Postcolonial Narratives And

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CIRCULATING STORlES: POSTCOLONIAL NARRATIVES AND

INTERNATIONAL MARKETS

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of the Ohio State University

Danielle Mina Dadras, Master ofArts in English

*****

The Ohio State University 2008

Dissertation Committee: Approved by

Dr. Chadwick Allen, Adviser

Dr. James Phelan

Dr. Pranav Jani Adviser Graduate Program in English

ABSTRACT

Many postcolonial scholars assert that there has been a shift away from the

global dominance of the nation-state system toward the so-called postnational. Why,

then, do such a large number of popular and provocative postcolonial narratives, both

through their rhetorical intent and through their circulation histories, indicate that the

nation remains a primary site of textual negotiation? And why does the nation remain a

central facet of international marketing and distribution campaigns? In an effort to answer

these questions, my dissertation attends to both what narrative texts marketed to an international audience do (rhetorically, aesthetically, and politically) and what is done

with these narratives in the processes of circulation and distribution. I demonstrate the

benefits of this dual model of reading by offering three chapter-length case studies from

various genres, regions, and post/colonial conditions.

“Circulating Stories: Postcolonial Narratives and International Markets”

borrows from the methodologies of rhetorical narrative theory and cultural studies as well

as from the important theoretical distinction between postcolonialism and postcoloniality,

formulated by Graham Huggan in The Postcolonial Exotic (2001). Huggan defines

postcolonialism as textual and cultural agencies of resistance and postcoloniality as the late-capitalist system of global cultural exchange that inevitably manipulates and perverts texts through channels of distribution and reception. My analytic strategy in each chapter is to confront the “entanglement” of these two tendencies, and then to extricate postcolonialism from postcoloniality in order to accomplish the following two purposes:

(1) to better understand the complex designs and potential effects of postcolonial texts and (2) to consider how authors and filmmakers committed to postcolonialism seek to navigate the treacherous waters of postcoloniality. My goal is to respect the voices and visions of postcolonial artists and, at the same time, resist perpetuating critical naiveté about the possibility of unmediated or “authentic” rhetorical exchange between postcolonial artists and their audiences.

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To my Baba and my Mother, for their love and support

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation could not have been completed without the sage advice, never- ending patience, guidance, inspiration, and friendship of my dissertation committee – Dr.

Chadwick Allen, Dr. Jim Phelan, and Dr. Pranav Jani. To them, I owe all my thanks.

I also want to say a special thank you to three dear friends and colleagues – Aaron

McKain, Tiffani Clyburn, and Kristen Hartman. Hours of conversation over wine or coffee allowed my ideas to develop, and their support and understanding during the hard times made the completion of this project possible. A particular thanks to Aaron for getting me out of an intellectional slump when I needed it most.

Finally, I want to thank my partner, Jeff Beech, for tolerating me at my worst and allowing me the time and space to pursue this project and my Ph.D.

VITA

August 30, 1978…………………….Born – Wilmington, Deleware

June 2000…………………………....B.A. English, Ohio University Certificate in Women’s Studies, Ohio University

June 2003……………………………M.A. English, Ohio State University

2003-2006…………………………...Ph.D. Student and Graduate Teaching Assistant, Ohio State University

2006-2008…………………………...Ph.D. Candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant, Ohio State University

August 2008-present………………...Assistant Professor of World Literature and Cultural Studies, Philadelphia University

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: English

Secondary Fields: Postcolonial Studies, Film Studies, Narrative Theory, Cultural Studies

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...iv Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………v Vita………………………………………………………………………………………..vi

Chapters:

1. Introduction, Circulating Stories…………………………………………………..1

2. Chapter 1, Man, Myth, Nation: Raoul Peck’s Two Lumumbas………………….29

3. Chapter 2, “Only Connect”: Zadie Smith’s Twenty-FirstCentury Optimism and the Global Culture Market…………………………………………………..86

4. Chapter 3, Communicating Kurdistan: Non-State Cinema and the International Market……………………………………………………153

5. Conclusion, Postcolonial Narratives and International Markets………………..241

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………282

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INTRODUCTION

CIRCULATING STORIES

From the conspiracy theories surrounding Shakespeare’s authorship to the

revelation that James Frey fabricated many of the details in his best selling memoir A

Million Little Pieces (2003), literary scandals provide provocative and illuminating

forums for the discussion of literature, authorship, and ethics in the public sphere.1 Since the birth of the field of postcolonial literary studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s, two major literary scandals have created broad, public interest in texts written by authors from the formerly colonized world. The first and most famous of these scandals is the

“Rushdie Affair” and concerns the fatwa on Salman Rushdie2, issued by Iran’s Ayatollah

Ruhollah Khomeini after the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1989.3 The second

scandal is only slightly less well known and concerns the allegations surrounding the

testimonío of Guatemalan author, activist, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta

Menchú.4

I begin this introduction by providing a brief examination of the Rigoberta

Menchú controversy – a controversy that I argue is indicative of larger trends within

postcolonial studies that constitute the subject of this dissertation. The Menchú scandal

usefully illuminates the often conflicting relationship between many postcolonial authors’ aesthetic and political purposes and the reception and interpretation of postcolonial texts as they circulate in the international culture market, raising questions such as the following: How does Menchú use narrative, generally, and the genre of the testimonío, specifically, in order to speak on behalf of her people to an international audience, and what are the ethical implications of this communicative transaction? How has the circulation of Menchú’s text, and its reception within academia and the public sphere, been shaped by various discourses about Indigenous peoples, and in what ways has this structured the Menchú scandal? The Menchú scandal demonstrates the dialectical relationship between what a text does and what is done with a text, and it is precisely this relationship between the aesthetic and/or political purpose of a text and the ways in which that text is acted upon in the context of circulation that constitutes the focus of

“Circulating Stories: Postcolonial Narratives and International Markets.”

I, Rigoberta Menchú, the testimonío that skyrocketed Menchú to international fame, was first published in Spanish in 1983 as Me Llamo Rigoberta Menchú Y Asi Me

Nacio La Conciencia and has been translated into dozens of languages. While the text is frequently referred to as an autobiography, a designation particularly prevalent among

Menchú’s detractors, it is more properly classified as a testimonío. John Beverley, a scholar of Latin American literature, is the most well-known theorist of the genre, which he defines in Against Literature as follows:

a novel or novella length narrative…told in the first person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events she or he recounts….Since, in many cases the narrator is someone who is either functionally illiterate or, if literate, not a professional writer, the production of a testimonío often involves the

tape recording and then the transcription and editing of an oral account by a interlocutor who is an intellectual, journalist, or writer. (70-71)

Most testimoníos address human rights violations or other political trauma and injustice

and position the narrator as a representative and spokesperson for a marginalized

community. In Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives, Julia

Watson and Sidonie Smith usefully add to Beverley’s definition: “testimoníos inscribe a

collective ‘I’ that voices stories of repression and calls for resistance in ways that have

influenced political struggle around the globe” (107).

Within literary criticism, Menchú’s narrative has been viewed as the paradigmatic

testimonío. The opening lines of Menchú’s story invoke the genre by calling attention to

the articulation of communal experience and by implicitly emphasizing the political

stakes of the narrative:

My name is Rigoberta Menchú. I am twenty three years old. This is my testimony. I didn’t learn it from a book and I didn’t learn it alone. I’d like to stress that it isn’t only my life, it’s also the testimony of my people….The important thing is that what has happened to me has happened to many other people too: My story is the story of all poor Guatemalans. My personal experience is the reality of a whole people. (1)

In the case of Menchú’s testimonío, the Venezuelan-French anthropologist Elisabeth

Burgos-Debray took hours of taped interviews from a discussion with Menchú in early

1982 and transcribed, shaped, and edited them into a coherent and compelling narrative.

The text’s status as a testimonío, the privileging of political over literary purpose that

defines the genre, and the extent of Burgos-Debray’s involvement with the text have

become central facets of the Menchú controversy.

I, Rigoberta Menchú narrates the harrowing life experiences of the Quiché-Mayan

Menchú, who was raised in poverty, working for the ladinos, or wealthy Guatemalan landowners of Spanish descent. During the protracted Guatemalan Civil War, which lasted from 1960-1996 and pitted leftist guerrilla groups against a corrupt and brutal military regime, Menchú and many of her family members became radicalized and participated in the political struggle through involvement with leftist and militant groups.

According to Menchú, her father was even a founding member of the Committee for

Campesino Unity, a peasant group later absorbed by the radical Guerilla Army of the

Poor (EGP). After the violent deaths of her brother, father, and mother at the hands of the Guatemalan army and finding herself in immediate danger, Menchú fled the country in 1980 and ended up abroad, trying to raise awareness for her cause through efforts such as her partnership with Burgos-Debray. Since I, Rigoberta Menchú was published in

1983, Menchú has advocated for Indigenous peoples at the United Nations, campaigned to have the perpetrators of the terrible violence in Guatemala tried in Spanish courts, and made a bid to become Guatemala’s first female president in 2007.

The testimonío’s compelling portrait of the real suffering of indigenous populations in Guatemala struck a chord internationally, and the book was a phenomenal success, especially in high school and college classrooms where it was used to expose a largely uninformed global youth community to the atrocities occurring in Menchú’s homeland. The book was rapidly curricularized, and as postcolonial theorist Mary Louise

Pratt notes in “Rigoberta Menchú and the ‘Culture Wars,’” “most students have never read anything of the kind, and the book tends to have dramatic and sometimes

transformative effects….For many, the book destabilizes for the first time their relation

with their nation and their government” (Arias 39).5 These are grand claims, but the

preponderance of Menchú enthusiasm attests to both the effectiveness of her narrative

and her incredible popularity in many segments of the academic community. Menchú’s

notoriety after the release of the testimonío led to an increasingly high profile for her as

an activist and an author; in 1992 she was granted the Nobel Peace Prize for her role as an advocate for the struggle of indigenous Guatemalans and global Fourth World peoples, and she published a memoir in 1998 titled Crossing Borders that documents her

life in exile. In late 1998, however, everything changed. With the publication of

anthropologist David Stoll’s Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans

(1998), and the subsequent front page story on Stoll’s exposé in the New York Times

(“Tarnished Laureate,” by Larry Rohter), the Menchú controversy was born.6 As a

result, critical discourse surrounding Menchú and her text has devolved into an often

vicious back and forth between Menchú advocates and attackers.

Stoll’s 1998 study of Menchú’s narrative focuses on the inaccuracies of the

account, arguing, for instance, that she had misinformed readers about the true nature of

her family’s conflict with the ladinos, falsified the account of the deaths of two of her

brothers and her father, and underplayed her own educational background and political

involvement.7 Defending his motives for writing the account in 2001, Stoll argues:

Ordinarily, cultural anthropologists such as myself are more interested in perspective than accuracy. That includes autobiographical accounts where partisanship is only to be expected. But in the case of I, Rigoberta Menchú, the story has been so appealing to foreigners that it has overshadowed other Mayan perspectives on the violence [between the guerillas and the military]. I felt obliged to point out the gaps between Rigoberta’s story and that of neighbors

because of the enormous authority that so many readers have attributed to it. If you take the book at face value, as an eyewitness account, you will probably conclude that guerilla warfare in Guatemala grew out of peasants’ need to defend themselves from intolerable conditions. Because of the different story I heard from many peasants, this is what became the most important issue for me: Was the Guerilla Army of the Poor (EGP) that Rigoberta joined, and whose version of events she gave us in 1982, an inevitable response by the poor to oppression? (Arias 393)8

In this declaration of intention, Stoll identifies the two central fronts in the battle over

Menchú – the literary and the political. On the one hand, the problem for Stoll is the

testimonío’s narrative perspective – the authenticity claims of the eyewitness account and

the overwhelming power of the non-fiction first person story in the international arena.

On the other hand, the problem is political; Menchú’s account is colored by her

involvement with the militant communist EGP and doesn’t accurately represent the

stories of the many peasants who do not experience their lives and frame their struggles

through the lens of radical politics. The Menchú battle continues to be raised on both of

these fronts, with Menchú’s detractors either willfully ignoring or misreading the literary

cues in the text and focusing on an interrogation of political motives, while her defenders

focus on the literary and dismiss the ethical ramifications of Stoll’s claims of political and

narrative manipulation with charges of racism and right wing conspiracy.

On the literary front, much of the contention centers on the issues of genre, the role of the interlocutor, and the authenticity of the testimonial voice, with each side making a case as to whether or not Menchú “lies” in her narrative. While many Menchú detractors refer to the text as an autobiography and cast their discussion of Burgos-

Debray’s processes of collaboration, collection, transcription, organization, and editing in

Menchú’s testimony in terms of political motivation (who was using whom to

disseminate what propagandistic narrative), Menchú defenders, many of whom are

literary critics, focus on the complex narrative ethics of testimonial texts. Postcolonial

critic Gayatri Spivak comments on the ethics of the relationship between the narrator-

protagonist and the interlocutor in testimonial literature in her essay “Three Women’s

Texts and Circumfession”:

testimony is the genre of the subaltern giving witness to oppression, to a less oppressed other. Editorial control varies in degree but is never absent. The situation is not unlike the old anthropological one….The production of testimony is also not unlike the classic psychoanalytic situation. The analysand is persuaded [uberzeugt] to give witness to his or her own truth, to which the analyst has access by virtue of tracking the graph of the metaphysical machinery. (7)

Comparing the relationship between the narrator-protagonist and the interlocutor in

testimonial discourse to anthropological and psychoanalytic structures and methodologies

suggests that the hierarchical distribution of power attributed to anthropological and

psychoanalytic interactions is evident in the creation of testimonial narratives. The power to define and diagnose, assigned to the anthropologist and the analyst, is transferred in the testimonial situation to the editor/compiler, who is ultimately responsible for the re/presentation of the narrating “other” to the majority culture. The mediation of the narrator’s story through the filter of the intellectual activist or writer is

often repressed in the text, and this has the potential to erase the complex negotiations of

the intellectual speaking of and/or for the oppressed, subaltern other.9 In terms of

Menchú’s narrative, Spivak’s assertion has the potential to call into question Menchú’s

agency and authority over the popular representation of her life story.

Yet in interviews and in press release statements, Menchú has maintained

ownership and narrative control of the story she told in I, Rigoberta Menchú while

simultaneously emphasizing the communal memory accessed by the testimony. The

following, for example, is from a press release from the The Rigoberta Menchú Tum

Foundation distributed to the media shortly after the New York Times story covering

Stoll’s book:

The testimony of Rigoberta Menchú has the value of representing not just the story of a witness, but rather the personal experience of a protagonist and the interpretation of that which her own eyes saw and wept over….No testimony can be viewed as journalistic reporting, nor as a neutral description of the reality of others. The testimony of Rigoberta Menchú has the bias and the courage of a victim who, in addition to what she personally suffered, had a right to assume as her own personal story the atrocities that her people lived through. (Arias 104)10

The argument that Menchú’s camp makes in this passage is that, as a testimony,

Menchú’s narrative should not be judged based on its adherence to facts or its ability to report journalistic truth, but on its compelling perspective (the very thing that worried

Stoll) and its ability to represent the story of a victim who “had a right to assume as her own personal story” the stories of “her people.” This reading of the narrative is certainly endorsed by the opening lines of Menchú’s testimony; “This is my testimony….I’d like to stress that it isn’t only my life, it’s also the testimony of my people” offers a clear articulation of the communal nature of truth and narrative in the text. That said, the notion that Menchú had a “right to assume” the story of her people as her own story and the complementary claim that “My personal experience is the reality of a whole people” are ethically troubling. Can one person assume the story of a community? Can one person’s story stand in for the stories of a people?

Many of Menchú’s most ardent defenders follow the line of argument that

suggests that instead of “lying,” Menchú was merely offering a communal truth or

participating in forms of narrative that privilege political efficacy and value community

experience over individual experience. Writing for the periodical Siglo XXI, Jorge

Skinner-Kleé argues that “it is evident that many of the facts narrated by Ms. Menchú, some of which she did not witness personally or see with her own eyes, were gathered by what we could call a communal memory if not an ideational one, so that, in my opinion, it is not worth it to try to question her…” (Arias 97). Academic defenders of Menchú make similar arguments for the relative truthfulness of the testimony, though they tend to be based more concretely on issues of genre and narrative antecedent. Kay B. Warren, for example, argues in “Telling Truths: Taking David Stoll and the Rigoberta Exposé

Seriously” that

Stoll is aware that Rigoberta Menchú dictated her wartime autobiography as a testimonío, as testimonial literature. This genre gained fame in Latin America as a strategy to air subaltern voices….They are designed to describe state violence, corrosive poverty, and inhuman working conditions in a way that makes a compelling case for dramatic change. The testimonío genre attempts to make abstractions…real by personalizing their effects and recounting heroic stories of individual resistance to entrenched inequalities in the face of overwhelming odds. (Arias 199-200)

Warren invokes both the political motives and narrative strategies of the narrator- protagonist in this passage in order to justify and explain the contradictions in Menchú’s testimony. W. George Lovell and Christopher H. Lutz make a similar move to situate

Stoll’s complaints about Menchú’s narrative in the context of larger narrative

frameworks, arguing that “[s]ome of the features that Stoll identifies as problematical in

Menchú’s testimony, we observe, have antecedents in native texts extant for the sixteenth

century” (Arias 172).

