Belief in the commodity’s supposedly self-generated value does not demand the process of disavowal on which it depends at home so that it can live out its myth as an object of cult. In Xala, Sembene uses the neo-colonial economy to show the capitalist commodity ‘super fetishised’. Modu, for instance, only puts imported bottled water into the Mercedes. These things take on pure ‘sign value’ (as Baudrillard would put it). However, the objects enable another process of disavowal. Sembene suggests that these fetishised objects seal the repression of history and of class and colonial politics under the rhetoric of nationhood. His use of the concept of fetishism is not an exact theoretical working through of the Marxist of Freudian concepts of fetishism, however; it is Marxist and Freudian. The interest of the film lies in its inextricable intermeshing of the two.
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[5] Wiliam Pietz, ‘The Problem of the Fetish’, Part 1, Res, no. 9 (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Spring 1985), pp. 5-17; Part 2 in Res, no. 13 (Spring 1987), pp. 23-46; Part 3, Res, no. 16 (Autumn 1988), pp. 105-24.
[6] Pietz, op.cit., Part 1, p. 6.
[7] Pietz, op.cit., Part 2, p. 21.
[8] Ibid., p. 23.