Ousmane Sembene
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As far as I am concerned, I no longer support notions of purity.
Purity has become
a thing of the past. . . I constantly question myself. I am neither
looking for a school
nor for a solution but asking questions and making others think. (qtd.
in Niang 176)
Biography
Born on 1 January 1923 in Ziguinchor, Senegal, Ousmane Sembene is
assuredly one of the most prominent figures in African film and
literature. Yet little in his early experience seemed to predispose
him to a career not only as a major literary figure but also as a
literary figure, tout court. Primarily self-taught, Sembene has been
exposed to various experiences and situations that have very often
turned out to reverberate in his work. As early as the age of 15, he
started earning his living as a fisherman. Beside working as a
fisherman, Sembene has also served as a bricklayer, a plumber, an
apprentice mechanic, a dock worker and a trade unionist -- jobs which
many people may view as incongruent with, or even unlikely to be
conducive to, the stimulation of literary talents. But it is this very
experience which, paradoxically or not, greatly contributed in shaping
Sembene as the great writer and filmmaker he has become. In this
respect, Ousmane maintains that his education was a result of a
training he received in "the University of Life" (qtd. in Amuta 137).
After World War II broke out, Sembene was drafted into the French
army. He returned to Senegal after the war, but went back to France to
work in the docks of Marseilles where he became a trade union activist
and joined the French Communist Party until the independence of
Senegal in 1960.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sembene's Literary and Filmic Aesthetics
In order to do justice to Sembene's work, one has to put it in a
context where art serves as a creative medium that is primarily imbued
with a functional aesthetics. As he spans over the experience of his
people and evaluates its sociocultural values, Sembene uses an
aesthetics that is largely explainable through consideration of the
cultural setting to which his work refers. Thus, being very much
concerned about the uplifting of the living condition of the exploited
classes, Sembene sees to it that his language remained accessible to
them. Stylistically, Sembene's incredible gift as a storyteller is
often translated into his work by smooth and easy shifts between the
use of standard French and local colloquialisms. It is perhaps this
concern for having his work accessible to those who constitute the
primary subjects of his artistic endeavors that motivates his deep
interest in the visual and the performative. As an artist interested
in carrying his message through to the socially underprivileged
masses, a choice can hardly be more felicitous than this, given the
high illiteracy rate in a country like Senegal.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Writer as Social Critic
Sembene's novelistic debut, Le docker noir, largely mirrors his own
personal experience as a docker in Marseilles. Since the publication
of his first novel, he wrote numerous other books and films which in
one way or another reflect his committed position as a writer or a
filmmaker. In these works his main preoccupation is to critically
assume his social responsibility as a critic who refuses to stand by
as a passive observer while social injustice in post-colonial Africa
takes on increasingly alarming proportions everyday. The nexus of
Sembene's literary and filmic work is generally a critique of the
conflictual relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, the
state and the people, men and women, the rich and the poor, and the
elders and the youth. In sum, his concerns are directed to universal
issues involving tensions that are created by power relations.
Sembene's depiction of the pervasive tensions between the different
existential poles that he examines is generally carried out from a
perspective which ultimately reveals a viewpoint that is both
favorable to the victims and expressive of a counter-hegemonic voice.
In this respect, Sembene's work constitutes a revolutionary crusade
aimed at exposing a certain system that maintains exploitation --
whether such a system is inherited from African traditions or acquired
as a legacy of the colonial encounter between Africa and Europe. Such
a crusade may be viewed in terms of the writer's commitment to stand
as a genuine griot for his people. As Sembene himself argues, the
artist should serve as a spokesperson for his/her people, expressing
the latter's aspirations and fears, and serving as a reflective mirror
for their experience: "The artist must in many ways be the mouth and
the ears of his people. In the modern sense, this corresponds to the
role of the griot in traditional African culture. The artist is like a
mirror. His work reflects and synthesizes the problems, the struggles,
and hopes of his people" (qtd. in Pfaff 29).
Naturally, Sembene's artistic engagement is first and foremost a
political engagement through which the artist can hardly address
social reality in ways other than political. Such a role as assigned
to the artist brings to mind Frederic Jameson's argument that the
intellectual in the Third-World is one that is "always in one way or
another a political intellectual" whose agenda is dictated by the
experience of his/her people (74).
In Sembene's books as well as in his films, political engagement is
often launched from a materialist perspective. Already in one of his
early novels, God's Bits of Wood -- inspired by the historic strike
observed by the workers on the Dakar-Niger railway -- Ousmane Sembene
announces one of the focal trajectories (the interplay between
political, social, and economic factors) that will later run through
his entire work. In this regard, and referring to God's Bits of Wood,
Chidi Amuta rightly maintains that Ousmane puts "a heavy accent on
economic exploitation and physical violence in the novel. But he
predicates this perception on an ideological perspective that firmly
recognizes cultural and institutional practices as contingent on
economic realities" (138). One may arguably contend that in its early
stage the bulk of Sembene's critique was directed against colonial
abuse of power and the concomitant "effects of the colonial experience
on the cultural values and institutional structures of his referent
society" (Amuta 138). His later critical reflection, however,
generally tends to denounce the perpetration of injustice and the
maintenance of an exploitative status quo by privileged classes at
home.