Menchú’s defenders seem to have a point that the genre, the political and

narrative traditions Menchú draws upon, and the fairly explicit opening lines of

Menchú’s text function to “let her off the hook” for “lying,” or, more properly, for using

invention to craft a first person narrative that captures the “truth” of the Guatemalan

political and military crisis through the integration of communal voices for a political

purpose. However, for this reader of the Menchú scandal, at least, this still leaves open

several important ethical questions. Can Menchú rightfully claim to speak for the masses

of indigenous Guatemalans subjected to military violence? Can she ethically absorb the

stories of others into her own story? Do her political ends justify her narrative means, or

does Menchú oversimplify and exploit the varied experiences of her people in a bid to

present the international community with a compelling narrative of heroic individualism?

These are not easy questions, and they are relevant to studies of the genre of testimonío

as it is traditionally conceived. My purpose in this discussion is not to answer these difficult questions or to adjudicate on Menchú’s text and/or the genre of testimonial life writing. However, what is significant to our discussion here is that the nature of the

Menchú controversy – the need to either condemn or defend Menchú’s testimony in

terms of its truth value – has overshadowed these provocative and broadly applicable

questions about the ethics of the literary project of the testimonío. These questions also

have clear political ramifications and indicate the extent to which Menchú’s text is bound

up in a larger discussion of Guatemalan and indigenous politics.

On the political front of the Menchú controversy, detractors argue that Menchú’s

story is merely a reflection of the EGP propagandistic narrative of events, while

defenders claim that to question the political value of the testimonío is dismissive of the

struggles and suffering of indigenous Guatemalans and is potentially racist. We have

already seen Stoll’s concern that “the Guerilla Army of the Poor (EGP) that Rigoberta

joined, and whose version of events she gave us in 1982, [is presented as an] inevitable

response by the poor to oppression” (Arias 393). In this passage, Stoll backhandedly relegates Menchú’s narrative to the realm of leftist propaganda, and strips the narrator- protagonist of ownership of her story by branding it an articulation of the EGP platform.

In a similar attack on the veracity and political motivations of Menchú and Menchú supporters, Octavio Martí defends Burgos-Debray’s role in the production of the text, stating, “[t]o the extent that it [the testimonío] was ‘much more a militant than an anthropological’ work, another element in the ‘strategy of resistance’ against dictatorship,

Elisabeth Burgos did not question the veracity of the facts provided by her interviewee”

(Arias 79). And he goes on to counter the arguments made by Menchú defenders, suggesting that “[t]he oral tradition, the mythical nature of historical explanations proposed by sympathizers of Castro, collective memory…are not enough to free

Rigoberta Menchú from all responsibility” (Arias 80). Both Stoll and Martí frame

Menchú’s narrative in such a way as to discount all personal or factual facets of the text;

for these readers, the political motivations of the narrator-protagonist trump any truth

claims or personal-historical information presented.

Menchú’s defenders counter these arguments primarily by insinuating that by

discounting Menchú’s testimony critics are trivializing the struggles and sufferings of

indigenous Guatemalans and/or by painting Menchú’s accusers as racists and imperial

collaborators. Consider the following from Margarita Carrera’s “Against Gerardi and

Against Rigoberta, Attacks Are Continually Made to Make Them Lose Some of Their

Luster”:

The campaign against Rigoberta is an international one. A gringo, suspiciously claiming to be an academic [Stoll has a PhD in anthropology from Stanford], writes a dissertation with the only goal of discrediting our Nobel Prize winner. Even if he claims he does not mean to destroy Menchú, his effort to evidence details where he claims she altered the truth is highly suspicious, as is his claim that he is not racist. Besides the Guatemalan military and its backers, who else but North American politicians…could be interested in this work of tarring and feathering. (Arias 108)

Carrera’s attack against Stoll is, certainly, an extreme example, but it is indicative of the

dismissive attitude that many leftists and progressive academics have had towards Stoll’s

critique of Menchú’s testimony. By dismissing the questions of political bias and

narrative truth in Menchú’s testimony, critics bypass the ethical consequences of

simultaneously speaking as an individual, speaking on behalf of a political party, and

speaking for a people that are raised by Menchú’s text.

Generally, then, the anti-Menchú camp seems to inadequately account for the

ways in which the genre, political purpose, and literary antecedents of Menchú’s

tesimonio establish a method of telling less concerned with fact and individual truth than

with compelling political and communal narrative. Meanwhile, the pro-Menchú camp seems to dismiss any interrogation of the ethical ramifications of Menchú’s political purpose as racism and a disrespectful trivialization of the suffering of indigenous

Guatemalans. It seems to me that both readings of Menchú’s text and the controversy that surrounds it are insufficient. John Beverley’s analysis of the controversy seems more to the point:

[Menchú] says that these interpolations [of other people’s stories and experiences] were a way of making her story a collective account, rather than an autobiography. I personally don’t find this explanation (or the related idea that Mayan forms of storytelling merge the individual experience in the collective) entirely convincing….The argument between Menchú and Stoll is not so much about what really happened as it is about who has the authority to narrate. What seems to bother Stoll above all is that Menchú has an agenda. He wants her to be a “native informant” who will lend herself to his purposes. (Arias 219)

According to Beverley’s analysis, it is less important to consider what exactly Menchú says than to interrogate how she does or does not accrue the authority to say it, and, similarly, it is crucial to examine how Stoll creates his own authority to speak about

Menchú’s life and narrative based on his supposed objective, anthropological distance.

Beverley’s arguments are persuasive. In fact, we can extend his analysis of the scandal to demonstrate how the Menchú-Stoll debates expose the ways in which international culture markets structure the participants’ range of viable authorial positions. Menchú’s words, her testimony, are granted authority only insofar as they express an authenticity of experience; her political motivations and affiliations are dismissed or viewed as corruptive of her indigenous authenticity. On the other hand,

Stoll’s academic critique of Menchú’s narrative is granted authority only insofar as it expresses an apolitical, “objective” truth; his political platform (that EGP guerillas

propagate an incomplete narrative of the Guatemalan violence) is written off as malice or racism. In other words, despite both authors’ attempts to find some kind of balance between historical truth, political expediency, and narrative coherence, the strictures of international circulation have greatly oversimplified the contributions of both writers. In

Menchú’s case, this is unsurprising, as there would seem to be a limited and limiting number of paradigms through which indigenous, postcolonial cultural production is circulated and received in the global market.11

Response to the Menchú controversy suggests that one of the primary ways that the author is decipherable and, consequently, consumable by the reading public is by viewing her in terms of a discourse of indigenous authenticity and naïve simplicity. This perception of Menchú is especially evident in an essay such as Rosa Montero’s “Her,” written as a defense of Menchú for El País. In the essay, Montero recounts meeting

Menchú, who she suggests possesses “an uncanny authenticity.” She then goes on to add that “of course, one has to be truly someone to walk around Madrid’s yuppie bar scene dressed like an Indian without looking pathetic,” but she finally concludes that

“Rigoberta is nothing but a poor Indian woman in her forties with braids” (Arias 76-77).

In addition to being utterly dismissive and functioning to infantilize the Nobel laureate,

Montero’s claims evidence a tendency to attribute to Indigenous peoples a simple, pristine, and childlike authenticity that plays into racist discourses about native peoples used to justify paternalism and a view of Indigenous peoples as relics of a noble but

forgotten past. These racist discourses also foreclose on the possibility of viewing

Menchú’s testimonío as a politically savvy attempt to communicate a particular message

about the situation of Guatemalan people to an international audience.

Menchú is stuck between a rock and a hard place: between two reductive myths

that have the potential to erase the author-activist’s agency, political adeptness, and

contribution to the cause of her people. On the one hand, there is Stoll, who posits

Menchú as a brainwashed mouthpiece for a propagandistic and corrupt communist EGP

political movement. Menchú is the pawn in the EGP’s game, as is Burgos-Debray, who

was duped by Menchú who was duped by the EGP. On the other hand, there is a chorus

of Menchú defenders who use academic discussions of genre and narrative antecedent

and/or discourses of a simple indigenous authenticity to elide the ethical questions

inherent in Menchú’s masterful political and narrative maneuvering. As Menchú

suggests in an interview intended to set the record straight, Stoll’s narrative about

Menchú relies on the assumption that “we all [,Indigenous peoples, are] ignorant, as Mr.

Stoll says, so that both communism and liberation theology were able to manipulate our minds, and they created us and made us myths, of me in particular they made a barbarous myth, a mysterious phantasm” (Aznárez, Arias 114). Menchú does not deal equally harshly with her defenders’ assumptions about her authenticity and simplicity (for obvious reasons), but her cogent and pointed critique of Stoll’s politics, and the discourses that inform them, certainly suggest that she is not just “a poor Indian woman in her forties with braids.”

I begin this dissertation with the Rigoberta Menchú controversy because literary

scandals such as this one offer particularly illuminating examples of what happens to

postcolonial texts (and authors) as they circulate and are received in the international culture market. Scandals and controversies, such as those surrounding the narratives of

authors and filmmakers as diverse as Menchú, Rushdie, Sally Morgan, V.S. Naipaul,

Mira Nair, and Gillo Pontecorvo, are likely to produce analysis and reflection that place the text/s in question within the context of their production and circulation – it is one of

the few times that we see scholars fully attending to the ways in which the text interacts

with and is acted upon by the outside world.12 In Menchú’s case this means considering

a host of questions about her political purpose, the ethics of her narrative choices, the

ways in which her story circulated and was received internationally, and the numerous

assumptions and discourses that structured the interpretation and evaluation of her work;

it means taking seriously both what Menchú’s narrative attempts to do (rhetorically,

aesthetically, and politically) and what has been done with Menchú’s text as it has

traveled through global channels of communication. And it is this tension between what

postcolonial texts do and what is done with postcolonial texts that constitutes the focus of

this dissertation.

Scandals such as the Menchú controversy emphasize the disjunctures in and

impediments to successful communication between complex, culturally and politically

situated authors and their international audiences. Menchú’s purpose and narrative

strategies seem to be misread by Stoll, whose purpose and historiographic approach, at

least in a generous reading, are then misread by Menchú’s defenders. All parties

involved are limited by their own respective purposes and assumptions.13 In what

follows, I suggest that this complicated communicative field is always present as

postcolonial texts navigate the international culture market; scandals merely expose and

lay bare the details of the playing field. As such, I extend the examination of what texts do and what is done with texts to postcolonial narratives that, while not always involved in explicit international literary scandal, attempt to communicate their aesthetic and political message to a global audience.

“Circulating Stories: Postcolonial Narratives and International Markets” borrows from the methodologies of rhetorical narrative theory and cultural studies as well as from the theoretical distinction between postcolonialism and postcoloniality, articulated by Graham Huggan in The Postcolonial Exotic (2001). Huggan defines postcolonialism as textual and cultural agencies of resistance and postcoloniality as the late-capitalist system of global cultural exchange that inevitably manipulates and perverts texts through channels of distribution and reception (more on this below). My analytic strategy in each chapter is to confront the “entanglement” of these two facets of postcolonial literary production, and then to extricate postcolonialism (what texts do) from postcoloniality (what is done with texts) in order to accomplish the following two purposes: (1) to better understand the complex designs and potential effects of postcolonial texts and (2) to consider how authors and filmmakers committed to postcolonialism seek to navigate the treacherous waters of postcoloniality. My goal is to

respect the voices and visions of postcolonial artists and, at the same time, resist perpetuating critical naiveté about the possibility of unmediated or “authentic” rhetorical exchange between a postcolonial artist and her audience.

In order to further explicate this project, it will be helpful to turn to Graham

Huggan and his articulation of three key concepts: postcolonialism, postcoloniality, and the postcolonial exotic. In The Postcolonial Exotic, Huggan confronts the dual nature of postcolonial studies as an institution; the field has both enabled the dissemination of narratives and theories from the formerly colonized world in a global forum (it has provided a platform from which subjects like Menchú can speak to an international audience), and, at the same time, it has inadvertently perpetuated many of the discourses and assumptions that have been used to define post/colonial subjects (for example, that

Menchú is either a political puppet of the left or an essentialized, authentic native). In order to highlight this distinction, Huggan breaks the field into two integrally related but ideologically opposed concepts. Huggan argues that there is a “constitutive split within the postcolonial, the entanglement of its ostensibly anti-imperial ideologies within a global economy that often manipulates them to neo-imperial ends.” Postcolonialism

“concerns largely localised agencies of resistance,” while postcoloniality “refers to a global condition of cross-cultural symbolic exchange” (ix). Huggan goes on to argue:

[In] Postcoloniality……value is constructed through global market operations involving the exchange of cultural commodities and, particularly, culturally ‘othered’ goods.…Postcolonialism, by contrast, implies a politics of value that stands in obvious opposition to global processes of commodification. Yet a cursory glance at the state of postcolonial studies at Western universities, or of the worldwide marketing of prominent postcolonial writers like Salman Rushdie, is enough to suggest that these two apparently conflicting regimes of value are mutually entangled. It is not just that postcolonialism and postcoloniality are at

odds with one another, or that the former’s emancipatory agenda clashes with the latter’s; the point that needs to be stressed here is that postcolonialism is bound up with postcoloniality – that in the overwhelmingly commercial context of late twentieth century [and early twenty-firstcentury] commodity culture, postcolonialism and its rhetoric of resistance have themselves become consumer products. (6)

Huggan’s distinction usefully crystallizes for us how Menchú’s complex postcolonialism, her integration of others’ stories and her presumption to speak on behalf of her people to achieve particular political ends, is inextricably “bound up with” the ways her text and image have been consumed and perverted by the postcoloniality of a global culture market that thrives on the perpetuation of familiar stereotypes and scandal. Postcolonial narratives, especially those that court an international audience, are inevitably bound to the complexities and manipulations of the global market because the market dictates the distribution of cultural goods. The politics and aesthetics of these texts are, therefore, always mediated by the realities of that market. What this dissertation argues for, then, is a method of reading that confronts head on the interactions and negotiations between the postcolonialism of various authors and filmmakers and the postcoloniality that has acted on their texts in order to discern what this can tell us about both the text and the functions of a global market.

Huggan takes up the issue of the global postcolonial studies market at length in

The Postcolonial Exotic. His argument, which I reference throughout the dissertation, is that the global culture market’s distribution of Third World and postcolonial “goods” is largely structured by what he calls the discourse of the postcolonial exotic.

status, for the anthropological information they provide; when academic concepts like postcolonialism are turned, despite their historicist pretensions, into watchwords for the fashionable study of cultural otherness – all of these are instances of the postcolonial exotic, of the global commodification of cultural difference that provides the subject for this book. The Postcolonial Exotic is, in part, an examination of the sociological dimensions of postcolonial studies: the material conditions of production and consumption of postcolonial writings, and the influence of publishing houses and academic institutions on the selection, distribution and evaluation of these works. (vii)

The postcolonial exotic, then, refers to the ways that cultural difference is made enticing

and consumable to an international audience comprised of readers and viewers whose

responses are structured by the institutions that distribute, interpret, and evaluate the

texts. Rushdie’s popularity and position as the representative Indian writer within certain academic circles can be attributed to the fact that he offers an enticingly exotic yet

strangely familiar vision of a foreign land to western viewers fascinated by Bollywood

and postmodern novels. Achebe may be read as anthropology because of assumptions

about African savagery and a dismissal of the aesthetic and narrative impulses

underpinning many African novels.

Huggan’s text extensively treats the institutions and functions of postcoloniality

and the postcolonial exotic, with chapters on the anthropological exotic, “Consuming

India,” staged marginalities (which I discuss briefly in chapter two), the Booker Prize, the

“multicultural fallacy,” autobiography and the cult of authenticity, literary celebrity, etc.

His study is thorough and the field of postcolonial studies would do well to heed his call

to examine its own entanglement with the often nefarious and very real influence of postcoloniality. But postcoloniality also offers narrative artists a ready audience; globalization seems to be a fact of life, and many postcolonial authors and filmmakers

seem eager to explore the potential of the international market to establish global

communication. There’s no denying that the economically driven, consumer oriented nature of the global culture market has the potential to limit and pervert postcolonialism, and for this very reason it is central that we establish methods of reading and interpretation that deal explicitly with the successes and failures of narrative artists who attempt to negotiate the market and successfully communicate to an international audience.

