Afri-Queer Fugitivity in African Cinema

Abstract

Speaking of Queer African Cinema's scope, Lindsey Green-Simms declares that her book should not be read as definitive or encyclopedic. Rather, it should be seen as a useful set of readings and a model of reading for scholars, activists, and filmmakers. Independently of that claim, the insightful study in four chapters fulfills the encyclopedic (in its erudition) function in addition to accomplishing what the author set out to do. In its curation of queer cinematic texts from both francophone and anglophone Africa, the book not only brings to light a vibrant archive but also charts innovative reading praxes that may inspire other scholars.Primarily, Green-Simms sees her examination of avant-garde films, realist dramas, popular melodramas, occult films, and a music video as demonstrating that the types of resistance the texts restage “are always multilayered, always determined by a complex entanglement of racial, gendered, and sexual identities and national politics as well as by conventions of genre and format and modes of circulation” (9). This investment in reformulating resistance as multiple and sometimes conflicting takes seriously the queer cultural artifacts as well as the inspiriting and challenging material conditions that undergird their production, distribution, and enjoyment.As such, Queer African Cinema is a first. That firstness stems from Green-Simms's long-standing and serious engagement with the cinematic texts, their actors, producers, distributors, censors, audiences, festival organizers, activists, scholars, and sites of appearance. Her knowledge of the context, which stems from participating in conferences, attending film festivals, and interviewing different actors in numerous countries, is translated into a methodological approach—worth highlighting—that is illuminating yet subtle. For instance, complementing her formal analysis of the documentary Major! (dir. Annalise Ophelian, 2015) with the insights she gained from attending the first-ever Queer Kampala International Film Festival (QKIFF) in 2016, she shares, “When the credits rolled during the Kampala screening where I was present, there was a huge round of applause. There were a few audible ‘wows’ from the audience, and several members looked back at the screen, raised a fist, and echoed the film's call for resilience by claiming, loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘I'm still fucking here’ ” (165, my emphasis). This delicate yet notable phrase “where I was present” gives some credence to the author's experience while turning the text from mere ethnography to robust analysis. The author's experience serves equally as a forceful reminder that films are seen and engaged in the world, making the case, if need be, that formal analysis benefits from the live audience reaction, which is unmistakably mediated by the writer's biases and goals.The firstness that marks the publication of Queer African Cinema as a formative work reflects the status of most of its films, film festivals, scenes, and characters. For instance, Mohamed Camara's Dakan (1997), discussed in the book's introduction and the coda, was West Africa's first queer film and is often considered the first global African feature. Joseph Gai Ramaka's Karmen Gei (2001), one of the two works examined in chapter 1, was the first-ever depiction of African lesbian sex on screen, the first and only with an explicitly queer protagonist, and the first African adaptation of Prosper Mérimée's 1845 novella, Carmen, which George Bizet turned into an opera in 1875. Similarly, Ghanaian Socrates Safo's popular film Women in Love (1996), which gave birth to Jezebel (2007–8), the four-part Ghanaian video film also analyzed in chapter 1, was one of the first Black African films ever to depict lesbianism. Wanuri Kahiu's Rafiki (2018), a key text in chapter 4, is a first in two ways, as it is the first queer Kenyan film to be shown in Kenyan cinemas and the first Kenyan film ever to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Stories of Our Lives (dir. Jim Chuchu, 2014), which features prominently in the book's introduction, became the first East African queer film to screen at international film festivals. Turning to Nollywood in chapter 2, Green-Simms focuses on Walking with Shadows (dir. Aoife O'Kelly), an adaptation of Jude Dibia's novel of the same name that became the first Nigerian queer film to premiere internationally when it screened at the British Film Institute Film Festival in 2019. Lancelot Imasuen's Emotional Crack (2003)—another key text of the same chapter—was the first Nigerian film to make homosexuality central to its plot and to feature an actual relationship between a same-sex couple.In Queer African Cinema, the reader will enjoy an enlightening account of many first queer film festivals. These include the South African Out in Africa Film, discussed in chapter 3, which in 1994 became the first national and officially recognized queer film festival on the continent. Chapter 4 explores the east African context by way of two “first” festivals: the Nairobi Out Film Festival (OFF) that in 2011 was the first queer African film festival outside of South Africa and QKIFF in Kampala, inaugurated in 2016. These festivals were organized and films produced, circulated, and enjoyed amid germinal moments, notably 1994, which marked South Africa as the first country in the world to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.In addition to its erudition in the domain of queer filmic texts, Queer African Cinemas offers readers numerous conceptual and analytical insights. An outstanding element of that conceptual repertoire and reading praxis is the cut that undergirds the notion of Afri-queer fugitivity, which is carefully demarcated from fugitivity as conceived in Black studies. Afri-queer fugitivity emerges from interpreting multiple films, but particularly chapter 1’s two films, Karmen Geï and Jezebel. Remakes of prior stories that feature eccentric iterations of the water spirit Mami Wata who engage in lesbianism, the films’ narratives offer in their form and in their improvisational jazz and drumming score the possibility of being read as cuts and breaks “that make waves in ways that are neither progressive nor regressive but that allow . . . for a particular emergence to occur” (71).Just as Green-Simms reformulates fugitivity, she also offers a robust examination of contemporary and perennial concepts, including resistance, resilience, hegemonic masculinity, fugitivity, waywardness, and fetishistic spectatorship. These terms get inflected, carrying nuances when confronted with African cultural productions and material contingencies. The idea of critical resilience in chapter 4, for instance, develops from Green-Simms's analyses of Rafiki, Art Attack's “Same Love (Remix)” music video, and queer art and activism within film festivals in Nairobi and Kampala. Investigating the struggles, triumphs, pains, and pleasures from these texts, Green-Simms surmises that critical resilience highlights two modes: a mode of championing “individual endurance, . . . in a way that also challenges neoliberal narratives by seeking to upend hierarchal organization and reimagine social life” and the mode of criticality, of dire necessity, and of resilience (171). This engagement shows the author's commendable knowledge of current concepts; however, her need to constantly reformulate them ends up framing the African context as fundamentally different from those from which the terms emerged.Similar to the films, characters, and storylines that make waves in Queer African Cinemas, the structure of the book is queer and wayward. Its organization is as intuitive with the geographic arrangement as it is queer with its content. Whereas two chapters deal with national contexts, Nigeria and South Africa, the two others examine two regions, West Africa and East Africa. Whereas wayward femininities and wounded masculinities occupy chapters 1 and 3, respectively, groundbreaking and broken film festivals, outrageous censorship boards, and triumphant filmmakers and audiences make up the content of chapters 2 and 4, demonstrating how modes of queer imaginative acts “are nonlinear and nondismissive” of pleasure and defeat (33).Written in clear prose and brilliantly self-reflexive in method, this sophisticated reading of queer cinematic texts deserves attention for the ways in which it converses with the most compelling scholars, thinkers, artists, and activists of queerness and gender in the generalized African context. The insights from Green-Simms's conversations with Keguro Macharia, Sylvia Tamale, Zethu Matebeni, Brenna Munro, George Barasa, Unoma Azuah, Stella Nyanzi, Dayon Monson, Beverley Ditsie, S. N. Nyeck, Binyavanga Wainaina, Ezekiel Mutua, Karl Schoonover, David Murray, and Neville Hoad make this book a must-read for those interested in queerness and film studies in Africa and beyond.