A Liquid Africa: Fluidity As Practice and Aesthetics in Diasporadical
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Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness/article-pdf/5/1/75/919864/75eshun.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 FIGURE 1. Woman and two young boys on the boat. Blitz Bazawule, Diasporadical Trilogía (2016). Frame grab. 75 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness/article-pdf/5/1/75/919864/75eshun.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 iasporadical Trilogía (2017), a short film by A Liquid Africa Samuel Bazawule, is the story of a woman D who has lived three different lives on three dif- Fluidity as Practice ferent continents in different time periods. We meet its protagonist across three chapters: first as a young and Aesthetics in woman in Accra, Ghana, in 1957; then as a little girl Diasporadical Trilogía in Brooklyn, 1997; and finally, grown more mature, in Salvador Bahia, Brazil, in 2017. The film is dreamlike in tone, and what opens in independence- era Ghana develops into an expansive search for shared ties of EKOW ESHUN identity, memory, and spirituality across the African diaspora. With its pancontinental locations and time- crossed storyline, Diasporadical Trilogía proposes a cosmopolitan African sensibility as a shared cultural identity for Black people across the Atlantic world. As Bazawule puts it, his project was born out of the “rad- ical notion that no matter how fragmented the African diaspora is, the influence of rhythm and spirituality remains largely the same.”1 The director’s choice of Salvador Bahia as the setting for the third chapter of the film, for instance, is telling. Salvador was founded in 1549 and is still known today as “Black Rome” due to the fact that its African- descended population is one of the oldest and largest in Latin America. Even as African- Bahians themselves remain a marginalized racial group within the state, their cultural practices, such as capoeira, samba, and Candomblé, have become foundational components of Bahian regional identity. To talk of a sensibility founded in “rhythm and spirituality” risks conjuring an essentialized African liquid blackness ■ ■ 5:1 ■ ■ April 2021 DOI 10.1215/26923874-8932595 ■ ■ © 2021 Ekow Eshun This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness/article-pdf/5/1/75/919864/75eshun.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 A LIQUID AFRICA IS PROTEAN AND SYNCRETIC. ITS INFLUENCE FLOWS ACROSS BORDERS AND TIME PERIODS, TAKING SHAPE IN NEW ENVIRONMENTS WHILE CONTINUING TO CARRY THE MEMORY OF PAST EXISTENCES. identity, its characteristics set in place by biology and closer to Achille Mbembe’s description of Africa as a history. But I’d suggest the film is making exactly the “geo- aesthetic category.”5 For Mbembe, the conti- opposite point. It is true that Africa is the governing nent is best envisaged as the meeting point of flows presence at the heart of Diasporadical Trilogía. But of commercial, cultural, and migratory exchange, the version of the continent offered by the film is mu- both forced and voluntary, that stretch back hundreds table, not fixed in form. It is, to coin a term, a liquid of years and continue to unfold into the future. Africa Africa. An Africa that is protean and syncretic. An Af- “is by definition a body in motion, a de- territorialized rica whose influence flows across borders and time body constituted in the crucible of various forms of periods, taking shape in new environments while con- migrancy . born out of overlapping genealogies, at tinuing to carry the memory of past existences. the intersections of multiple encounters with multiple I suggest the idea of a liquid, formless Africa here elsewheres.”6 in distinction to the continent’s frequent representa- This evocation of Africa and “Africanness” as an tion as a homogenous landmass.2 I also propose the innately cosmopolitan condition, shaped by the tidal concept as a way to resist popular accounts of Af- wash of local, regional, and international cultural in- rica as a site of giddy economic advancement, as ad- fluences, is echoed in Emmanuel Iduma’sA Strang- vanced by the flawed narrative of “Africa rising”3 or er’s Pose (2018), a drifting, contemplative travelogue by the conceit of Afropolitanism, which, as Stephanie across the continent, whose pages — equal parts Bosch Santana rightly observes, has “come to stand memoir, poetry, and photo essay — together form “an for empty style and culture commodification.”4 atlas of a borderless world.”7 And it also underscores What I have in mind with the term is something Felwine Sarr’s notion of “Afrotopia,” which envisages ESHUN ■■ A Liquid Africa 77 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness/article-pdf/5/1/75/919864/75eshun.