In order to assess these successes and failures, this dissertation extends Huggan’s concern by supplementing his attention to the institutions of postcoloniality with a rhetorical narrative approach to the postcolonialism of authors and filmmakers that

considers a number of different possible interactions between aesthetic, narrative, and/or

political purpose and the market. A rhetorical narrative approach, evident in the work of

literary scholars such as Wayne C. Booth, James Phelan, and Peter Rabinowitz, examines

the strategies and cues available in the narrative discourse (the words or images on the

page or screen – the language through which the story is told) to ascertain an author or

filmmaker’s purpose for telling a particular story in a particular way to a particular

audience. The assumption behind such an approach is that it is possible to use the visual,

verbal, and structural components of a text in order to tease out the artist’s aesthetic,

ethical, and political intentions. As Huggan’s analysis of postcoloniality suggests, the

global marketplace is a complex and challenging communicative arena, and yet

postcolonial artists continue to tell stories and engage global audiences for very specific,

and often significant, reasons. As such, an approach that seriously engages their

intentions is of the utmost importance. Furthermore, a rhetorical narrative approach to postcolonial texts counters tendencies in the field to treat novels, non-fiction narratives, and films as anthropological or cultural artifacts. Instead, attention is paid to the choices that artists make as artists and as participants in a far-reaching global dialogue.

The first chapter discusses two films about a famous anti-colonial hero that have been misread and under-appreciated because of the forces of postcoloniality and the stratification of markets. The second chapter considers a bright, young writer who has resisted the postcolonial exotic, and I argue that this constitutes a significant literary postcolonialism. The third chapter looks at a nationalist filmmaker who strategically negotiates within the categories and confines of the market in order to ensure that his postcolonialism reaches an international audience. Each of the chapters articulates a different possible configuration of postcolonialism and postcoloniality, of what a text does and what is done with a text, and each also argues that approaching postcolonial texts through the lens of the two often conflicting “regimes of value” illuminates both the aesthetic and political contributions of the text and the function of the culture market. I build on Huggan’s study, then, by giving the narratives themselves more “air time,” and I attempt to parse out the dialectical relationship between textual postcolonialism and market driven postcoloniality. In order to do this, I focus on three case studies, each of which treats a group of texts by a single author/director that have circulated and interacted with the market and global postcoloniality in significant ways.

Chapter 1, “Man, Myth, Nation: Raoul Peck’s two Lumumbas,” argues that two documentary films by Haitian director Raoul Peck about Patrice Lumumba, the martyred

Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, both circulate and interrogate the mythic association of Lumumba and the Congolese nation. The first film is experimental in nature and has been distributed and received as an academic, postmodern meditation on memory and historiography. In marked contrast, the second film is a feature-length docudrama that was aired on HBO (the cable television network) and has been reviewed in the popular press as a piece of anti-imperialist propaganda. I argue that the aesthetic and political purposes of the two films are not as different as they may appear, and that

Peck’s provocative biographical project, evident when the films are viewed as a unit, is being obscured by postcoloniality and the stratification of the films’ markets. This is evidence of the tendency by both critics and distributors to see aesthetic and theoretical meditations on politics and history as antithetical to popular and ostensibly

“propagandistic” narrative strategies.

In Chapter 2, “Only Connect: Zadie Smith’s Twenty-First Century Optimism,” I argue that Smith, who resists the standard categorization of her work as part of a larger body of multicultural British texts, has been exoticized and commodified through processes of distribution and reception despite Smith’s optimistic narratives of human connection and community. Assumptions about Smith’s multiculturalism have led to the simplification of her textual postcolonialism and are also suggestive of the potential problems with the current trend towards a “genrefication” of race and difference. After the success of her first novel, White Teeth, Smith was marketed and received as part of a

black British “hybrid” tradition that includes authors such as Salman Rushdie and Hanif

Kureishi, who are repeatedly cited as her literary “forefathers.” Yet from her own

articulation of her literary peers, to the varied genres and media she works in, to the

different traditions she invokes, the ways that Smith has marketed herself demonstrates

her resistance to these reductive literary paradigms based on difference and identity

politics. Smith’s literary postcolonialism is defined by a refusal of the very classificatory

systems of postcoloniality that structure her reception as a writer.

In Chapter 3, “Communicating Kurdistan: Non-state Cinema and the International

Market,” which focuses on Bahman Ghobadi’s Kurdish nationalist films, I argue that

Ghobadi’s films evidence the director’s engagement with an international audience with

the purpose of advocating for Kurdish artistic and national sovereignty. Despite

Ghobadi’s Kurdish nationalism, the films have been primarily marketed to audiences

through a national affiliation with Iranian cinema and an anti-war political agenda that

has considerable currency in the post-9/11 and Iraq War era. These two steps unveil the

problematic relation between postcolonialism and postcoloniality in this case: Ghobadi’s

postcolonialism (his Kurdish nationalism) may seem to be obscured by his negotiation of postcoloniality (the realities of a market that values established national cinemas and

current events with relevance to an international audience). However, I argue that

Ghobadi’s conscious manipulation of postcoloniality actually serves his postcolonialism by ensuring a broad and politically interested audience for his films, which, in turn, facilitates the establishment of a burgeoning Kurdish non-state national cinema.

It is worth saying a few words about the selection of texts used in the three

chapters. I have chosen not to focus on the “usual suspects” – Rushdie, Achebe, Roy,

Naipaul, and so forth – often cited in criticism focusing on the commodification and marketing of postcolonial studies. Smith is as close as this dissertation gets to postcolonial celebrity, and while her star is certainly rising, her relative newcomer status makes her a fresh, untested case. I stay away from some of these obvious choices both because I believe postcolonial studies needs to expand its horizons, artistically as well as geographically (this is why the inclusion of Kurdish texts is so important), and because I argue that all postcolonial texts aimed at an international audience are subject to the manipulations of the market, no matter how “obscure.” In a similar vein, I have tried to select texts that represent an array of genres and postcolonial experiences, from non- fiction films that examine an established nation state, to a set of novels, stories, and

essays that reflect on national and transnational cultures, to fiction films speaking out on

behalf of a silenced non-state population. Geographically, the dissertation moves from

Africa, to England and the United States, and finally to Kurdistan and the Middle East. It

is also notable that of the postcolonial artists selected for the three case studies, two, Peck

and Ghobadi, have more explicitly political, traditionally postcolonial projects than

Smith, whose work, I argue, is primarily interested in human connection and literariness.

Indeed, Smith is something of an outlier case in this dissertation – sandwiched between

two Third World filmmakers, Smith writes from the metropole and with a different kind

of aesthetic and political project, a different kind of urgency. Nonetheless, I argue that

Smith, like Peck and Ghobadi, balances politics and aesthetics in her work, and in each of the case studies it becomes apparent that for these postcolonial artists the political and the aesthetic are intimately related.

There are also significant limitations to this project, as no single interpretive work could possibly treat all the diverse ways in which artists, texts, audiences, and markets intersect and interact in order to establish some kind of international communication. In

“Circulating Stories: Postcolonial Narratives and International Markets,” I choose to focus on only three case studies in order to provide the time and space to delve in some depth into the complex inter-workings of the postcolonialism and postcoloniality evident in the work and circulation histories of each artist considered . As such, the results of the study are suggestive and not conclusive, but I hope that they illustrate the need for further interpretation of postcolonial texts through a method that takes into account both what texts do and what is done with texts. The three case studies do, however, represent a range of possible interactions between postcolonialism and postcoloniality: postcoloniality overshadows Peck’s postcolonialism, Smith’s postcolonialism is largely predicated on her refusal of postcoloniality, and Ghobadi’s postcolonialism is advanced by his manipulation of postcoloniality. In other words, the three case studies attempt to be representative if not comprehensive.

Before moving on to chapter one and Peck’s two Lumumbas, it will be helpful to articulate the three primary claims that unite these three seemingly disparate chapters.

First, I argue that Peck, Smith, and Ghobadi all court an international audience, and I suggest that all of their narrative projects are highly rhetorical: they seek to communicate

a specific message (aesthetic, political, philosophical, cultural) to their global audience for a significant purpose.14 Second, I suggest that the international culture market and the forces of postcoloniality pose a challenge to the successful circulations of each of the texts under consideration: in Peck’s case it is the stratification of audiences and markets; in Smith’s case it is the discourse of the postcolonial exotic and the fetishization of race and difference; and in Ghobadi’s case it is the potential invisibility of non-state cinema in the context of a global film market founded on the taxonomy of national cinema.

Third, each of the following chapters focuses on a set of texts that are in some way invested in a reimagination of community and the articulation of new, refashioned stories of national and international belonging. (Peck by “rewriting” a national myth,

Smith by refusing difference and representing optimistic narratives of national and transnational human connection, and Ghobadi by challenging existing nationalisms and creatively representing a non-state nation and a non-state cinema.) This focus on narratives that reimagine communities is explicitly dealt with in each chapter, and in the conclusion to this dissertation, “Postcolonial Narratives and International Markets,” I return to this idea and examine the stakes of postcolonial artists communicating across borders and negotiating the global culture market. In the conclusion, I argue that each of the case studies demonstrates that the establishment of literary and cinematic imagined communities, whether national or transnational, whether non-state nations or faith communities, continue to matter to postcolonial narrative artists. I argue that the continued emphasis on the national and on establishing localized, specific communal identities does not deny the centrality of global and transnational configurations of power

and exchange but, rather, allows for an understanding of the ways that postcolonial artists continue to position themselves both in relation to their respective “imagined communities” and their increasingly international audiences. As the case studies that constitute this dissertation indicate, what is often at stake for both the creators and consumers of postcolonial texts is the possibility of inter-national communication that both articulates and transcends the imagination of the “limited and sovereign” nation.

CHAPTER 1

MAN, MYTH, NATION: RAOUL PECK’S TWO LUMUMBAS

From Gillo Pontecorvo’s foundational 1966 film The Battle of Algiers to Walter

Salles’ 2004 The Motorcycle Diaries, historically and biographically based cinematic

narratives of anti-imperial struggles and heroes have captured the popular imagination.15

These stories entice their international audiences with depictions of righteous collective struggles, emphases on the political developments and sacrifices of great individuals, and reaffirming narratives of resistance in the face of daunting odds. Perhaps no biographical retelling of an anti-colonial history has been more internationally successful than Richard

Attenborough’s 1982 biopic Gandhi, which won an impressive eight Academy Awards and was widely viewed and reviewed around the world. Attenborough has made his directorial reputation as a non-fiction filmmaker, with nine of the twelve films credited to him as a director based in historical and biographical narrative.16 When Gandhi was

released in 1982, it received primarily positive reviews. Vincent Canby from the New

York Times, for example, called it “a big, amazingly authentic-looking movie, very

sincere and aware of its responsibilities in the panoramic manner of a giant post office

mural.” Canby goes on to note, however, that

[n]either Mr. Attenborough nor John Briley, who wrote the screenplay, are particularly adventurous film makers. Yet in some ways their almost obsessively middle-brow approach - their fondness for the gestures of conventional biographical cinema - seems self-effacing in a fashion suitable to the subject. Since Roberto Rossellini is not around to examine Gandhi in a film that would itself reflect the rigorous self-denial of the man, this very ordinary style is probably best.

While the straightforward narrative and “middle-brow approach” of “conventional biographical cinema” may reflect Gandhi’s humility and appreciation of simplicity and frugality, it does not do justice to the complexities of Gandhi’s life, his philosophy, or the complicated and complicating colonial history that men like Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah negotiated as they tried to lead India into an independent future.

Attenborough’s reliance on conventional biographical narrative structures and strategies has led to valid criticisms of the film such as the following, which appeared in the journal Film Quarterly the year after the film was released: “Attenborough’s three- hour film on Gandhi concentrates primarily on the Mahatmaness of the man, obliterating most human nuances that made Gandhi the unique person that he was. Gandhi was not a prophet….Unfortunately, this is how Attenborough depicts him” (Cooper 46).

Conventional biographical storytelling, with its emphasis on heroic individualism, functions to idealize Gandhi, a man who spent much of his lifetime struggling sometimes with and sometimes against the burdens and responsibilities of his perceived exceptionalism.17

In the opening scenes of Gandhi, Attenborough signals to his viewers that he is acutely aware of the challenges and potential pitfalls of biographical cinema: onscreen

text informs the viewer that “[n]o man’s life can be encompassed in one telling. There is no way to give each year its allotted weight, to include each event, each person who helped shape a lifetime. What can be done is to be faithful in spirit to the record and try to find one’s way to the heart of the man.” This introductory exposition on the relationship between biographical truth and filmic art succinctly expresses the complex negotiations between historical responsibility and aesthetic or narrative creation inherent in biographical storytelling. Director-biographers have an ethical responsibility to remain faithful to the historical record and to their subjects, yet many also utilize all the creative and rhetorical narrative strategies at their disposal to ensure that the viewer is able to access the “heart of the man.” Add to this that many biographers, particularly those who focus on embattled political figures or present controversial histories to international audiences, conceive of their projects as interrogations and critiques of dominant historical

narratives, and it becomes apparent that biographers navigate a number of conflicting

ethical imperatives. There is much at stake, historically, aesthetically, ethically, and, to

an extent, politically, in the creation, interpretation, and international circulation of these

biographical texts.

It is particularly relevant to this chapter’s examination of director Raoul Peck’s

two biographical films about Patrice Lumumba that Attenborough’s onscreen text refers

specifically to the difficulty of a human life being “encompassed in one telling”

(emphasis mine). The pervasive narrative skepticism that accompanied the rise of

poststructuralism in the academy has radically challenged assumptions about historical or auto/biographical objectivity and the singularity of stories; as a result, claims to definitively narrate any historical event or figure seem tremendously naïve.

Attenborough, however, may be indicating more than only this theoretical truism when

he refers to the inadequacy of one telling. Attenborough, who dedicated a tremendous

amount of time to researching, fund-raising, and preparing for the film, published a book

titled In Search of Gandhi concurrent with the release of the film. The book describes in

detail the arduous process of documenting Gandhi, and this story about a man telling a story about a man becomes a “second telling” that contextualizes the more conventional

biographical narrative and reflects on it as both narrative process and cinematic product.

In this chapter, I examine two biographical films directed by Raoul Peck that,

while less well known than Attenborough’s Gandhi, creatively expose and manipulate the

inadequacy of “one telling” and explicitly negotiate the narrative challenges of the genre

in an effort to tell the story of Patrice Lumumba, the martyred first prime minister of the

Democratic Republic of Congo (DROC). Peck is best known as a foundational member

of Haitian cinema and for his fiction films, yet his foray into non-fiction filmmaking

presents a highly sophisticated and sustained example of both the processes and political

outcomes of postcolonial non-fiction cinema.18 I turn to Peck’s Lumumbas because the

two films present very different narrative accounts of the life and death of the

mythologized African hero and, surprisingly, they have been received very differently by

professional critics and popular audiences around the globe. Peck’s repetition with a

difference offers an interesting case study of the challenges and creative potential of

postcolonial biography and historiography, illuminating the range of narrative choices

that directors can make in order to transform their source material into a meaningful and

effective story.

Peck’s first attempt to tell the story of Lumumba in the 1991 film Lumumba: La

Mort Du Prophéte (Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet) offers a fragmented narrative that

focuses extensively on the processes and challenges of retrieving anti-colonial and

postcolonial historical and biographical narratives. The film circulated among rarified

audiences, and its investigation of history, memory and subjectivity has led critics to

approach the film through poststructuralist frameworks. Peck’s second attempt to narrate

Lumumba in the 2000 biopic, Lumumba, provides a much more traditional biographical

account. Unlike the 1991 film, the 2000 biopic presents the mythologized leader through a coherent narrative discourse that offers a clear indictment of both western imperialism and African complicity in the DROC. Despite these obvious differences, however, the films’ narrative projects and aesthetic strategies are not as discrete as they initially appear. Rather, the two-film unit offers a sophisticated interrogation and deconstruction of narrative processes of historical recovery and simultaneously insists on the value and inevitability of these historical narrative processes in light of the compelling need to create political and aesthetic meaning for an international audience.

Peck’s first treatment of the Lumumba story in his 1991 Lumumba: The Death of

the Prophet experiments with the genre and forms of biographical, documentary

filmmaking. Challenging traditional biographical conventions, which function to

minimize the distance between viewer or reader and biographical subject, Peck exposes

the layers of subjectivity and mediation inherent in all narrative acts. Consequently, what

the film documents best are the contexts and processes of Peck documenting Lumumba.