Many observers believe that the vast majority of African post-colonial
states have failed to meet many -- if not most -- of the expectations
that their people initially associated with independence from European
colonial rule. And relatedly, for many African people the formal end
of colonial rule did not produce an end to social injustice and
drastic economic imbalance. In this context, one may easily understand
why Ousmane's work continues to be dominated by a desire to spell out
what he thinks has been going wrong with his society. Thus, he yields
to a critical examination of post-colonial African societies without
seeking neither to embellish nor to discredit them, but to simply
depict a reality in which the intervention of the critic comes as an
attempt to objectively consider issues that are of critical importance
to contemporary African societies. In an interview with FranÁoise
Pfaff, Sembene made his position clear when he argued that "I have
never tried to please my audience through the embellishment of
reality. I am a participant and an observer of my society" (40).
Indeed, as "a participant and an observer" of his society, Sembene
strives (as he recommends young African filmmakers to do the same) to
"give voice to . . . [the] inner screams" of his people (Niang &
Gadjigo 177). Yet even if he maintains that he is "neither looking for
a school nor for a solution," his work elicits a tremendous complex of
issues that he does not just address. Indeed, the ways in which
Ousmane Sembene examines the political and socio-economic spectrum
that is under scrutiny in his work reveal, if nothing else, that at
least awareness of social injustice can be gained through reading his
books or watching his films. If ultimately this unasserted goal is
achieved, then Sembene's work will have undoubtedly managed to create
a highly needed revolution in the beliefs and behaviors of his
primarily targeted audience. If that happens, he will have managed to
contribute to the conscientious creation in his readers of a
consciousness that strives for the establishment of more equity and
justice, despite his resistance to appear prescriptive (KassÈ and
Ridehalgh 191, my translation).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Works by Sembene
Primary Works
Le docker noir. Paris: Nouvelles …ditions Debresse, 1956. Published in
English as The Black Docker.
O Pays, mon beau peuple! Paris: Le Livre Contemporain, 1957.
Les bouts de bois de dieu. Paris: Le Livre Contemporain, 1960.
Published in English as God's Bits of Wood.
Voltaoque. Paris: PrÈsence Africaine, 1962. Published in English as
Tribal Scars and Other Stories.
L'Harmattan. Paris: PresÈnce Africaine, 1964.
Véhi-Ciosane ou Blanche Genese, suivi du Mandat. Paris: PrÈsence
Africaine, 1965. Published in English as The Money Order and White
Genesis.
Xala. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1974. Published in English as Xala.
Le dernier de l'empire (two volumes). Paris: L'Harmattan, 1981.
Published in English as The Last of the Empire.
Niiwam suivi de Taaw. Paris: PrÈsence Africaine, 1987. Published in
English as Niiwam and Taaw.
Filmography
[Although Ousmane Sembene has written and directed an impressively
great number of films, this filmography is limited to a list of what
may be considered to be some of his major films. What follows is
therefore not an exhaustive list of his films.]
Borom Sarret (1963). No official English title.
La noire de... (1966). [Black Girl. In French with English subtitles]
Mandabi (1968). [The Money Order. In Wolof and in French. There is
also a Wolof version with English subtitles]
Taaw (1970). [In Wolof with English subtitles]
Emitai (1971). [God of Thunder. In Diola and French with English subtitles.]
Xala (1974). [In Wolof and French with English subtitles]
Ceddo (1976). [In Wolof with English subtitles]
Camp de Thiaroye (1988). [In Wolof and French with English subtitles]
Guelwaar (1992). [Guelwaar: An African Legend for the 21st Century. In
Wolof and French with English subtitles]
Photo: From Xala
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Works Cited
Amuta, Chidi. The Theory of African Literature: Implications for a
Practical Criticism. London: Zed Books LTD, 1989.
Jameson, Frederic. "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism." Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88.
Kassé Magueye & Anna Ridehalgh. "Histoire et traditions dans la
création artisitique: entretien avec Ousmane Sembéne." French Cultural
Studies. Vol. 6 (Part 2), no. 17 (June 1995): 179-196.
Niang, Sada & Samba Gadjigo. "Interview with Ousmane Sembene."
Research in African Literatures 26:3 (Fall 1995): 174-178.
Pfaff, Françoise. The Cinema of Ousmane Sembene: A Pioneer of African
Film. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1984.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Author: Serigne Ndiaye, Fall 1998
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html
To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
|
