Cinema and diaspora, between the mirror and the rear-view mirror

Of all the so-called modern arts, cinema probably comes closest to matching the versatility of African oral tradition, where the possibility exists of speaking horizontally, like the Griot or the elders, with and to all or at least the vast majority. The horizontality of cinema as a discourse enables one to present, narrate, represent, and recreate imagined scenarios and realities that transport us inside those experiences despite our being geographically distant from a country. As Ousmane Sembène once said, “cinema speaks as much to an African living abroad as it does to a farmer in the remotest village on the African continent.” This interplay between mirror and rear-view mirror allows for an emotional umbilical connection with one′s country of origin. In the diaspora, films condense the past in the present and serve as a refuge against the phantasm of uprootedness. In African cinema in general and in Manthia Diawara′s films in particular, exile more so than territorial displacement is both an encounter and a missed encounter between the present and memory and history. Peeking in the mirror of the present is the rear-view mirror of the past, in search of the roots and meanings of our diasporic condition and its link to the inherited dynamics of historical processes in identity construction that lead to the constitution of the African political subject. In “Conakry Kas” and “Bamako Sigi-Kan”, this quest to reconcile the present with memory and history is a metaphor of what has remained and has yet to be achieved in the pan-African dream. As incredible as it sounds, pan-African sentiment is now more alive and of greater significance in the diaspora than on the continent. Amongst other aspects of Manthia Diawara′s films, this lecture aims to discuss how, on the one hand, cinema is, for the diaspora, a way of looking at oneself and how nostalgia in “exile can restore Africa” in diasporic communities by reconstructing imagined and/or lived scenarios, and on the other, how cinema can be place of refuge against the hardships of exile, uprootedness, and isolation. And how the rear-view mirror of past time and the mirror of the present linking us to the past are an exorcising of the dystopic remains of the utopias of the past and of those to come.