The two men’s lives and journeys are layered one on top of the other, as the lines between biography, autobiography, documentary, and fiction film are blurred. The 1991

Lumumba intertwines and juxtaposes three primary narrative strands: first, a biographical narrative of Lumumba; second, an autobiographical narrative of the filmmaker’s family’s migration from Haiti to the DROC shortly after independence; and, third, the story of the filmmaker’s attempts to uncover Lumumba as historical referent and as an international political myth. These three narrative strands multiply intersect throughout the film. Peck uses various cinematic and documentary techniques: observational footage of the cold, gray streets of Brussels; talking head interviews with Congolese and Belgian politicians,

activists, and journalists; archival footage of anti-colonial and postcolonial historical

events and figures; and Peck’s old family videos. All of these narrative pieces are tied

together by Peck’s poetic voice-over commentary. As I discuss at greater length below,

the various narrative strands and devices not only explore Lumumba’s history and legacy,

they also situate Peck in relation to his source material and expose the processes of

historical retrieval that constitute the biographical project.19

Peck’s 2000 version of the former prime minister’s life, Lumumba, is in many

ways a traditional biopic, one very much in the vein of Attenborough’s Gandhi. In fact, as in Gandhi, Peck’s Lumumba opens with the murder of the nationalist hero and goes on to narrate the remainder of the film through an extended flashback that eventually returns the viewer to the initial scene of violence with a much keener sense of the tragic

implications of and complex motivations for the assassination. Also as in Gandhi, Peck chooses to begin his narration of Lumumba’s life at the moment of his political radicalization and then structures the film as a political coming of age story. Peck spent years researching and studying Lumumba and has striven for historical accuracy in the film, even recreating scenes from photos or news footage down to the most seemingly inconsequential detail. At the same time, the film endorses the prevalent reading of

Lumumba as a mythic metonym for the Congolese nation, postcolonial Africa, and even the entire “Third World” affected by colonial and imperial structures of power. Thus,

Peck’s 2000 rendering of Lumumba does two things: first, in early onscreen text it insists that “this is a true story,” and, second, it asks viewers to interpret this story as indicative of something that transcends historical truth – the national, Pan-African, and international myth of the martyred anti-colonial hero. The film’s seemingly straightforward, historically objective presentation of its story is deceptively simple.

In addition to their different methods of biographical representation, the two films have had very different circulation and reception histories. The 1991 Lumumba was produced with funding from France, Germany, and Switzerland and is distributed in the

United States by California Newsreel. The film was critically acclaimed, winning the

Procirep Prize at the Festival du Réel in Paris and Best Documentary at the Montreal

Film Festival in 1992. However, it has not achieved the popular success that some documentaries are able to garner and there is no indication that there are any plans to release the film, now available only on VHS, on DVD in the near future. On the other hand, the 2000 Lumumba was produced with funding from France, Belgium, Germany,

and Haiti, is distributed by Zeitgeist Films, and was aired on television on the popular

cable network HBO. It is available with “extras” on DVD, and both subtitled and dubbed

versions of the film circulate. The film won a number of awards in 2001 from

international film festivals, including the awards for Best Film at the Pan African Film

Festival in L.A. and the Santo Domingo International Film Festival. It also won the

following accolades: the Paul Robeson Award, Fespaco; the Audience Prize, Best Actor

Award, Jury Prize, and Grand Prize OCIC at the 11th African Film Festival, Milan; the

Best Film by a Foreign Director Award at the Acapulco Black Film Festival; and a Best

Foreign Film Nomination at the Independent Spirit Awards. While both films won film

festival awards, it is apparent that the 2000 Lumumba has had greater international

success than the 1991 film.

In what follows, I argue that Raoul Peck’s two Lumumbas are politically and

aesthetically significant in their attempt to communicate both the processes and outcomes

of narrativizing Patrice Lumumba. The films balance skepticism about the possibility of

narrative historical reconstruction with a belief in the value and political inevitability of

such a task. Reading the two texts together exposes the complexity of Peck’s negotiations with his aesthetic goals, his various source materials, and his political purpose. I go on to suggest that it is possible to discern specific reasons, based on the ways postcolonial texts circulate in the international market and grounded in the two texts

themselves, for the responses of critics, which do not fully account for the films’

complexities and sophistication. Peck’s 1991 Lumumba has been relegated to what those of us ensconced in institutions of higher education are hesitant to acknowledge as the

relative obscurity of academic markets and circulation. The film is seen (by the few critics who see it) as interesting primarily because it participates in the academic, theoretical meditation on ideas such as “memory” and “truth” that structured the poststructuralist trend in postcolonial studies in the early 1990s – Lumumba the man, his politics, and his role as a popular international figure are obscured. Peck’s 2000

Lumumba, on the other hand, has circulated relatively widely and has been made available to a diverse viewing demographic. (I say “circulated relatively widely” here to indicate that the film is still far from accumulating the kind of viewer-ship that

Hollywood films and even some American independent films and documentaries enjoy.)

As such, the film is treated as a straightforward articulation of the mythic history of

Lumumba, and little attention is paid to some of the more aesthetically and historiographically interesting aspects of the narrative. These two circulation histories, and their impacts on the respective interpretations of the circulated texts, indicate that it is productive to talk about diverse international culture markets and to pay close attention to the ways in which these various markets structure our readings of these works. There are aesthetic and political stakes in viewing these texts without close attention to the institutions and markets that structure their distribution and critical reception; viewing the films in the context of their circulation enables greater understanding of Peck’s sophisticated politics and creative aesthetics as well as the viewing and interpreting practices that affect the scope and success of the filmmaker’s cinematic postcolonialism.

As I discuss in the introduction, “Circulating Stories,” this dissertation project

attempts to bring together the fields of rhetorical narratology, cultural studies, and

postcolonial studies. My intention in what follows is both to argue for a more nuanced

appreciation of Peck’s two Lumumbas and to suggest that the central claims that structure

the chapter illuminate a model of reading and interpretation that takes into account both

the aesthetic and political purposes of texts and interrogates the impact of global circulation. I propose that this reading model is of particular import for the study of

postcolonial texts, as it allows for serious narrative analysis of and engagement with the

“voices” of marginalized artists and considers that the ways in which texts travel in our

contemporary global culture market impact our reading, interpretation, and reception. It

is a reading model that attends to both what postcolonial texts do, aesthetically,

rhetorically, and politically, and what is done with postcolonial texts through processes of

circulation and interpretation. In this chapter, especially, and throughout the dissertation,

more generally, I am often implicitly relying on Peter Rabinowitz’s discussion of the

cultural and political implications of misreading in “The Politics of Interpretation” from

his book-length study Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of

Interpretation (1998). Rabinowitz’s claim that “we can ‘read’ misreadings in order to

illuminate the political [and, I suggest, cultural] pressures implicit behind them” is

foundational to my approach to Peck’s films (174).

I. Intent

Since the pronouncement of the “death of the author” by influential literary and

cultural critics such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, to refer to concepts like

authorial intention has been decidedly out of vogue. My purpose here is not to enter into

this long-standing debate, but I begin this section by attempting to shed light on the

specific ways in which I will be using the concept of authorial intention in my analysis of

Peck’s Lumumbas and also to indicate why the term is so central to my argument. Within a rhetorical narratological framework, to refer to authorial intention is not, as it might

seem, to fetishize the actual, flesh and blood author of a work, nor is it to suggest a

coherent authorial subjectivity that exists in the world and is available to readers or

viewers of various texts. Rather, readings that are geared towards the discovery of

authorial intention attempt to discern the ideas, evaluations, and judgments of the implied

author, which according to James Phelan is “responsible for the choices that create the narrative text as ‘these words in this order’ and that imbue the text with his or her values.

One important activity of rhetorical reading is constructing a sense of the implied author”

(Living to Tell, 216). The implied author does not exist outside the text or prior to

reading and interpretation, but is constructed by readers and viewers through analysis of

the narrative discourse. The purpose, then, of intentional rhetorical reading is to use

textual, discursive cues and devices to formulate an evaluation or interpretation of the

text that comes as close as possible to the evaluations and interpretations of the implied author structuring the text. Generally, this method of reading allows readers and viewers to posit that specific readings adequately address the cues in the text, at least insofar as

the purpose of the interpretation is to reveal the “meaning” that is available through the

discourse. I recognize that my interpretation is not the last word, but I offer working

hypotheses about the implied author’s narrative designs. Because my argument in this

chapter and this dissertation rests upon the assumption that specific postcolonial texts

attempt to rhetorically and narratively communicate specific meanings to international

audiences, the degree to which it seems this communication has been successful is

central. It is also the case that in order to make the claims that I am making in this

chapter, I have to argue that my reading is more adequate than other readings.20 My

argument about Peck’s two Lumumbas relies on establishing an intentional reading that

the various interpretations of viewers and critics can then be evaluated through and

against. I begin in this section, then, by providing a close reading of Peck’s cinematic

discourse in order to propose a reading of the films that I argue is reflective of authorial

intent.21

In order to consider the complex narrative dynamics at work in Peck’s two

Lumumbas, it will be helpful to begin with an explanation of the three levels of narrative negotiated by non-fiction texts – referent, story, and discourse.22 The distinction between

story and discourse is foundational to narrative theory and study and was initially introduced by the Russian Formalists as fabula (roughly, story) and sjuzet (roughly, discourse). Story is defined by James Phelan as “the what of narrative: character, events,

and setting are parts of story; the events in chronological order constitute the story

abstracted from the discourse” (Narrative as Rhetoric, 219). As is the case with the

concept of implied author, story must be constructed by readers through the narrative

discourse. Discourse, on the other hand, refers to the “the set of devices for telling the

story….discourse is regarded as the ‘how’ of narrative, distinct from the ‘what’ –

character, event, and setting” (216). While this bipartite model of narrative levels has

proven incredibly useful for the analysis of fictional texts, non-fiction narratives engage a

third level, which Dorrit Cohn terms the referent in her essay “Signposts of Fictionality.”

The addition of the third term to the standard story/discourse distinction is meant to

indicate non-fiction’s reliance on historical, referential facts and events that temporally

precede story and discourse.

In order to fully appreciate the aesthetics and politics of Peck’s two Lumumbas, we must key our reading of the texts to the ways in which these three levels are presented and negotiated. Specifically, I argue that while Cohn sees non-fiction discourse as offering a fairly transparent mediation between historical referent and, in this case, biographical story, Peck’s films illustrate a much more complex set of negotiations that expose the ways in which discourse not only retrieves but constructs story through the manipulation and interpretation of historical referent. Peck insists on the historicity of the

man and at the same time points to the selection and interpretation underlying his

narrative account. Ultimately, the power and the purpose of Peck’s two Lumumbas are in

his conviction that it is possible to resurrect the referential Lumumba as a coherent

biographical story in order to creatively envision new possibilities for the Congo and for

Africa as a whole. Without this insistence on referentiality and the “truth” status of the

project, the story is emptied of its political and cultural impact. Yet, Peck’s films lay

bare their own narrative processes and expose the levels of mediation involved in turning

referent into “true” story. These two seemingly opposed narrative tendencies invite

viewers to consider the fact that without coherent narrative discourse, history is obscured,

unattainable, and without the contemporary relevance that is so central to Peck’s

representation.23

Peck’s negotiation of the three narrative levels is evident in the following scene from Lumumba: La Mort Du Prophéte. Early in the film, Peck narrates in voice-over the story of his mother bringing home a photograph of Lumumba surrounded by government officials and dignitaries. As the camera pans over the photograph, Peck’s voice-over speculates about the historical story that the photographic discourse portrays. Presenting the viewer with a piece of fact from the referential database (which indicates something like the man Lumumba existed and was in a room with these men for some reason on some occasion), Peck uses the discursive tool of voice-over to construct a story in which, he suggests, some of these men might have been bored, some, perhaps, were forced to attend the meeting; others, he speculates, were excited, thrilled to be a part of whatever historic event the viewer of the photograph is witnessing. Peck, in other words, lays bare the process of transforming referent into story through discourse, and he highlights that this transformation is not simply a matter of retrieval dictated by assumptions about non- fiction narrative’s responsibility to fact and event, but, rather, it is a process of construction where discourse negotiates the tension between referential fact and the desire to call into being a meaningful historical narrative.

The final scene of Peck’s 2000 biopic Lumumba also negotiates these three

narrative levels, but while the scene from the 1991 film exposes the ways that discourse

is used to create story with the ultimate goal of narratively recovering referent, in the

following scene, referentiality is used in the service of creating meaningful story through

heavily symbolic and evocative discourse. In the scene from the 2000 film, actor Eriq

Ebouaney, as Patrice Lumumba, prophesizes a victorious future for Africa in voice-over

narration from beyond the grave: “History will have its say one day. It won’t be a history

written in Brussels, Paris or Washington. It will be ours, the history of a new Africa.”

Onscreen, a match is lit and thrown into a metal can containing the mutilated remains of

Lumumba and his compatriots, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito. The flames leap into

the air, and the camera zooms in until the frame is entirely consumed by the blaze. As

the voice-over ends, the camera holds its focus on the raging fire, and non-diegetic music,

mixing the grandeur of choral hymns and the driving percussive quality of traditional

African music, crescendos. The scene is filled with traces of the narrative’s referential

level. The voice-over narration is a fairly authentic reproduction of lines from a letter

that Lumumba wrote to his wife Pauline from a prison cell at Camp Hardy in Thysville,

now Mbanza-Ngungu, in the days just before his death. In addition, small historical

details about the disposal of Lumumba’s body (the types of tools used, the kind of

alcohol drunk), taken from interviews with the Belgian brothers responsible for carrying

out the gruesome act, are represented faithfully. On the other hand, the pairing of the voice-over with the highly symbolic, highly discursive image of the blazing fire, literally burning from Lumumba’s remains, and the epic magnitude of the music indicate Peck’s

investment in the mythic story of Lumumba as an anti-colonial martyr and as the spirit of a postcolonial Africa. While in the previous example from the 1991 Lumumba discourse and self-conscious story-telling are used to approach the historical referent, in the 2000

Lumumba traces of the historical referent and symbolic discourse are used to craft a mythic story.

The cinematic negotiation of these levels is not only significant in terms of the exposition of Peck’s aesthetics and narrative strategies and structures; Peck’s voice-over narration in the 1991 Lumumba poses a question that seems to account for the preoccupation with recovering, narrativizing, and mythologizing the referent evident in the two texts. Peck’s aesthetics and his politics seem to be mutually supportive here.

The voice over narrator, who seems to be synonymous with Peck, states:

A prophet foretells the future. But the future has died with the prophet. Whatever is said. Today his sons and daughters weep, without ever having known him. His message has vanished, but his name remains. Should the prophet be brought back to life again? Should he be given the floor one last time? Or should the final traces of his memory disappear with the snow...and that’s it?

In this passage, the narrator asks a question that structures Peck’s exploration of historical and mythological story-telling in the first Lumumba and also seems to anticipate his project in the 2000 Lumumba. Lumumba, the prophet, has died, taking his liberationist, popular, and anti-imperial vision for the future with him. Those he has left behind, “his sons and daughters,” feel the absence of his vision without ever having known it.

Lumumba continues to exist as a sort of empty signifier, just a name, and yet there is a

desire, a need, for Lumumba’s message. Peck, as voice-over narrator, questions the

import of resurrecting the prophet, of ensuring that Lumumba is “given the floor one last

time.”

A little later in the film, Peck’s voice-over narration offers viewers answers to the

questions posed in the previous passage and begins to indicate the political implications

of resurrecting Lumumba:

I wanted to find the pieces of the puzzle…searching for signs of the prophet. And why here in Brussels, and not elsewhere? Why elsewhere anyway? I looked for the soul of the prophet whose voyage is endless. He who never finds a peace of mind. Up against a wall, lost and far from home. Won’t the Marshal of Zaire [Mobutu] let him return home either? Others insist unequivocally that the prophet is dead, but they are unable to show the body. Hard luck for them….The prophet roamed this city [Brussels]. He is returning to tickle the feet of the guilty. Now they are bound as never before to his destiny.

Peck begins his narration in this complicated and dense quotation by providing a personal

response to his previous questions – he is unwilling to allow Lumumba to “disappear

with the snow,” and so he is “find[ing] the pieces of the puzzle” and attempting to

recover fragments of a referential Lumumba in order to make historical and narrative

sense of the legacy of the prophet. He goes on to suggest that Lumumba’s mythic legacy

exists in exile, unable to return to DROC (then Zaire) where it belongs.24

He then turns to offer a more explicit rejoinder to the question of allowing the

“final traces of his [Lumumba’s] memory [to] disappear with the snow” that he posed in

the earlier scene, and the tone of the narration becomes defiant and oppositional. The

assumption that Peck’s first, interrogative voice-over narration is based on, that the spirit

of Lumumba is dying, vanishing from memory and consciousness, is explicitly negated

here. Those who insist on the “death of the prophet” are “unable to show the body,”

which is “hard luck for them.” The “them” of this utterance (the “them” who insists on

the death of Lumumba’s myth) is then seemingly conflated with the “them” of “the

guilty,” the Belgians and others responsible for Lumumba’s actual, historical death. The

“they” of the final sentence seems to refer to both groups: “they are bound as never

before to his destiny.” Therefore, as a response to the question of Lumumba’s

resurrection, this passage suggests that despite the desire of those who wished the man

Lumumba dead and now hope to squash his memory and legacy, the myth of Lumumba not only can, but inevitably will be resurrected to restore him to his proper place within both national and international political, historical, and symbolic orders.

