Review of It all depends #2

A male voice reads out a text, which is repeated each time by a multi-voice chorus – I write down the German subtitles and make a few notes on the images:
“The origin of the people of Mozambique: // When the Portuguese came to Mozambique ... // … in 1498 …”
Slow fade-in to an image showing a spider starting to crawl.
“… they found … // an Arab leader // … whose name was … // ... Mouss-en-Bik … // … on the island before Mozambique …”
Suddenly, the spider is gone; only a sort of crosshairs remain in the image – or is it part of a grid?
“Bantu … // … is the name …”
Zoom out.
“… of a large group … // … of languages …“
I realize that the image shows a shot out of a window. What I thought was a swastika or grid is actually the cracked window glass.
“… that we speak.”
Cut to an image showing the foundation walls of a building under construction.
“The first inhabitants ... //… of southern Africa ...”
The image becomes fuzzy. Zoom out. The camera now focuses on the foreground.
“… including … // those of Mozambique // … were … // … the Bushmen … // … a people … // … small …”
Cut to the window, followed by a pan down and to the left.
“… in stature … // … and nomads. // After the Bushmen … // … came the Hottentots … // … a people … // … more ... // developed // in their social structure // The Bushmen // fled to … // … the Kalahari desert ... // … where they live to this day.”
The same voice, possibly of a teacher, can be heard again, which now says: “Now we want to read.” The title of the film then follows: MUEDA, MEMORIA E MASSACRE.

“Moments that Took me Back”

The racist terms “Bushmen” and “Hottentots” used in the German subtitles, which were created for the Berlinale Forum in 1981 (translation: Sigrid Vagt), correspond to the words “koeshan” and “hottentotes” in the Portuguese original soundtrack. – In Germany, these concepts or colonial constructs of African societies are an echo from the time of the German settler colony in what is now Namibia between 1884 and 1915 as well as from the genocidal colonial war between 1904 and 1907. The label “H” remains to this day a metaphor for disorder in everyday speech. In a 1920 German colonial lexicon, the “Bushmen” are referred to as “people in German South-West Africa that call themselves the San.” (Vol. I, 2) And “The H. call themselves Koikoin, which means something like people.” (Vol. II, 77). There was thus a clear awareness of colonial de-naming. The reference work Afrika und die deutsche Sprache (Africa and the German language) published by Susan Arndt and Antje Hornscheidt in 2009 (Münster: Unrast Verlag) establishes that (in the entry on “H” by Stefan Göttel, 147–153) “khoi” is also a foreign attribution and that both constructions are linked to the highly questionable idea of a cultural development taking place from nomadic (hunting and gathering) ways of living to more settled ones (cattle rearing), as is also reflected in the narrative of MUEDA, MEMORIA E MASSACRE. Debunked – a closed box. But if not even a fraction of the colonial archive’s totalisations have been cast off to at least some extent, how could I dare to keep asking in German? By embarking on a liaison with the “Faire crever l'horizon borné que nous ont imposé les anthropologues" (Hountondji 1977: 238) rather than looking for sources in German?

Becoming Many

All these smooth transitions before, after and while watching the film, between the translations within the film and the transferral of other medialities, such as the theatrical framework, into the film and, as must also be added, from the film back out into our lives and bodies and their everyday practices are transformations that presuppose a “safe place” or actually create one to begin with, a place where the pain must be repeated and recognized. So we sat in the small Arsenal 2 cinema in Berlin and looked at the screen and from there back into the auditorium and its door. The translations we followed in the film and then afterwards amongst ourselves as the event organizers and audiences were more or less about the trace of the narrator, much like Walter Benjamin describes how the trace of the potter’s hand remains on the clay bowl. – It’s less about work with hands here than work with bodies, about the already difficult task of attaching bodies to bodies. The translator’s acting in MUEDA, MEMORIA E MASSACRE was in any case close to being something like an example of this when he always noticeably deviates slightly from the source when translating from Creole into Portuguese, translating "up" (into a dominant language), placing the gesture before language, the embodied history translating the translator before he begins to translate. Or the infectious laughter about those wearing uniforms, their clumsily presented poses for military physical discipline recalling the Cameroonian makossa band Golden Sounds from the 1980s, whose song “Zangalewa” (which approximately means “who sent you?”) provided the 2012 World Cup song interpreted by Shakira... It is not only those acting in Mueda that are given a body, but also what they are acting, a body that is far, far more than the embodiment of one’s own biographical history, but rather divisions and multiplications that stretch back to the fish that came from the sea and apes whose tales were cut off ... – Prologues that are not origin stories, but rather transmutations marked by migration and conquest ...

In-between History

The interval, the intervention of a third space destroys the mirror of representation according to Homi Bhabha. “The intervention of the Third Space of enunciation, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code. Such an intervention quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People.” (Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994: 54) He talks of the disruptive temporality of the enunciation, which leads to the narrative of the Western nation being displaced as a homogenous, serial time and thus being incorporated into a discontinuous time of translation and negotiation. This inherently non-representable interstice is constitutive for cultural signs being able to be translated and re-historisized and above all re-assigned and re-coded, bringing Bhabha into connection with Frantz Fanon’s vision of revolutionary cultural and political change as forming the "swaying movement" of a concealed sense of vertigo and making a plea to this end for a cultural practice whose productive potentials are of both colonial and post-colonial origin. “For a willingness to descend into that alien territory (…) may reveal that the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture (…). To that end we should remember that it is the 'inter' – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the inbetween space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. It makes it possible to begin envisaging national, anti-nationalist histories of the 'people'. And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves.” (ibid. 58)

Post-Histories

For me, the urgency of this for the German-speaking world seems to have been shown by the debate and occasional lack thereof surrounding Johan Simons’ staging of Jean Genet’s "Les Nègres" at the Vienna Festwochen, about which Matthias Dell wrote in Zeit Online that: “If it’s evidently already too much to ask that the director presiding over the 2013 theatre of the year might actually understand the problem in using the N-word, might it not at least have been possible for Simons not to have ruined the one single joke in the piece? Genet’s stage direction stipulating that only black actors are to be cast in the play did at least shown an understanding of the fact that racism in theatre is about concrete questions of representation. That Simons now has white actors playing black actors playing white colonialists shows on the other hand that he clearly hasn’t understood the play whatsoever”.(1)

(1) http://www.zeit.de/kultur/2014-06/neger-genet-simons-festwochen/seite-2