To Be Nsala's Daughter: Decomposing the Colonial Gaze by Chérie N. Rivers (review)

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Reviewed by:

• To Be Nsala’s Daughter: Decomposing the Colonial Gaze by Chérie N. Rivers
• Rachel Kabukala

TO BE NSALA’S DAUGHTER: DECOMPOSING THE COLONIAL GAZE. Chérie N. Rivers. Durham: Duke University Press, 2023; pp. 128.

To Be Nsala’s Daughter: Decomposing the Colonial Gaze is the second book from interdisciplinary scholar Chérie N. Rivers and builds upon ideas found in her first, Necessary Noise: Music, Film, and Charitable Imperialism in the East of Congo (published under the name Chérie Rivers Ndaliko). Her most recent monograph centers on a colonial-era image of a Congolese man identified as Nsala made by English missionary and documentary photographer Alice Seeley Harris. The photograph in question features Nsala, who sits looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter, who was murdered by ABIR militia (Anglo-Belgian India Rubber company). The haunting image circulated widely as part of the Congo Reform Association’s campaign to alert the world to the atrocities taking place in King Leopold II’s Congo Free State (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC).

As a response to Harris’s photographic archive, Rivers collaboratively developed and co-taught a workshop titled “Decomposing the Colonial Gaze” as part of her work as executive director of Yole!Africa, a Congolese-led educational and cultural center in Goma, DRC. The workshop involved “recalibrating one’s imagination” to produce art that makes visible systems of power, enacting conscious and creative change (xii). Participants activated the Harris archive through their contemporary interpretations of the historical images. Some engaged in photographic reenactments. Some produced collages or manipulated reprints of the original images. All “interrupted established ways of representing and intervening in Congolese life” (xii). By highlighting the archival interventions offered by the Congolese artists, Rivers reveals a potential path forward for those seeking to decompose colonial systems and the normalized violence that is their undercurrent through critical creativity informed by Rivers’s methods of decomposing, disremembering, and re-remembering, which I return to later in greater detail.

The book is divided into seven chapters. The first serves as a brief, two-page elegy for Nsala, in which Rivers writes about how she came to work with Nsala’s image. She explains how the photograph haunted her and dedicates the book to Nsala and his daughter, sharing her hope that others might also be haunted as an antidote to inaction. The remaining chapter titles employ action verbs: to see, to decompose, to replicate, to contradict, to create, and to love. This play with language and subsequent explanation of each term’s role in decomposing the colonial gaze aligns with the author’s penchant for using active learning and slow scholarship as methodological approaches. Chapter 6, for instance, asks: “What if to see is not to believe but rather to create?” Imagination becomes, for Rivers, a vehicle for rupturing and refusing systems of normalized violence; a tool that can allow one to create new ways of seeing and being beyond the constraints [End Page 583] of colonial logic. Throughout, she incorporates the creative production of contemporary artists in DRC to compel the reader to take stock of their own complicity in the continuation of colonial logic and proposes a shift towards a shared future that rejects violence and instead sustains life.

In chapters 2 and 3, Rivers discusses how producing art that compels viewers to imagine an existence outside of colonial logic involves the futuristic discipline of “seeing against the grain of everything we are taught to believe” (5–7). It also requires changing our habits of perception so we might decompose the colonial gaze. Chapter 2, “To See Nsala’s Daughter,” introduces the reader to the concept of “seeing the dead,” which is a technique Rivers suggests in order to see differently, and considers critical to exposing the violence of colonialism. The author describes seeing the dead as, “looking for the possibilities rendered invisible by systems of normalized violence. This is, quite literally, a matter of seeing ghosts, of seeing what once was or could have been, what isn’t but still could be” (5). Chapter 3, “To Decompose,” focuses on the concept of decomposing the...