Loading ...Opinion: To Timbuktu and back again, wiser for the journey
In the Lionel Bart musical based on Charles Dickens’ novel “Oliver Twist,” Nancy asks Oliver whether he’d go to Timbuktu to prove his devotion. “And back again!” he replies. Timbuktu, in central Mali on the southern edge of the Sahara, represents the ends of the Earth to Nancy and Oliver. But we — how miraculous! — can go there and back again simply by watching “Timbuktu,” a film by Abderrahmane Sissako available online. And we’ll be changed by the experience.
Sissako, whose film was nominated for a best foreign language Oscar in 2014, has also been to Timbuktu and back again. He was born in Mauritania, his mother’s home, but completed part of his primary and secondary education in Mali, his father’s country. He studied cinema in Moscow from 1983 to 1989 and settled in France at the beginning of the 1990s.
Sissako’s movie, based on a brief 2012 Islamist takeover of Timbuktu, wasn’t actually filmed in Timbuktu, however: Sissako thought it still too dangerous. The film isn’t really set in Timbuktu, either, but in what seems to be a small town outside it: Timbuktu’s Timbuktu, as it were. And yet, even in this backwater, modernity has arrived and cultures are mixing.
Among the film’s central characters, for example, the members of a nomadic herding family spend a good deal of their time in the desert looking for a cellphone signal. Their prize cow, which goes astray with disastrous consequences, is called GPS. And what we first take to be one jihadist telling another the dates of Islamist victories turns out to be a conversation about World Cup soccer.
“Timbuktu” depicts cultural homogenization as far from complete, however. Characters in the film speak six different languages: Arabic, French, English, Bambara (a lingua franca in Mali), Songhay (once classed as a Nilo-Saharan language and a lingua franca in Timbuktu) and Tamasheq (spoken by nomadic pastoralist Tuareg people in the area around Timbuktu).
Therefore, crucial exchanges — a marriage proposal, a criminal trial, Islamist bans on music and soccer — have to be translated, sometimes several times. Nor does sharing a language guarantee comprehension. “Brother, I can’t understand your Arabic,” one character complains. “Can you speak English?”
Moreover, cultures may mix only to destroy each other. In an opening sequence, jihadists use wooden African sculptures — I take them to be ancestor deities — for target practice. The female figures, whose distended nipples and navels suggest fertility, seem to be a particular target.
“Timbuktu” also mixes magic with its realism. Young men obey the jihadists’ edict against sport by playing a ghostly soccer game without a ball. A gaudily dressed woman trails through the town’s back alleys carrying a rooster on her shoulder and claiming to be a refugee from the 2010 Haitian earthquake — she says she is as fissured as the Earth itself.
One would expect the Haitian woman’s eccentricity to be the Islamists’ first target. But, then, why does their chief dance like a rooster for her to the forbidden music only we moviegoers can hear? Has he been bewitched by a voodoo priestess, or does Sissako use this erotic moment to mock men’s sexual dominance in fundamentalist Islam?
What, finally, is the message of “Timbuktu”? The mayor of a Paris suburb with many North Africans tried to prevent a screening of “Timbuktu.” According to the newspaper Le Figaro, the mayor decided, without having seen the movie, that it “makes an apology for terrorism,” that his young constituents would see the film’s jihadists as heroes.
Hardly likely, given that rooster dance or the way the local imam gently chides the jihadists for not undertaking personal jihad (struggle) for submission to God’s will. The jihadists are human beings, in other words: What they do is scary, and clearly Sissako condemns it. But the jihadists themselves also have the same foibles you and I have. They are vain, hypocritical, lonely, unwise, overbearing.
Whatever the meaning of “Timbuktu,” it depicts another time and place from our own with such specificity that we are freed to see unexpected comparisons between the film’s world and our own. Since we don’t really live in Timbuktu, we find lessons miraculously generalizable to our own, here and now. The Islamists’ rigid ban on music makes me wonder: Should I sing more? Is soccer a lingua franca I should learn more about? Which American political party is the more hypocritical and overbearing?
Now that I have been to Timbuktu and back again, I am less lonely, because I know humanity better. And I trust that I am marginally wiser and less overbearing.
Anne Waldron Neumann is the author of “Should You Read Shakespeare?” She teaches writing workshops for adults and teens in Princeton.
Source: www.nj.com