Within the 1991 Lumumba, this promised restoration of a mythic Lumumba never occurs; the film is ultimately unable or unwilling to place the fragments of historical referent, mythic story, and aesthetic discourse into a coherent narrative. Each of the

levels or narrative parts works to underscore the difficulty of accessing the others - stories

are always mediated by self-consciously discursive structures like “my mother once told

me,” referents are presented, but the discourse lays bare the process of making them into

story, and the aesthetic experimentation with narrativizing history reflects Peck’s political

concerns but does not offer any solutions. If we turn to the 2000 Lumumba, however,

and consider the two films as a unit, it becomes apparent that the second Lumumba

fulfills the promises of the first: the prophet is resurrected, and a historical, biographical

narrative is presented that both “tickles the feet of the guilty” (by exposing the political

atrocities and imperial interests leading to Lumumba’s murder) and returns the voice of

the Congolese nation to the “sons and daughters” who “weep” for a future without

knowledge of Lumumba’s legacy. Yet, I want to argue, the 2000 Lumumba does not merely actualize the promise of the 1991 version; rather, traces of the explicit negotiation of referent, story, and discourse, as well as of Peck’s anxieties about piecing together the fragments of Lumumba as referent and Lumumba as myth into a coherent narrative, are evident in the 2000 text, at least to members of Peck’s authorial audience. These viewers, though presented with the absolutism of the early onscreen text that unabashedly states that “this is a true story,” will have in mind, all along, Attenborough’s more nuanced claim that “[n]o man’s life can be encompassed in one telling....What can be done is to be faithful in spirit to the record and try to find one’s way to the heart of the man.” I argue that in order to enter Peck’s authorial audience for the two films, viewers must balance an awareness of the narrative manipulations and representational limitations of biographical storytelling with an affective response to the films that provokes ethical and political evaluation.

James Phelan, borrowing from Peter Rabinowitz, offers a useful definition of authorial audience in his Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology:

“the hypothetical, ideal audience for whom the author constructs the text and who understands it perfectly. The authorial audience of fiction…operates with the tacit knowledge that the characters and events are synthetic constructs rather than real people and historical happenings” (215, emphasis mine).25 In addition, the authorial audience possesses certain knowledges and beliefs that align them with the implied author (140).

Phelan’s definition refers specifically to fictional texts, but I want to argue that it serves as a useful point of departure for thinking about the authorial audience for non-fiction

texts as well, specifically in its assertion that ideal readers negotiate the distinction

between textual, synthetic constructs and historical events and happenings (referents) as

they read or view texts. In non-fiction, then, to construct an authorial audience aligned

with the implied author would suggest that individual viewers or readers who attempt to enter the authorial audience would need to work at discerning how the implied author or director uses textual and cinematic cues to indicate the extent to which her text should be understood as a mimetic narrative representation of the referential level or, conversely, should be seen as a synthetic presentation of story through discourse that is, more or less, loosely based on the referential level. In other words, to enter the authorial audience of non-fiction requires that readers and viewers take seriously the claim that “this is a true story” and investigate the exposition of that claim throughout the body of the text. In order to do this interpretive work it is necessary that the individual reader or viewer possess the requisite knowledge and system of beliefs, as this is necessarily part of parsing the mimetic referentiality of the text from its synthetic narrative qualities.

So how, then, might we define the authorial audience for Peck’s 2000 Lumumba, and how can this definition help us to determine the extent to which the film participates in some of the same interrogations and negotiations of the narrative manipulation of the three levels of referent, story, and discourse evident in the 1991 film? One way to begin considering what knowledge viewers need in order to enter into the authorial audience is to look at the DVD “extras” released with the film. The extras include transcripts of interviews with Peck where he discusses the long and arduous process of attempting to recover Lumumba’s story (for example, Peck states that it was difficult to “find

Lumumba the man in the mass of material without making him an idealized hero or a

legend”), historical background presented as a timeline of significant dates and events in

the DROC from the pre- to the postcolonial era, and, importantly, five scenes of

significant length from the 1991 Lumumba: Death of a Prophet. This suggests that in order for viewers to gain a full appreciation of the narrative (and, therefore, join the authorial audience), they must have some limited knowledge of Peck’s process,

Congolese history, and the first 1991 Lumumba – significantly, viewers of the 1991 film will have all of this knowledge at their disposal as they view and interpret the 2000 film.

It is, of course, the case that many people viewed the film in theatres or when it was aired on HBO and did not have access to the information presented in the “extras”; this would not necessarily prevent them from entering the authorial audience, even if they had not seen the 1991 film and chosen to interpret the two as a unit, but these viewers are certainly put at a disadvantage.

This knowledge, which I’m arguing is essential to constructing an authorial reading of the 2000 film and of the two film unit, does a number of things that may, at first, seem to indicate opposing purposes. First, some limited knowledge of Lumumba’s history and the history of the Congo is fundamental; the film claims in early onscreen text that “this is a true story,” but viewers are left taking the filmmaker’s word for it unless they have a sense of the historical narrative that the film is based on – some historical knowledge is needed in order to verify the factual accuracy of the film. Similarly, viewers with extensive historical knowledge and/or viewers who have seen Peck’s 1991

Lumumba are likely to recognize the precise reproduction of photographs and newsreel

footage from the referential database that Peck integrates into the film. Among the most striking of these carefully reproduced images are the scenes of Lumumba being welcomed in Brussels to attend the roundtable conference on Congolese independence

(he was released from prison to attend and his wrists are bandaged as evidence of the harsh treatment political prisoners suffered in Belgian colonial prisons) and the scene of

Lumumba, Mpolo, and Okito, after their capture and just before their murder, bound in the back of a truck surrounded by members of the Force Publique, one of whom is pulling Lumumba’s head back and stuffing a piece of paper into his mouth. Recognizing

Peck’s careful historicism in these scenes and throughout the film is absolutely central to his purpose – resurrecting the myth of Lumumba is only significant insofar as that myth has its basis in referential fact, especially since Lumumba’s history has been contested and suppressed since his murder in 1961. On the other hand, the knowledge presented in the “extras,” specifically the detailed interviews outlining Peck’s process and the clips from the 1991 documentary, calls attention to the synthetic narrativization of the 2000 film and references to the 1991 film, which also clearly undermines the idea of a transparent and unmediated articulation of referential history, as discussed above. The authorial audience, therefore, is positioned to simultaneously verify Peck’s attempt at factual and historical accuracy and challenge the possibility of such a narrative feat.

The negotiation of the mimetic and the synthetic narrativization of history that becomes apparent through consideration of the “extras” is also evident in the body of the film itself, particularly in the film’s opening sequence, which is worth considering in some detail. As the movie begins, the credits roll and the audio track echoes sparse

sounds like drops in a bucket or tonally varied wooden drums; whispering is barely

audible. The pace of the audio track begins to pick up and a call and response begins

between the individual whispering voice and a collective voice. As the audio plays, Peck

uses parallel editing to compare and juxtapose the visual representation of distinct but

related historical moments. First, the camera holds focus on old black and white photographs from the colonial period; the photos are stereotypical and both invoke

European dreams of African exoticism and serve as a reminder of the cruelty and

exploitation of the colonial encounter. The film then cuts to close up color shots of

glasses of champagne clinking and then tracks out to reveal guests, a majority of them

white, at a lavish party. As the camera pans the party, the viewer sees Mobutu, played by

Alex Descas, sitting on a sort of throne, presiding over the affair in his infamous leopard

skin cap and spectacles. Peck cuts back and forth between these two scenes, and then the

viewer is presented with the following onscreen text: “At the Berlin Conference in 1885,

Europe divided up Africa. The Congo became the property of Belgium’s King Leopold

II. On 30 June 1960, a nationalist of 36, Patrice Lumumba, became the first prime

minister of a new independent state. He would last 2 months in office. This is a true

story.”

Following this onscreen text, the scene changes, and an aerial shot follows as a

motorcade enters the jungle, driving Lumumba, Mpolo, and Okito to their deaths. It is at

this moment that the voice-over narration, which is addressed to Lumumba’s wife,

Pauline, and logically must be the voice of a mythic Lumumba, emanating from beyond

the grave, begins: “You never knew about that night in Katanga. No one was to know.

Their mission was clear: three bodies to pick up and get rid of. No tomb, no memorial.

Even dead, I was still a threat to them.” As the voice-over narration mentions the “three

bodies,” Peck cuts to a close up on Lumumba’s battered and beaten face; this is the first time the viewer sees Lumumba. Peck then cuts to an extreme long shot of a truck snaking through the vast Congolese savannah – the truck carries the two Belgian brothers assigned the task of disposing of the bodies. Peck recreates, with extreme historical accuracy based on interviews, the gruesome act of dismembering and burning the bodies.

From there, Peck cuts to footage of large scale demonstrations and people holding

Lumumba banners; it is unclear whether this is archival footage or reenactment. This is followed by a brief scene of Lumumba engaging in political debate with several opponents, one of whom is Moise Tshombe, the pro-western Katangan leader who played a major role in Lumumba’s murder. While this seems, momentarily, to orient the viewer

and introduce the primary narrative line, Peck soon cuts back to the truck weaving

through the jungle, again with the bodies in the back, placing this scene temporally before

the previous scene involving the mutilation of the bodies. Lumumba’s otherworldly

voice-over enters again: “By killing me history would slip through their fingers. I’d

given voice to a dream of freedom and brotherhood.” Peck cuts to an image of Lumumba

being showered with flowers by supporters at the height of his power. The voice-over

again narrates: “[y]et it had all begun very well,” and the viewer is transported back to

Lumumba, still a young beer salesman, arriving in Leopoldville. From here, the narrative

proper begins.

I include this lengthy description of the opening sequence of Peck’s 2000

Lumumba because it demonstrates a number of the ways in which this film, which is often read as a straightforward reproduction of a mythico-historical version of Lumumba, actually engages in a nuanced analysis of its own narrative, historical, and political projects. To begin with, the sequence condenses and comparatively evaluates events and images from a vast historical period – from the pre-colonial African traditions invoked by the early rhythmic drumming and call and response, through the colonial era depicted in photographs, to the anti-colonial movement represented by the protesting Lumumba supporters, through independence, Lumumba’s brief political career and murder, and on to the imperialist influence and exploitation of Mobutu’s lavish parties. These historical moments are not presented in linear, sequential order, nor is their relationship to one another spelled out for the viewer, potentially leaving audience members feeling disoriented and initiating a process of interpretive analysis and narrative reconstruction that in many ways mirrors Peck’s own process, as outlined in both the DVD extras and in the 1991 Lumumba.

In addition, the sequence combines images such as the photographs that suggest unmediated access to a referential, historical level with highly synthetic staged scenes such as the champagne-filled Mobutu party. This juxtaposition of the historical and the synthetic initiates in the savvy viewer an awareness of Peck’s negotiation of narrative representation and referentiality. When the viewer is then presented with Congolese protestors in the streets holding Lumumba signs, a scene that is shot in black and white and appears to be authentic newsreel footage, she is faced with a decision – is the scene

part of the referential database, like the photographs, or is the scene a narrative recreation

of referentialities. In this case, there is no way to discern whether the footage is authentic

or a recreation attempting to replicate or assume historicity based solely on the text. This

potentially initiates a process of historical suspicion and an analysis of referentiality that

continues throughout the body of the film. The voice-over narration in the sequence also

complicates the claim that “this is a true story.” While the ghostly narration is in no way contradictory to the vision of Lumumba as prophet and wandering spirit presented in the

1991 Lumumba and, if fact, functions to bring the voice of the prophet to his “sons and

daughters,” there is no way to reconcile this narrative technique with the referential,

historical Lumumba who was murdered in the savannah in 1961, thirty-nine years before

the release of Peck’s film. While the voice-over complicates a purely referential reading

of the film, it is central to Peck’s purpose as it allows Lumumba to be “given the floor

one last time.”

Finally, the opening sequence introduces a narrative strand that is central to

Peck’s self-conscious presentation of story and myth in the 2000 Lumumba, as is indicated by the filmmaker’s decision to integrate it into the opening and closing sequences of the film. Peck exposes and interrogates his own narrativization and the purpose of a referential Lumumba by emphasizing the story of Mobutu’s manipulation of the myth of Lumumba. In the opening sequence, the viewer is introduced to the opulence and imperial cooperation of the Mobutu regime, but the viewer is given no information about how Mobutu was able to garner and consolidate such impressive power. In the final sequence of the film, Peck again turns his attention to a Mobutu event, a large public

speech given on the anniversary of Congolese independence. Like the earlier scene of

Mobutu’s lavish party, this scene is parallel edited with contrasting scenes, this time of

Lumumba’s murder. As Lumumba waits to be executed, the camera rests on a close up of his beaten and resigned face; the image fades out, then another image fades in; it is a mural depicting Lumumba standing shoulder to shoulder with Mobutu. The camera rests on this image and then pans around the audience that waits for Mobutu’s speech. The camera then tilts up to reveal Mobutu on what appears to be a throne. The camera rests and Mobutu stands to speak: “Citizens, militants. On this memorable day, anniversary of

our independence, we greet you with pride and joy. In the name of the government, let us observe a minute of silence in memory of the man we hereby declare a National Hero:

Patrice Emery Lumumba.” One of the great ironies of postcolonial politics in the DROC is that Mobutu, whose implication in Lumumba’s murder seems irrefutable even if the degree of his involvement is debatable, was able to mobilize a rewritten, mythical vision of Lumumba as national hero and martyr for independence in order to consolidate his own very dubious claims to power. Mobutu, in other words, used political and narrative discourse in order to rewrite historical reference and create a nationalist story. While

Peck’s own process of transforming referent into story through discourse is far less politically and ethically problematic, his attention in the film to the processes and outcomes of Mobutu’s narrative manipulations emphasize and contextualize his own motives for resurrecting and re-narrating the mythic story of the DROC’s first prime minister. This contextualization also recognizes the inevitability of the narrativization of historical reference in the service of nationalist narrative and suggests that the larger issue

is not whether such fashioning occurs but rather the ethics of that narrative fashioning

(does it significantly distort the historical referent, and so on) as well as the larger purposes – ethical, political, and/or ideological—that it serves.

Before turning to a discussion of the international circulation and reception of

Peck’s films, I would like to offer a few words of contextualization and rationalization in

the interest of clarifying my argument about Peck’s films and their significance. First,

and perhaps surprisingly, I turn to James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture:

Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Specifically, I turn to Clifford’s

discussion of the relationship between Bronislaw Malinowski’s ethnography of Papua

New Guinea’s Trobianders published in 1922 under the title Argonauts of the Western

Pacific and his posthumously published field-notes, which appeared in 1967 under the

title A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. While Clifford’s discussion of ethnography

may seem an odd place to turn in order to enlighten my argument about Peck’s project,

Clifford’s observations about the creation and narrativization of ethnographic non-fiction

are both astute and, I argue, more generally applicable to the discussion of the processes

and outcomes of non-fiction narrative. Part of Clifford’s interest in Malinowski stems from the difference Clifford perceives between the cohesive ethnographic account presented in Argonauts and the “messy,” process oriented account of the creation of

Argonauts offered in the Diary. Clifford describes Malinowski’s narrative of his

fieldwork in the Diary as “ambivalent and unruly” and argues that the coherent

ethnographic subjectivity represented in Argonauts was complicated and challenged by

the posthumous publication (110). Clifford, however, goes on to argue that this

discrepancy between a narrative of process (the fieldwork diary) and the narrative as

product (the ethnographic study itself) is inevitable:

the discipline of fieldwork-based anthropology, in constituting its authority, constructs and reconstructs coherent cultural others and interpreting selves. If this ethnographic self-fashioning presupposes lies of omission and of rhetoric, it also makes possible the telling of powerful truths….[thus this narrative construction is] simultaneously an act of censorship and of meaning creation, a suppression of incoherence and contradiction. (112)

The process Clifford describes here, where the suppression of inconsistencies and contradictions that exist at what I have been calling the referential level allows for the creation of “powerful truths” and “meaning creation” at the level of story, clearly resonates with the narrative trajectory I have traced from Peck’s 1991 Lumumba to his

2000 version. Ultimately, this makes sense, as both Malinowski and Peck are striving to represent and communicate the complexities of certain historical and cultural experiences to international audiences through narratives that are coherent, interpretable, engaging, and meaningful. This progression from incoherence and ambivalence to coherence and engagement may be a universal tendency of non-fiction narrativization, and it is significant that Peck, unlike Malinowski, chose to circulate his “messy” process as its own text before releasing the cohesive narrative account, setting up the second Lumumba in a provocative way.26

This leads me to a final point, and it is in the way of a rationalization.

