Reviewed by Biko Agozino
Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful
writer whose contributions to online debates always signal to me that a
thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see
that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African
cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: ‘The images
scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the
rubbish bin by celluloid film standards’ (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me
to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author
obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and
trash in the book.
Having read the book, I admit
that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of
conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash
in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that
Africans are ‘worthless people’. The author over-generalized his observation of
trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films,
the culture, the politics, the law and the people. ‘What is worthless? Who is
trash?’ He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is
not trash should be the answers.
Right from the cover illustration
of the book, the author wrongly suggests that the ‘dyed red sheet hung to dry’
in Abderrahmane Sissako’s film, Bamako,
is a representation of trash whereas it is the valued African textile industry of
‘tie and dye’ that people wear with pride across the world.
The author reports in the
introduction that he was warned about this choice of words in his earlier book
on Postcolonial Cinema in Africa. According to him, Jude Akudinobi warned him
against taking the analogy too far especially given that the dismissal of
African cinema in a scene analyzed in that earlier book was contested by a
character who condemned the speaker as trash: ‘If African cinema is trash, then
you are trash because you are an African’, he retaliated. For reasons best
known to him, Ken decided to double down on this pejorative description of
Africans that is all too familiar from the point of view of white supremacy, a
perspective that is contradictory to his otherwise pro-African views in his
scholarship.
One of the reasons given by Ken
Harrow for using the trope of trash to represent valuable African cultural
productions is because he finds support in the theory of Bataille about the
locations of trash in surrealism (Chapter 1). Here he said that he threw a challenge in his
earlier book, Postcolonial Cinema,
calling for a new Aristotle to emerge to theorize the new cinema of Africa.
Without telling us why he presumed that another Aristotle, a guy who believed
that slavery was natural, would be a suitable theoretical framework for
understanding African culture, a culture that was wounded by centuries of
slavery, Bro Ken decided to take up his own challenge.
Trash therefore appears to be a pitiable wrestling match between
him and himself. His difficulty could have been enormously lessened if he had
ignored Aristotle and examined the drama of classical African civilization in
ancient Egypt that predated Greek drama by 3000 years, according to Cheikh Anta
Diop (Civilization or Barbarism). The
presumption of race-class-gender superiorism by Harrow is revealed when he
cites Battaille as asserting that the upper classes make ‘almost exclusive use
of ideas’ even when some of those ideas may have lowly origins (p.15). The Ken
Harrow who writes everything in lower case letters in his constant online
contributions to debates would have been expected to challenge Bataille here
but he accepts the dubious notion uncritically just as he accepted Mbembe’s
astonishing slur that Africans focus exclusively on the mouth, the belly and
the phallus as if they have no mind of their own.
His only attempt to critique this
myopic view about Africans came out lame because of his coupling of
‘glamorousness/repulsiveness’ (p.24) as if they are conjoined twins in African
cinema. On the same page he demeans Ghana by suggesting that a ‘shit-caked
handrail’ in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The
Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (where the handrail in question was not
covered in shit cakes but in a ‘generous grub of mucous’, a wise hygienic
advice to avoid germ-infested public handrails that is heard even in ‘clean’
countries) was representative of Ghana under Nkrumah. But CLR James would
differ in Nkrumah and the Ghana
Revolution by identifying the glorious National School Movement as a major
medium of resistance to colonialism and a major achievement in nation-building,
not shit cakes or trash.
Harrow cites Sembene Ousmane as
identifying African cinema as the night school of the masses in line with Achebe’s
subservience of literature to pedagogy but he devalues such emphases in African
arts and cinema by following Ranciere to term them ‘mimesis’ or mere ‘representation’
as opposed to 'experimentation' (32-33).
In arguing his spurious
hypothesis that revolutionary accounts tend to neglect trash, Harrow makes a
grievous theoretical error by asserting that ‘views from the trash
landscape…don’t figure in the Fanonian liberationist schemata’ (p.40). Quite
the contrary, for according to Fanon, the dominant image of the colonized in
the mind of the colonizer was that of: ‘Dirty Nigger, or simply, look a Negro’,
dirty Arab, dirty Jew, or dirty Indian despite the fact that the colonized was
remarkably clean compared to some filthy-rich members of the colonizing group.