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Africans as the inheritors of compound, hybrid identities: “We are the result of what has per- Practice sisted, the result of the syntheses that took place in First, in curatorial terms, liquid Africa is useful as a ourselves.”8 means of denoting a shared versatility of practice Africa as a convergence point of diverse ideas among the filmmakers whose work I’m exploring. For and influences is not, in itself, a new concept. Chika example, prior to filmmaking, Bazawule was better Okeke- Agulu and Okwui Enwezor, among others, known as a musician — the hip- hop artist Blitz the Am- have written of how the interplay of pan- Africanism, bassador. The three chapters of Diasporadical Trilogía nationalist independence movements, and a grap- were originally released separately as videos to ac- pling by individual artists with “the complex drama company tracks from his fourth studio album, Dias- of their postcolonial subjectivities”9 ignited the con- poradical (2016). Following Diasporadical Trilogía, tinent’s “short century”10 of creative flourishing in art, he made his debut feature, The Burial of Kojo (2018), literature, and music from the 1940s to the 1990s. which became the first Ghanaian film available on In this essay, I explore how Africa today has ac- Netflix after being acquired by ARRAY, the distribu- quired renewed cultural resonance, as evidenced by tion company of Ava DuVernay. a number of recent films shot on the continent and In his journey from music to moving image, and made mainly by creative practitioners of African ori- from Ghana to his current base in New York, Baza- gin. I look primarily at Diasporadical Trilogía and At- wule has followed a similarly peripatetic path to the lantics (2019), the Cannes Grand Prix – winning feature other filmmakers with whom I am concerned. Like him, by French- Senegalese director Mati Diop. Addition- their practice is fluid. They move effortlessly between ally, I look at La Maison Noir (2018), a “visual album” genres and mediums, from music video and short film by Southern Africa – based musician Petite Noir, a.k.a. to cinema screens, art galleries, and streaming plat- Yannick Ilunga; and the British short filmsAllumah forms. Based in Europe and Africa and traveling freely (2020), by Curtis Essel, and Practice (2017), by fash- in pursuit of creative goals, they use their work to ion designer Grace Wales Bonner and photographer speak to the notion of a liquid Africa as the generative Harley Weir. With these works in mind, I mobilize the source of an artistic sensibility across the diaspora.11 concept of a liquid Africa in two separate but com- The connection between liquidity as a way of plementary ways: as a curatorial and an aesthetic working and a way of seeing is typified by the way category. Bazawule developed his project simultaneously as album and film, with the two works both testifying to the notion of the diasporic as a zone of borderless encounter. 78 liquid blackness ■■ 5:1 ■■ April 2021 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/liquid-blackness/article-pdf/5/1/75/919864/75eshun.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 The driving horns and guitar that accompany 2 Make Ups” (1999) by Method Man featuring D’An- the Salvador Bahia–set chapter of Diasporadical gelo. Throughout the film, music animates depictions Trilogía are garlanded by a call- and- response refrain, of diaspora. Scenes are cut to the beat. In Accra and “Ago — Ame,” a traditional greeting in Ghana that New York and Salvador, they’re dancing in the street. translates from the Twi language as “Listen — We The effect is utopian. But an undercurrent of sorrow is are listening.” The chant is an articulation of kin- never far away. The joyous legacy of a shared culture ship across the Atlantic world. Throughout the film, of music across the Atlantic world has come at a ter- Bazawule weaves a tapestry of auditory affinities. rible historical cost for people of African origin. This The Brooklyn chapter is set to West African djembe knowledge haunts the film. It unites the individual drums and Malinke guitar. Bazawule raps over the stories in each chapter in a larger, longer narrative <COMP: music, punctuating his verse with snatches of Gha- of collective memory and shared suffering. Of mul- Please place naian slang and intoning the line — “Let the rhythm tiple pasts always within reach of the present. (See video 3 here, hit ‘em” — in a cadence that borrows explicitly from video 3.) linked to words Rakim’s delivery on the Eric B and Rakim track of “video 3.”> the same name (see video 1). Like the time- swept Aesthetics woman at the center of the film, we are, sonically, al- Turning to consider liquid Africa as aesthetic cate- ways in more than one place at once. In the Ghana gory, I want to explore how the continent functions chapter, a love story unfolds on screen to music typ- as “an ethic and an imaginary” in Diasporadical ical of that postwar period — the vigorous horns and Trilogía and other films I have listed.12 I will do so by <COMP: Please place guitars of a highlife band (see video 2).