Throughout this chapter, I have insisted on discussing Peck’s two films as a unit, with the

1991 film both anticipating and informing the 2000 version and with traces of each film’s

narrative strategies and purposes evident in the other. I insist on this two-film unit

despite the fact that Peck clearly stated in an interview with Anaye Milligan for the web-

zine Indie Wire that he sees the two films as “two different stories.” While it may seem

inconsistent of me to offer an authorial reading of the films that clearly disregards the

stated intent of the flesh and blood author, it is important to remember that authorial

intent attempts to uncover the ideas, judgments, and evaluations of the implied author -

not the real Peck, but the Peck available to viewers through cues in the discourse. More

to the point, however, I insist on viewing the films as a unit because I believe that while

each film individually offers an effective glimpse into the story of Lumumba, it is only as

a unit that the greater significance of the films becomes evident, just as Clifford argues

that reading Argonauts and the Diary together is productive and illuminating. The

preceding discussion of Peck’s two Lumumbas demonstrates the films’ provocative aesthetics and politics as well as Peck’s creative handling of the mythic narrative of a man who has come to symbolize a nation. The two films, when viewed together, foreground a self-conscious and evocative aestheticism that functions to call attention to the cinematic and narrative processes through which Lumumba’s story becomes accessible to viewers. At the same time, Peck insists on the fundamental truth value of his political story – the guilty must be exposed and the mythic story of Lumumba retrieved from the potential of historical erasure. These two central purposes of the two

film unit, which may, at first, seem at odds, are integrated in the films and mutually

support one another. The exposure of the process validates the import of the narrative

reconstruction, and the political necessity of narrativizing the referential Lumumba gives

weight to the aesthetic emphasis on process and creative historical retrieval.

II. Circulation and Response

In the first section of this chapter, I argued for a reading of Peck’s two films as a

unit and suggested that such a reading thematically foregrounds Peck’s recognition that a

filmmaker’s complex negotiations of referential truth and narrative or aesthetic creation

are a central part of the process of biographical storytelling. In this section, I turn to a

consideration of the ways in which the films have circulated in the international culture

market and examine the implications of this important contextual element, emphasizing

the ways that circulation has bifurcated the audience for the two films. In doing so, I

follow Graham Huggan, who in the preface to The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the

Margins, summarizes the impetus for his study:

When creative writers like Salman Rushdie are seen, despite their cosmopolitan background, as representatives of Third World countries; when literary works like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) are gleaned, despite their fictional status, for the anthropological information they provide; when academic concepts like postcolonialism are turned, despite their historicist pretensions, into watchwords for the fashionable study of cultural otherness – all of these are instances of the postcolonial exotic, of the global commodification of cultural difference that provides the subject for this book. The Postcolonial Exotic is, in part, an examination of the sociological dimensions of postcolonial studies: the material conditions of production and consumption of postcolonial writings, and the influence of publishing houses and academic institutions on the selection, distribution and evaluation of these works. (vii)

In this passage, it is evident that Huggan is not satisfied to simply extol the virtues of

postcolonial studies as an academic discipline that has insisted on the inclusion of the

voices of “cultural otherness” in institutions and curricula of higher learning. Rather,

while maintaining a firm commitment to the principles and assumptions of

postcolonialism, he argues that those of us invested in the industry of postcolonial

studies, as critics, publishers, or public intellectuals, must turn a critical eye to the ways

in which our own interpretive and selective processes determine the ways in which

postcolonial texts are produced, distributed, consumed, and evaluated. Postcolonial

studies, Huggan argues, does not exist in a vacuous space outside international markets,

but is influenced by and influences the ways in which “other” cultures are distributed

through the channels of global capitalism.27 How, then, might Huggan’s claims about the

global circulation of postcolonial texts help analyze the disparity between an authorial

reading of Peck’s two Lumumbas and the major trends of their critical reception? Can a

methodology that considers the circulation of the films through specific postcolonial

culture markets explain the difference, for example, between popular and academic

responses to the 1991 Lumumba or between the opposing critical trends evident in

reviews of the 1991 and 2000 films?

I argue that one of the primary ways to explain the effects of the international circulation and reception of Peck’s films is by attending to an assumption that I suggest has dictated critical response to the works – namely, that the audience for the 1991 film is

a specialized academic audience privy to poststructuralist theoretical frameworks, while

the 2000 film targets a popular audience that is conceived of by marketing institutions as

politically unaware and therefore susceptible to narrative manipulations. These

assumptions about audience and, therefore, purpose influence interpretation and reading

of the films. This is where I return to Rabinowitz’s claim that “we can ‘read’ misreadings in order to illuminate the political [and, I suggest, cultural] pressures implicit behind them” (174). Rabinowitz’s point is that misreadings are not to be simply passed over as bad analysis or faulty logic but, rather, diagnosed and treated as symptomatic

functions of larger political and social assumptions that structure our approach to literary

works. As such, I attempt to diagnose specific scholarly and popular readings of Peck’s

films and classify them according to the paradigms and assumptions they support and

rely on. Specifically, I classify readings of Peck’s films into three categories: those

influenced by the power of poststructuralism in academia, those interested in the realism

of history, and those exceptions that describe Peck’s work on Lumumba in ways that

challenge and embrace both poststructuralism and historicism.

In general, those reviews that treat the first Lumumba were published before the

release of the second Lumumba. And while it is important to note that while these critics

obviously did not have the foresight to predict the release of the second Lumumba, they

still did not take seriously the genuine historicist moves apparent in the first film. And

while the second group of critics (amateur and professional) who approached the 2000

Lumumba as a purely historical document may not have been considering the implications of the 1991 film, they have also chosen to ignore the interrogation of historical narration present in the second film. In order to support these claims, I first turn to a brief discussion of the production and distribution histories of the two films and then offer a synopsis of some academic and popular responses to the films. This overview of critical responses is based on the very limited number of reviews and/or analyses of the films available in English; popular responses to the two films from average viewers are gleaned from the Internet Movie Database28. I include both professional and

nonprofessional responses in an effort to ascertain how a diversified group of viewers

interpret the two films. Predictably, the 1991 Lumumba is reviewed primarily in

academic journals, while the 2000 film is treated in popular publications. I present only

one example of a response that seriously considers the two films in relation to one

another because, as far as I have been able to discern, this remains the only such extant

analysis (many analyses of the 1991 film, of course, were published prior to the 2000

release of Peck’s second Lumumba, but most reviews of the 2000 film also make no

reference to the 1991 Lumumba). The dearth of writings on the films indicates both the

limited market for and attention to international documentary, even those that have

garnered the sort of critical acclaim achieved by Peck’s two Lumumbas. Nonetheless, I

attempt to identify significant interpretive moves and cull general trends in the reviews of

the films that indicate the ways that circulation may be seen to structure or limit critical

engagement and response. 29

Both of the Lumumbas were produced by the French Velvet Films Inc., of which

Peck is president, in collaboration with a multinational association of organizations that contributed funding. Like many international, independent films, Peck’s Lumumbas were made possible only through far reaching fund-raising efforts. In terms of distribution histories, however, the two films diverge. 1991’s Lumumba has been distributed in the

United States by California Newsreel, a company that advertises its mission with the claim “[f]ilm and video for social change since 1968” (“About California Newsreel”).

While this “mission statement,” with its emphasis on social change, perhaps as defined in the seminal year of 1968, may seem to suggest a tendency towards popular or mass oriented filmmaking, today the company primarily distributes documentary films to academic institutions.30

The 2000 Lumumba, on the other hand, is distributed in the United States by

Zeitgeist Films, a company that specializes in international fiction and documentary film

with an emphasis on auteur films. Zeitgeist has distributed many films that have become

classics with a popular art house crowd. Zeitgeist defines their standards for selection as

follows:

Zeitgeist acquires their films with the following criteria in mind: passion for the film, its quality and prestige, and its marketability. Their collection of the best in independent and international cinema has been accumulated by working with the most talented and innovative filmmakers in the U. S. and abroad. Their catalog includes numerous festival award winning films such as 2002 Academy Award winning Best Foreign Language Film, NOWHERE IN AFRICA; the 1997 winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, TASTE OF CHERRY, plus an Academy Award nominee (LET’S GET LOST, 1989), the 1991 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner POISON and the theatrical re-issue of THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (both an Academy Award nominee and Palme d’Or winner, 1964/re-released 1996). The Zeitgeist film library includes films by such renowned directors as Atom Egoyan, Todd Haynes, Francois Ozon, Derek Jarman, Yvonne Rainer, Abbas Kiarostami, Deepa Mehta, Christopher Nolan, Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay. (“Zeitgeist Films”)

While this “greatest hits” list would certainly impress many academics with an interest in

independent and international film, many of the films and directors listed here have also

garnered enough popular success to be more widely recognized.31 The 2000 Lumumba’s

distribution, then, already establishes the film as courting a popular audience. In

addition, the 2000 Lumumba was aired on HBO, a definite indication of its perceived mass appeal. It is not difficult to understand why Peck’s 2000 Lumumba would be viewed as potentially more popular than the 1991 film. The 2000 Lumumba is feature length, in color, primarily narrative in its approach to its material, and is easily situated within the popular genre of the biopic. The 1991 Lumumba, on the other hand, is somewhere between a short and a feature film in length, is entirely black and white,

primarily makes its meaning through a combination of the dialectical juxtaposition of

images (montage) and documentary techniques, and lacks a clear sense of genre categorization.

To return to the passage from Huggan’s book quoted above, how can this understanding of “the material conditions of production and consumption of postcolonial writings” help to ascertain the “the influence of publishing houses and academic institutions on the selection, distribution and evaluation of these works”? Or, more

specifically, what is at stake in an interpretation of Peck’s two Lumumbas that considers the diverse circulation histories of the two texts? What I want to suggest is that by attending to the critical perception that the two Lumumbas are two distinct films intended

for two distinct audiences, we can begin to make sense of the disparity between the

authorial reading of the films and the responses of critics and amateur reviewers. I argue

that because the 1991 film has primarily circulated in an academic culture market, it is

viewed through the lens of academic, theoretical meditations on ideas such as memory,

history, and truth that structured the poststructuralist trend in postcolonial studies in the

early 1990s – Lumumba, his politics, and his role as a popular international figure are

viewed as secondary concerns. On the other hand, the 2000 film is treated as a

straightforward articulation of the mythic history of Lumumba, and little attention is paid

to some of the more aesthetically and theoretically interesting aspects of the narrative.

It has to be noted that the tendency to read the two texts according to assumptions

about their academic or popular audience and purpose is not due solely to their

international circulation but is also a reflection of textual elements inherent in the films

themselves. The 1991 film is not viewed in conjunction with poststructuralist theories about the viability of memory, history, and truth simply because of its circulation; the film itself, through its cinematic and poetic deconstruction of linear narratives and simplistic concepts of historiography, invokes a number of poststructuralist truisms.

Similarly, the 2000 Lumumba’s well-choreographed and dramatic reenactments of a history that seems to function primarily as an instructional tool for uniformed viewers and a call to arms (or at least a call to political indignance) can easily be viewed as conventional, theoretically unsophisticated, and necessarily “popular.” My point here is not to suggest that the power of international circulation is such that it dictates our reception of texts completely, but that the assumptions that proceed from the ways in which texts are positioned in the market at least structure and limit the realm of likely responses to a particular text.

The Power of Poststructuralist Assumptions:

Abdul-Karim Mustapha’s 1999 review of the 1991 Lumumba in the journal

African Arts provides the most sustained and complex analysis of the film currently available. The review is theoretically sophisticated and offers some useful insights into the ways in which contemporary subjectivities are situated and critiqued by a resurrected

Lumumba in the film. However, Mustapha’s reliance on poststructuralist theoretical approaches leads him to overread certain aspects of the film and underread others.

Specifically, Mustapha overreads Peck’s interrogation of historical and referential truth and underreads the promise of narrative reconstruction. The opening lines of the review

illustrate Mustapha’s poststructuralist approach to the investigation of narrativizing

history more generally:

To pursue the question of Patrice Lumumba today is to re-educate one’s own memory, a memory that, as V.Y. Mudimbe reminds us, is always embedded and translated through education, professionalization, geography, and language. Of these four modalities, the last two are most significant to our discussion for it is through our uses of language and our occupation and construction of space that we define who and what we are in relation to other entities. (79)

Mustapha’s poststructuralist approach to the film in this passage is apparent, with the emphasis on the interrogation of memory, the contextualization of identity, and the relation between the self and others. From this opening passage, Mustapha goes on to discuss Mudimbe’s theorization of the interplay of colonial and postcolonial memories in the contact zone and then argues both that the film “is no simple avant-garde protestation from the metropole; it is, by its own modality of ethical relations, an attempt to define a completely new topography of memory in the postcolonial period” and that the film

“effectively transcends and ruptures the certitude of our hermeneutical horizons not by reliving the history of Lumumba but rather by becoming Lumumba” (80). These claims seem to overstate the case for Peck’s films (Defining an entirely new topography?

Becoming Lumumba?), and also illustrate the extent to which Mustapha’s analysis is often masked by his grand theoretical claims.

Throughout the review, Mustapha does offer some moments of lucid insight into what I am discussing as the film’s self-conscious representation of its own discursive and narrative strategies, yet it often seems as though in his poststructuralist enthusiasm for the rupturing or deconstruction of hermeneutic certainty, Mustapha completely loses sight of

Lumumba, as both a historical man and as the subject of Peck’s film. This obliviousness

to the man behind the myth behind Peck’s meditation on mythologizing culminates as

Mustapha incorrectly refers to Lumumba as “the first president of a newly independent

Congo” (79). Lumumba, of course, was the first prime minister of the independent

DROC; Joseph Kasavubu was the first president. I mention this factual error not to

suggest that it discredits Mustapha’s sometimes enlightening reading of the film, but

rather to point out that while Peck, despite his aesthetic experimentation and self- conscious narrative strategies, always keeps the referential Lumumba within his sights,

Mustapha’s approach obscures Lumumba from view.32 While my approach to the texts

focuses on Peck’s interrogation of memory and narrativization as an aesthetic exploration

and as an experiment with forms of telling, Mustapha’s poststructuralist approach

questions memory, history, and narrative on the level of ontology, making it particularly

difficult to reconcile the 1991 Lumumba with the 2000 version. In essence, Mustapha

reads the film in perfect accordance with the way he perceives its “genre” – as an

academic and theoretical meditation – which, in turn, licensed by the way the film

circulates and by its own gestures towards cinematic poststructuralism. What Mustapha’s analysis omits is any sustained consideration of the politics of optimism and the

insistence on narrative reconstruction and coherence that the 1991 film subtly insists

upon and the 2000 film embodies.

Another review of the film influenced by the poststructuralist trend is written by

Prerana Reddy for the African Film Festival Inc. and was copyrighted in 2000-2001.

Reddy’s lucid analysis of the film carefully attends to both Peck’s politics and his formal,

aesthetic experimentation. Reddy argues that

[t]he importance of Lumumba [Death of a Prophet] is that it manages to achieve a successful synthesis between the poesis of memory and the analysis of the image as signifier. By inciting the viewer to explore the economic, political, and personal uses of the image, it presents the image as a contested terrain, rather than as an authoritative or representative artifact. At the same time, the use of evocative voice-over and the manipulation of time and chronology in the manner of an African griot shows us an ingenious strategy of poesis, that is, a highly self- conscious regard to the aesthetic processes at work in the filmic medium.

Reddy’s claims in this passage seem to resonate with what I argue is the authorial reading of the film presented in the first section of this chapter. Reddy insists on the self- consciousness of the narrative and on the interrogation of referential images.33 However,

Reddy also makes the following claim: “While he [Peck] uses interviews, old photos, and archival footage, which are the traditional artifacts of history used in documentary films,

he simultaneously subverts their authority, questioning their uses and their ability to reveal truth.” Here, there seems to be a shift in Reddy’s interpretation. In the first

passage, the emphasis is on the referential image as “contested terrain,” while in the

second, the “authority” and “ability to reveal truth” of referential signifiers is questioned.

While this shift may seem minor on a semantic level, I believe that it is telling in terms of

Peck’s project and the exploration of the problematics of non-fiction narrative more

generally. The first passage articulates what I suggest is Peck’s delineation of an

essentially narrative problem – facts from the referential database exist, but their

meanings within narratives are contestable. As suggested in the previous section, the

question is how to narrativize reference through discourse into meaningful story. The

second passage, on the other hand, supports Mustapha’s reading of the film by suggesting

a fundamentally ontological problem. The onus for meaning making is removed from

either the narrativizing or the interpreting agent (the artist or the viewer) and is placed

instead on the image, the referential object, which does not have the “ability to reveal truth.” In terms of thinking about Lumumba as a historical figure, it is the difference between arguing that it is only through the discursive mediation of referentiality that we can know Lumumba through narrative and arguing that access to the referential

Lumumba is impossible. Reddy, like Mustapha, ultimately binds her analysis of the film to a set of poststructuralist assumptions that Peck’s films explore but do not endorse.

The Power of Realist Conceptions of History:

However, not all responses to the film engage poststructuralist discourses, and they may or may not maintain their assumption of an academic audience. In a short 1993 review of Peck’s Lumumba: Death of a Prophet and Jean-Marie Teno’s Africa, I Will

Fleece You from the American Historical Review, Andrew F. Clark focuses primarily on the historical context in the DROC that inspired Peck’s film. Of the six paragraphs devoted to Peck’s film, four outline the history of Belgian colonialism and Lumumba’s rise to and fall from power. The other two paragraphs of the review offer brief analysis of the film’s cinematic techniques. Obviously, this disproportionate attention to historical detail can be attributed to the historical focus of the publication venue, but the result is that the synthetic and metanarrative elements of Peck’s film are obscured. This tendency to overlook the synthetic and focus on the mimetic-historic forces of the narrative are evident in most of the reviews that seriously treat the historic, realist aspects of the two films.