Harrow also erred historically by
asserting that ‘western decadence’ is the source of postmodernism whereas
Jacques Derrida insisted that his deconstruction derived from his African
cultural background, a view that is indirectly supported by Ron Eglash in African Fractals and by Adbul Karim
Banguara in Fractal Complexity in the Works
of Major Black Thinkers. Recognizing African originality even in a western
art form such as cinema would demand less obsession with trash and a greater
focus on creativity and worthiness.
To his credit, Harrow throws in
genuine concerns about inequality, revolution and protest about consumer
capitalism and the export of toxic waste from the West to underdeveloped
countries. The former President of Harvard University and former Obama
economics adviser, Larry Summers, is quoted (pp21-22) as saying that there is a
rational basis for rich countries to export toxic waste to poor countries
because the lives of the poor are not as valuable as the lives of the rich.
This is an indirect suggestion that the trash represented in African cinema may
be part of the 'evidence' for the 'mock trial' of imperialism as dramatized in one
of the films that he discussed. With a chapter on the dumping of toxic waste in Africa,
Harrow may be indirectly calling for more films on the theme of environmental
justice in Africa.
However, Harrow neglected to
point out to readers that the trope of trash is not an African trope but a
Western one. The importation of trash is actually less pronounced in Africa
than in the developed countries where interstate trade and transportation of
trash was ruled by the US Supreme Court in 1973 as legitimate commerce after
Philadelphia sued New Jersey for attempting to block the transportation of
out-of-state trash across state lines.
Pennsylvania and Virginia are the
top importers of trash, not just from other states in the US but also from
Canada and Mexico in line with NAFTA, and the dumps for such refuse are usually
located near poor communities where racial minorities predominate. In 1988, the
Supreme Court ruled that police officers do not need a search warrant to seek
incriminating evidence by going through the garbage left on the kerb for
collection by garbage collectors. Also, Sweden had so little trash due to recycling
that trash was imported from Norway to help power their trash-fueled power
generators.
By contrast, African societies,
like most precapitalist societies, managed to go on for centuries without
generating mountains of trash until the unhygienic Europeans, as Olaudah
Equiano observed, came to dump the excrements of their excessive consumption on
the relatively deprived. Yet, not even Cecil Rhodes saw Africa simply as a junkyard
of trash, he saw the mineral wealth and set out to rob Africans of their land
and stole their labor to exploit the riches. Harrow sees trash everywhere in
Africa and thereby missed the morality, the wealth and the natural beauty that
are even more preponderant in African cinema despite the occasional scenes of
trash that are common in Hollywood films too.
Instead of admitting that Africa
is relatively unpolluted compared to the industrialized countries, Ken Harrow
presents a fictional contrast between the suparmarche or supermarket in Paris
and the trash ridden streets of Africa as represented in Sissoko’s La Vie sur Terre (1999) as if this is a
contrast based on empirical reality that is verifiable in every part of Africa
and every part of Paris – even the slums of Paris will have those gaudy
supermarkets too while upper class reserved areas in Africa would be buried in
rubbish. Harrow forgot that advice that his mother must have given him; do not believe
everything you see in the movies. His dirty mind saw even things that were not
trash, such as shoes on the streets, as trash.
I recommend Ken Harrow’s Trash to readers who are looking for
spoilers given that his detailed plot summaries of the movies in the book are so
well written that readers may no longer need to see the films after reading his
book. The consumer warning to the reader is to beware of the trash talk lest you
fail to see the people, landscape, gold and diamonds due to the obsession of
Harrow with filth and rubbish - the 'below' of his sub-title.
2 comments:
Gbam! well written, prof.
Thanks bro,
Truth is bitter to some
But sweet like honey to others
Osondi owendi, as Osadebe put it.
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