Another site where reviews of the film focus on historical exposition rather than

poststructuralist interrogation is the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). In this case,

however, the assumption is of a popular audience. There are only two reviews of the film on the site (compared to twenty-seven on the 2000 Lumumba as well as a message board with multiple discussion threads); one is from a viewer in Cleveland, Ohio, in the United

States while the other is from a viewer in Yaounde, Cameroon, in Central Africa.34 The

Cleveland, Ohio, viewer says of the film:

The 1961 assassination of Zaire's prime minister Patrice Lumumba is the subject of this modest documentary. Raoul Peck directs this unique look at a tragic time in African history, where the one man who seemed poised to finally speak up for the black population of the Congo was brutally killed before his goal of equality could be completely achieved. Peck, who intertwines bits of his own childhood into the mix to establish the period, uses little music to help establish the somberness of the subject. The result is a worthwhile documentary, especially to those interested in African history. (etoukesteph)

The viewer from Yaounde, Cameroon, takes a similar stance:

A documentary picture shot during the challenging period of the rule of Mobutu, Lumumba's executioner, and probably Africa's most notorious dictator. This movie accurately recounts Lumumba's origins, his efforts, the challenges he faced and his betrayal. Most of all it reveals Lumumba's tragic destiny, that of a mere Bantu who unfortunately sought too much for his people. Drawn from his evidently deep emotional ties with the then Zaire, the director tells the story of an African holocaust and of the omnipresent invisible hand of the West. (felixthecat)

While these amateur reviews may not seem particularly enlightening, they are significant in that they illuminate the disparity between academic and popular responses to the film.

Neither viewer, perhaps unaware of or uninterested in the academic theories that have structured professional responses to the film, reports feeling “disoriented” or questioning the possibility of accessing historical truth; both address the historical, referential

Lumumba in their review.35

Reviews of Peck’s 2000 Lumumba are far more numerous and primarily treat the film as a pedagogical document of historical exposition, an approach to the film that is logically consistent with the assumption of a popular, rather than an academic, audience.

Insofar as the audience is assumed to be a diverse, popular audience (an audience defined, for example, as “HBO viewers”), the purposes of the film, and therefore the appropriate grounds for evaluation, are assumed to be political and educational as opposed to aesthetic or theoretical. Keith Kyle’s review of the film in the journal

International Affairs is illustrative of some general critical tendencies with regards to the

2000 film. Kyle begins his review by attesting to Peck’s commitment to factual accuracy: “Peck has chosen to follow the most accurate accounts discernable among much conflicting testimony” (595). Kyle then goes on to point to two aspects of

Lumumba’s history not dealt with by the film – Lumumba’s tense relationship with the

United Nations, generally, and with then UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, specifically, as well as Lumumba’s life before his arrival in Kinshasa (then Leopoldville) and his entrance into politics. Kyle does not go into detail about Lumumba’s relationship with the UN, but he does go on to offer a brief overview of Lumumba’s early life.

Evidencing his commitment to historical exposition over analysis, Kyle, however, does not investigate the repercussions of Peck’s decision to completely omit reference to

Lumumba’s early life – repercussions that are quite telling. Before being politically radicalized, Lumumba was what the Belgians called an évoulé – a native, Black African who had “evolved” towards whiteness - and in his early political writings he espoused a policy of equality under Belgian citizenship for the Congolese at a time when leaders

such as Kasavubu had already begun to champion independence. The remainder of the

article merely re-narrates the history portrayed in the film, occasionally adding additional

historical and contextual information to clarify the referential events. In Kyle’s review,

there is no attention to cinematic craft, no exploration of modes of storytelling, and no

attempt to tease out a political platform or project. The primary focuses of the review are

on filling in and reiterating historical information and examining the factual and narrative accuracy of the film.

While other reviews do spend more time addressing the cinematic techniques and political motivations of the 2000 film, they do not approach the film’s aesthetically

nuanced and self-conscious manipulations of referent, story, and discourse that I argue

constitute a central concern of the two film unit and are evident in the 2000 film on its

own. Elvis Mitchell, reviewing the film for the New York Times, for example, says that

“[t]he film refuses to lay out Lumumba's life in traditional, corny terms by presenting a

lengthy and unwieldy history lesson and then groveling for audience sympathy….Mr.

Peck loads the picture with information, but at a breathless pace” and goes on to suggest

that Peck is “out to make a film that exposes the ugliness of cold war politics and knee-

jerk imperialism. The movie's view is that Lumumba was sacrificed to stop African

independence….And ‘Lumumba’ lets neither the United States nor the United Nations

off the hook: it implicates both in his assassination.” Much of the short review, however,

is spent re-narrating and explicating moments from the film. Similarly, Cynthia Fuchs,

reviewing the film for the webzine PopMatters, attends to both aesthetics and politics,

stating both that the film captures “Lumumba's speedy rise and fall with deft narrative

strokes and riveting, beautifully composed scenes, shot by Bernard Lutic to create not only a sense of urgency, but also a heightened sensitivity to emotional details, light and shadows work together in a kind of sublime tension” and that “[a]t this point, most analysts agree that the assassination [of Lumumba] involved the Belgian government, the

United States, and by extension, the United Nations….Raoul Peck's moving, poignant, and quietly angry film accuses all of these participants.” Ultimately, however, Fuchs determines that the film’s primary contribution is a historical study of “personalities and events.”36

While reviews in the mainstream press balance some attention to style and politics with a primary interest in the film as historical exposition, a number of reviews in specialized Black presses focus much more explicitly on Peck’s political project. In The

New York Amsterdam News, Elombe Brath praises the film primarily for its positive representation of Black characters: “[f]ar too often, whenever Black people are invited to go to the movies what is on the screen is an embarrassment, disparaging us and our historical legacy” (23). Brath writes a more extensive review of the film for the journal

Haiti Progress in which he argues that

Peck deals with a particularly nefarious part of U.S. history, which is still ongoing. Lumumba shows how the U.S. and its allies undermine democracy in African states, destabilize fledgling governments, and, after bringing down a government, help to create a mythical consensus that the people of the targeted African country were not yet ready for self-rule. Covert operations by Western counter-intelligence agencies stealthily undermine African governments and make them appear to be ungovernable, thus fostering the myth that once European colonialists left, Africans automatically slide back to atavism, stagnating until the good white father returns to rescue them through recolonization. It is of vital importance that people, particularly the black community, see Lumumba so that they become conscious of the real motivations of U.S. foreign policies and how the machinations to reach their objectives are accomplished.

In Brath’s review, the film is of interest primarily because of its political intervention into

historical and ongoing colonial and imperial projects of domination. Esther Iverem,

writing for the online Black news and culture site SeeingBlack.com takes a slightly more

critical perspective on the film, arguing, with Kyle, that Peck’s omission of Lumumba’s

early years is a detriment to the historical efficacy of the narrative: “There is no narrative—not even a flashback—about Lumumba's formative years. We are given no clue about the influences—familial, social or educational—that shaped him into an important thinker about African independence.” Nonetheless, Iveron goes on to extol the

film’s anti-imperial politics and ends her review with the assurance that “[d]espite its

flaws, Lumumba is the must-see Black film of 2001.” In each of these reviews, the

film’s aesthetic and narrative concerns take a back seat to political imperatives.

Popular responses to the film, gleaned from user comments on IMDb, mirror

critical tendencies in their assertion that the film is only a reflection of history rather than

a self conscious narrative of history making, and most viewers also comment on the

political ramifications of Peck’s narrative. A viewer from Los Angeles, California, in the

United States, for example, values the film for historical accuracy, saying “[t]his movie is

the best movie I have seen in a long time. It is also the best movie seen that uses a drama

to tell history, without going to speculation such as with JFK, Nixon or Hoffa” (anyanwu)

Another viewer from Botswana, Africa, offers a review that is worth citing at length since

it accurately reflects a number of the tendencies apparent in professional as well as

amateur reviewing:

Congo is a sad country which started with massive disadvantages (King Leopold used it as his private route to personal wealth) and never recovered. The Belgians made little provision for independence, but that is not unusual in Africa and other countries have managed OK despite a bad start. Congo never did. A combination of tribal and ethnic conflicts, underhand colonial behaviour and Cold War politics meant that failure was inevitable. Lumumba was brutally murdered by his own countrymen with America and Belgium cheering from the sidelines. Lumumba never had a chance and he made it worse for himself by delivering an un- programmed and fiercely anti-colonial speech on Independence Day. This is not made too clear in the film - you have to listen really hard to know that that is what was happening. As a result of that unwise speech, he destroyed his relations with the Belgians and gave the Congolese people hopes and expectations that could never be realised. He also made an enemy of the leader of the Katanga region….Everyone comes out badly in the film - which is only right and proper. Belgians for practising apartheid before the word was invented to cover the Boers in SA....The Americans come out rather lightly in the film. Maybe it was not known at the time the film was made that the CIA station chief (Devlin, not Carlucci) was sent poisoned toothpaste to introduce into Lumumba's bathroom cabinet (he didn't). By order of Eisenhower. The Congolese come out worst of all, appropriately, since in the long term they are the ones who also suffered (and continue to suffer) the most as a result of not being able to act together irrespective of tribal origin. There is still in reality no country that is Congo. It remains a collection of tribal and ethnic groupings. And therefore weak and poor and ready to be exploited. All this is accurately foreshadowed in this excellent film. A film that is horrific and unsettling, but real. Excellent. (annepeter)

This amateur review, like many amateur reviews, neglects cinematic craft. However, it also expresses what I want to suggest are five tendencies of amateur, academic, and political reviews of the film.

First, this review, like most, relates the past narrated by Peck’s film to the present situation in the DROC, and, therefore, implicitly makes the argument that part of the political and historical function of the film is to illuminate a connection between the past and the present. This concern with the continuity between past and present in the films conforms to Peck’s general interest in legacy, history, and memory in both Lumumbas, but it overlooks Peck’s simultaneous skepticism about and commitment to the processes

of narrativization that enable such temporal connections. Second, the review provides the reader with background information on Lumumba and Congolese history, validating the film’s commitment to historical exposition. Again, this tendency to focus on historical exposition only accounts for part of Peck’s purpose in the film; in addition to historical exposition, Peck’s interest is clearly in exposing the processes of history making and the implications of a naïve belief in the possibility of absolute historic reconstruction. Third, the review highlights Peck’s indictment of various colonial and imperial powers (though this reviewer, in my opinion wrongly, breaks from conventional wisdom on the film by arguing that the US “come[s] out rather lightly” and that the Congolese “come out worst of all”). While it is outside the scope of this chapter to deal with this fundamental tension in Peck’s work, the filmmaker’s political critique of the west and imperialism must be balanced with his own aesthetic and philosophical reliance on western cinematic traditions and theories. Fourth, the review evaluates the film in relation to its ability to offer full historical and narrative disclosure (“Lumumba never had a chance and he made it worse for himself by delivering an un-programmed and fiercely anti-colonial speech on

Independence Day. This is not made too clear in the film - you have to listen really hard to know that that is what was happening”). Again, it is clear that this amateur review, and many of the professional reviews that adhere to a similar fundamental logic, overlooks Peck’s insistence on the impossibility of a perfect, complete representation of history. Instead, the filmmaker emphasizes the processes of selection, omission, and manipulation inherent in any narrative account. Finally, the review, in the end, endorses the film full heartedly, citing its “real” representation of the “horrific and unsettling” truth

of imperial politics. As should be fairly obvious by now, any claim to a “real,”

referential representation in Peck’s films runs counter to the Lumumbas interrogation of

history and referentiality. These five trends highlight the film’s political and historical

projects but overlook Peck’s aesthetic and narrative experimentation.

The Exceptions:

It is not, however, my intention to suggest that all reviews follow these trends. In

The New Crisis, a publication founded by W.E.B. Du Bois and devoted to the

advancement of Civil Rights, Kristal Brent Zook offers a fresh perspective on the film.

Zook’s review of the 2000 film is noteworthy for its attention to the relationship between the 1991 and the 2000 Lumumbas. Zook, after providing the requisite overview of

Lumumba’s life and death as well as some background on the filmmaker, focuses on the ways in which the processes of assembling the personal and public memories of the mythic man for the 1991 documentary influenced the vision of Lumumba projected onscreen in the 2000 film:

[i]t was through this photograph [from the 1991 film, discussed in section one of this chapter] that Peck began to understand Lumumba as a Congolese Everyman: a visionary who spoke of relatively simple ideas, such as national unity and self- determination for all Africans. But he spoke of these concepts, says Peck, in a way that the rest of the world was not accustomed to hearing. (45)

While I am not convinced by Zook’s argument that Peck views Lumumba as a

“Congolese Everyman,” her emphasis on Peck’s two-film, decade long process of recovering Lumumba as referent is central to the authorial reading of the film proposed in section one of this chapter.37

A second anomalous review of the 2000 film is written by Julia Watson, a

prominent theorist of life writing, for the journal Research in African Literatures. In

Watson’s brief but sophisticated review of the film, she argues that

Lumumba talks back to historical realities by giving voice from beyond the grave to Lumumba himself….In voicing an unwritten controversial history, Peck’s film combines archival documentary means, such as photos and chronologies of 1960, with the interpretive resources of historical fiction to interpret the assassination of Lumumba and the events leading up to it as a conspiracy against African self- determination. (230)

She goes on to note: “Lumumba is an extraordinary film for both cinematic and political reasons, and its affective and aesthetic power derives not only from stunning indictment of international complicity in the assassination, but also, and primarily, from Peck’s brilliant and deeply moving use of storytelling…” (230). While other reviewers have attempted to argue for either the film’s commitment to or deviation from historical accuracy and clarity, Watson points out that Peck has chosen to base his cinematic account on a specific version of Lumumba’s historical narrative – a version that is still under dispute. Watson points out that Peck clearly follows Ludo De Witte’s account of what happened in the DROC, an account that has been critiqued by Brian Urquhart, assistant to Ralph Bunche, the American UN undersecretary in 1960. Watson’s review, which focuses on Peck’s relation to his source material and his creative, aesthetic processes, clearly resonates with the authorial reading of the film offered in section one and illuminates a number of central concerns of both the 2000 film and the two film unit.

Nonetheless, the preceding discussion of the circulation and reception histories of

Peck’s two Lumumbas indicates the extent to which assumptions about markets and audiences, popular and academic cinematic genres, structure our interpretive responses to

films and their political and aesthetic purposes. It also suggests that it is productive to talk about diverse international culture markets, and to attend to the ways in which the various cultural circuits through which texts move prescribe particular interpretive approaches and occlude others. As such, we must key our reading and evaluative practices to these circulations, and, as viewers, critics, and teachers, become cognizant of the ways in which our work is both influenced by and influences the circulation and reception of postcolonial texts intended for international audiences.

IIII. Conclusion: Politics and Aesthetics

The previous two sections suggest that viewing and interpreting Peck’s

Lumumbas as a unit enables a reading of the films that engages Peck’s nuanced political and aesthetic interventions. Without the limiting constraints and assumptions that structure viewing and interpretation, it becomes clear that the 1991 film does more than interrogate and deconstruct the potential for historical narrative, it insists on its viability and inevitability. The project, therefore, is both aesthetically innovative and politically salient. Similarly, the 2000 film does more than offer popular viewers a historical education with the aim of instigating political critique and response; it explores the aesthetic strategies and effects of historical and political narrative. That Peck’s aesthetic and political projects seem to be mutually constitutive, with each relying on the other for its full realization of significance, challenges the prevalent assumption that aesthetic and political undertakings operate at cross-purposes – with the former existing in the world of ideas and emotions while the latter engages in the world of action and material

consequence. Critics and distributors, scholars and consumers are often guilty of

perpetuating the assumption that aesthetic and theoretical meditations on politics and

history are antithetical to popular and ostensibly “propagandistic” narrative strategies –

this largely accounts for the stratification of markets evident in the circulation of Peck’s films.

Postcolonial studies, like most fields within the Humanities, must shoulder some

of the responsibility for the propagation of this division between popular-political and

aesthetic-theoretical purposes. While the field has, since its inception, embraced the possibility of the political value of cultural products (sometimes conflating the cultural and the political to a fault), there has been a clear preference for texts that are seen as

theoretically and aesthetically innovative and a disdain for texts that privilege

“simplistic” or “propagandistic” political purpose over form and narrative

experimentation. To return to Huggan’s distinction between postcolonialism and

postcoloniality, discussed in the introduction to this dissertation, it is clear that

postcolonial studies structures postcoloniality and the circulation of texts by formerly

and/or currently colonized people by insisting that the popular-political and the aesthetic-

theoretical are more or less discrete categories. This raises important questions: What

investment does postcoloniality have in maintaining these aesthetic hierarchies and

stratifications of audience and purpose? Why should a field founded on the integration of

politics and aesthetics participate in the broader academic disdain for texts that place their

central emphasis on political purpose and continue to celebrate a theoretically complex

aestheticism?

One reason for this bifurcation of audience and purpose is that postcolonial

studies is not only a field of academic inquiry – it is an industry, and as a market driven

industry, assumptions are made based on potential audience demographics and the

economic bottom line of ensuring consumers for global products. A Rushdie novel, with

its theoretical and aesthetic sophistication, is sure to sell well among academics and is

likely to find a place in college literature curricula. An Isabel Allende novel, on the other

hand, is marketed to the “middle brow,” popular audience of book clubs and the Oprah

Winfrey Show. And Bollywood films, even those that, like the recent international hit

Lagaan, offer political and historical critique, are celebrated for their entertainment value

and intended for native audiences living in India and throughout the diaspora. Such easy

distinctions are perpetuated through circulation despite the fact that Rushdie relies

heavily on global popular culture in his novels, or that Allende’s works typically engage

complex Latin American politics, or that Lagaan reflects on the legacy of colonialism in

meaningful ways.

A film like Attenborough’s Gandhi that has been widely successful with a broader

audience, attaining popular success, critical acclaim (an unheard of sweep of eight

Academy Award categories, including Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Picture), and

longevity through academic curriculurization, offers an example of a text that straddles

several different audiences and markets. Its popular success can be partially attributed to its traditional biographical storytelling strategies as well as its casting (while Ben

Kingsley was not widely known internationally at the time of the film’s release – he had primarily acted on stage and in television before 1982 – a number of fairly well-known

movie stars, including Candice Bergen, John Gielgud, John Mills, and Martin Sheen

make appearances). The film’s ability to straddle the high-low divide and to blur the distinction between political and aesthetic filmmaking is evident in its broad success and may have as much to do with its biographical subject as its narrative and/or marketing strategies. Gandhi holds a special place in the minds and hearts of people around the globe; his anti-colonial activism was among the earliest and most internationally visible

political interventions on behalf of the formerly colonized world, and his philosophy of

non-violent resistance and Satyagraha has had incredible influence on numerous global

struggles. While Lumumba’s contribution to Congolese independence was undeniably

and fully political, Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement integrated politics, spirituality,

philosophy, and a savvy ability to manipulate aesthetics and the image in order to garner

support. Gandhi’s recognition of the centrality of everything from clothing and khadi

cloth to staged photo-ops (like his train trek across India) demonstrates the

aestheticization of Gandhi’s politics and accounts for some of the continued fascination

with him as a figure in the context of academia and other high culture institutions.

Another possible reason that postcolonial studies may be invested in the

perpetuation of a distinction between the aesthetic-theoretical and the popular-political is

that the field, as a relatively recent “add-on” within the Humanities that continues to

struggle with curricular marginalization, has had to continually justify its academic rigor

and intellectual merit. Insofar as members of the old guard within departments of

English have had to be persuaded that Aimé Césaire, Chinua Achebe, and Arundhati Roy

should be taught alongside Shakespeare, Conrad, and Woolf, postcolonialists have had to

make the case for aesthetic and theoretical innovation at the expense of a more overtly political argument (though the political argument also has some currency and is likely to surface in discussions among scholars in various marginalized fields). Additionally, the field rose to prominence at a time when poststructuralism dominated the academy and suggested that the popular politics of the pre-1968 era were a naïve relic of a simpler time and that semiotic and epistemological experimentation and deconstruction constituted the proper domain of intellectual political inquiry.

In her 2004 essay “Beginnings, Affiliations, and Disavowals,” postcolonial theorist Benita Parry argues that postcolonial studies, in its poststructuralist enthusiasm and due to a case of historical amnesia, has been far too quick to embrace theories that either reject or ignore the legacy and continued importance of narratives of anti-colonial struggles and of liberation theories. She states

The poverty of serious discussion on liberation theory in a field devoted to the production of anti-colonial/imperial critiques signals a preference for rewriting a historical project of invasion, expropriation and exploitation as a symbolic encounter….Few of the problems engaging radical anti-colonial thinkers figure in the contemporary postcolonial discussion of the colonial past….The recuperation of liberation theory as a revolutionary project for overcoming both colonialist social institutions and archaic indigenous forms seems essential at a time when postcolonial critics traduce its positions, negate its analysis of exploitative and conflictual conditions, and ignore its ethical analysis of colonialism’s illegitimacy. (9)

Parry’s argument is clearly influenced by her own staunchly materialist, Marxist perspective, and while I don’t wish to enter into the long-standing and prolific (perhaps too prolific) debate between poststructuralist and Marxist postcolonial scholars, it seems to me that Parry’s claims for the continued relevance of anti-colonial liberation theories in the contemporary moment can illuminate the contribution Peck makes with his two

films, counter the stratification of popular and academic audiences, and help balance the poststructuralist readings of the 1991 film discussed above. By resurrecting Lumumba, a figure who has come to epitomize liberationist, anti-colonial discourses and politics, by giving him a voice, and by allowing him to return to “tickle the feet of the guilty,” Peck clearly engages the conflictual, combative history of anti-colonialism that Parry rightfully suggests has fallen out of vogue as an object of inquiry in postcolonial studies today.

At the same time, Peck’s retrieval and rearticulation of Lumumba’s anti-colonial liberationist politics interrogates the processes of renarrating history and explores the contemporary relevance of such a project. In doing so, Peck both acknowledges the political and cultural impetus behind Parry’s claims and avoids uncritically reproducing modes of political thought and activism from the historical past. As discussed in the first section of this chapter, Peck explicitly investigates Parry’s assertion about the need for a recuperation of anti-colonial liberationist theories when, in the 1991 Lumumba he asks,

“Should the prophet [Lumumba] be brought back to life again? Should he be given the floor one last time?” Peck answers this question in the affirmative (“[h]e [Lumumba] is returning to tickle the feet of the guilty. Now they are bound as never before to his destiny”) by suggesting the inevitability of the return of Lumumba as a symbol for precisely the kind of combative anti-colonialism that Parry advocates. The contemporary relevance of such a historical recuperation is addressed in the final scenes of the 2000

Lumumba and is discussed above in greater detail. The final lines of the film, delivered by Lumumba as voice-over narrator, “[h]istory will have its say one day. It won’t be a history written in Brussels, Paris or Washington. It will be ours, the history of a new

Africa. And on that day…,” are followed by the image of the fire raging from

Lumumba’s remains. This scene, with its open ended articulation of the inevitability of a

“new Africa,” presumably an Africa politically and philosophically consistent with

Lumumba’s anti-colonial liberationist theories, clearly demonstrates the contemporary

relevance of the recuperation of Lumumba’s history. However, it refuses to suggest any

simplistic correspondence between Lumumba’s history and political change, with the

“And on that day…” indicating that the precise nature of the relationship between the

recuperation of history (which will “have its say one day”) and a “new Africa” is still

uncertain.

As such, the films don’t merely replicate politically naïve stories of

anticolonialism, Third Worldism, and heroic nationalist resistance. They involve viewers

in the processes and outcomes of the re/production of these socio-political myths and

value the processes of retrieval alongside the continued relevance of these narratives. It’s

not just that, or even primarily that, Lumumba’s story is important; what is most

significant, Peck’s films suggest, is the narrative project of recovering and making visible

these stories as unifying and anti-imperial paradigms with relevance to the contemporary

moment. As people in the DROC and across the formerly colonized world continue to struggle to define a national identity and political agenda that will both move them forward in an increasingly globalized age and value a history defined by resistance and heroism, these stories continue to resonate in ways that reflect the complexities of the postcolonial era.

CHAPTER 2

“ONLY CONNECT”: ZADIE SMITH’S TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY OPTIMISM AND THE GLOBAL CULTURE MARKET

Since the 2000 release of White Teeth, Zadie Smith has become an icon of multiculturalism in the new millennium.38 The judges who awarded Smith the

prestigious Whitbread First Novel Award called White Teeth a “landmark novel for

multicultural Britain,” and critics in the popular press and literary scholars, in Smith’s

native Britain and abroad, have consistently remarked on Smith’s multicultural

perspective (Moyes).39 This fascination with Smith’s literary multiculturalism has

recently been reconfirmed – and in the most unlikely of places, the decidedly un-literary

MTV. During the 2006 MTV Movie Awards, the channel premiered a consciously

multicultural series of promotional spots that instruct young American viewers to “define

yourself,” appealing to both adolescent narcissism and contemporary obsessions with

identity. The four television spots feature a multicultural cast of characters, including the

African American Margot, who both vaguely resembles Smith with her afro and hip,

bohemian sense of style and is explicitly defined by the ad’s voiceover as a “fan of Zadie

Smith, the author from London.” Margot is also defined through a series of multicultural

identity categories – she is explicitly identified as lesbian and implicitly as African

American through the tag “the hottest ‘gangsta lezzie’ from Phoenix ‘ill’ PA, Untied

States of America.” Her interests also mark her as a truly cosmopolitan and international

youth, with references made to the French Canadian pop group Kiss Me Deadly and

Asian martial arts: Margot is “a student of Hai Chi, which she thinks her dad made up,

but it’s kinda like Tai Chi, only faster” (“MTV – Define Yourself - Margot”). Margot,

much like Smith, is marketed to contemporary consumers as an exotic, worldly product.

Zadie Smith’s position as a signifier of a brand of popular multiculturalism in this

MTV ad campaign is significant both because it demonstrates the pervasiveness of

Smith’s association with multicultural paradigms, and because it illustrates the ease with which these paradigms can be coopted and commodified by the mainstream media.40

Mulitculturalism, once considered a mode of political intervention that challenged

ethnocentric and racist doctrines, is now fodder for marketing strategists who want to

appeal to a new generation of young viewers and consumers.41 Multiculturalism has

become a commodified, consumer oriented discourse that is frequently mobilized within

capitalist structures in order to appeal to a new generation of potential buyers. Both in

interviews and in her fiction, Smith has been dismissive of her current position as a

spokeswoman for multiculturalism and of the fallacious imagination of London as a

“Happy Multicultural Land” (Smith, White Teeth 384).42 How, then, have some critics

and scholars come to associate Smith so closely with multiculturalism? And how has

Smith resisted this racialization and exoticification? How might close attention to

Smith’s narrative choices and the ways that she has positioned herself as an author and a thinker in the global culture market complicate her perceived status as a multicultural

icon? And, finally, how can this new perspective help us to better comprehend the contributions of a writer who promises to be one of the most exciting and prolific literary

voices of the early twenty-first century?

The questions above reflect the larger questions posed by this dissertation.

Attention to Smith’s narrative choices takes into account what the texts do, while

consideration of her self-marketing and her resistance to the global market and

postcoloniality highlight the ways in which Smith has attempted to intervene in what has

been done with her texts. My focus in this chapter, as in the other chapters in this

dissertation, is on the interactions and negotiations between the artist’s intention and the

strictures of the international market. While Peck’s texts and intentions were seemingly

subsumed by the power of postcoloniality and the international market, Smith fights

against such a reception.43 Within the context of this dissertation, we can frame Smith’s

struggle against the market as a stand for postcolonialism in the face of postcoloniality.

To return again to Huggan’s terms, he claims that there is a “constitutive split within the postcolonial, the entanglement of its ostensibly anti-imperial ideologies within a global economy that often manipulates them to neo-imperial ends.” Postcolonialism “concerns largely localised agencies of resistance,” while postcoloniality “refers to a global condition of cross-cultural symbolic exchange” (ix). Huggan goes on to argue:

[In] Postcoloniality [….] value is constructed through global market operations involving the exchange of cultural commodities and, particularly, culturally ‘othered’ goods [.…] Postcolonialism, by contrast, implies a politics of value that stands in obvious opposition to global processes of commodification. Yet a cursory glance at the state of postcolonial studies at Western universities, or of the worldwide marketing of prominent postcolonial writers like Salman Rushdie, is enough to suggest that these two apparently conflicting regimes of value are mutually entangled. It is not just that postcolonialism and postcoloniality are at

Postcoloniality has worked on Smith in such a way as to turn her into a consumer product

– an exotic and multicultural author whose difference is “buyable.” Yet she also seems to push against that categorization in her fiction, her criticism, and in the shape that she has given her career. This resistance to the forces of postcoloniality constitutes its own literary postcolonialism. According to Huggan, postcoloniality primarily functions through the mobilization of the discourse of the postcolonial exotic (“the global commodification of cultural difference”), and it is clear that in terms of both Smith’s literary content and self-marketing, this discourse is actively resisted (vii). While Smith’s literary postcolonialism may not have the scope or ambition of Peck’s political-historical postcolonialism (or Ghobadi’s nationalism, discussed in the following chapter), it is significant in its explicit rejection of the global forces that affect all postcolonial texts in international circulation.

My argument in what follows is broken into two sections. In the first section, I reconsider Smith’s White Teeth and argue against a multicultural reading of the novel. I suggest, instead, that White Teeth advocates two primary paradigms for understanding the socio-cultural landscape of Britain at the dawn of the twenty-firstcentury: postcolonialism and nationalism. Smith’s work suggests that while multiculturalism may (more or less benignly) help to describe the demographic present, postcolonialism and nationalism initiate projects of historical inquiry into the past and provide a utopian imagination of

the future. Smith mobilizes a postcolonial critique of Britain’s colonial past in order to

recognize the implications of this exploitative and corrosive history in the present. At the

same time, she insists on an optimistic future through a consistent emphasis on narrative

and human connection and British nationalism. The refrain, repeated throughout the

novel, “a past-tense, future-perfect kind of a mood,” suggests that in White Teeth the past

may be “tense,” but the future promises to be “perfect” (15).44 Smith, I argue, speaks for

a new generation of multi-ethnic, postcolonial British nationals living in the former seats

of colonial power for whom the liberal, accommodationist policies of multiculturalism in

the late twentieth century no longer provide a sufficient engagement with contemporary realities and who, instead, have developed a keen, critical understanding of the past in conjunction with an optimistic vision of a more authentically unified national future.

This vision of a more unified national future, as well as Smith’s insistence on human and narrative connection, challenges the exoticist, “othering” frameworks through which

Smith has been approached. A closer look at what the novel does provides an implicit critique of what has been done with Smith and White Teeth in the process of circulation.

After providing a sustained analysis of White Teeth, the novel that won Smith

critical acclaim and established her reputation as a writer, a thinker, and a literary

celebrity, the second section of this chapter examines Smith’s post-White Teeth work and

literary career. I argue that Smith has actively resisted her categorization as a

multicultural writer both through her fiction and non-fiction writing and by marketing

and re-branding herself in ways that defy the expectations established for her in the wake

of White Teeth. I argue that Smith’s fiction, especially her novels The Autograph Man

and On Beauty, emphasize the potential for human connection and unification in the face

of divisive paradigms of difference in a globalized world. While both of Smith’s post-

White Teeth novels shift the focus away from Britain and nationalism, they maintain their optimistic insistence on the centripetal forces – from transnational fan communities to faith based groups to love and beauty – that draw people together and complicate pluralistic multiculturalism’s festishization of difference and the “other.”

Smith, as literary celebrity, also refuses to be racialized and “othered” by the discourse of the postcolonial exotic and she, instead, has steered her career in unexpected directions that were not anticipated in the wake of White Teeth’s amazing success. From her own articulation of her literary peers, to the varied genres and media she works in, to the different traditions she invokes, the ways that Smith has marketed herself prove her to be a much more savvy and complex figure than her youth and relative newcomer status on the literary scene might suggest. Smith has taken control of her circulation by taking control of her production, and in the years since the release of White Teeth, she has experimented with a variety of genres, literary traditions, and cultural identifications. In this second section of the chapter, I do not offer the same kind of sustained analysis of

Smith’s work that I do in the first section on White Teeth. My focus, instead, is on considering the broader narrative and thematic choices Smith makes in her later prose and considering those choices in the context of the trajectory of Smith’s varied career and literary celebrity post-White Teeth. Finally, I argue that Smith’s postcolonialism is defined by her resistance to the systems of postcoloniality that largely dictate the ways in which writers such as Smith, with personal histories that engage the legacy of

colonialism, are circulated and consumed. Despite Smith’s varied literary career, her

resistance to postcoloniality and the discourse of the postcolonial exotic is remarkably

consistent both in terms of what her texts do and in terms of the ways in which she has

negotiated the forces that attempt to do things with her texts.

I. Part One: White Teeth and Postcolonial Nationalism

The Root Canals of Zadie Smith and the Making of a Multicultural Icon

As almost every article, interview, or review addressing Zadie Smith’s White

Teeth is remarkably quick to point out, Smith is the child of a multiracial marriage

between a Jamaican mother and a white, British father. Her brothers are both involved in

the London hip-hop scene, and the Smith children were raised in Willesden Green, a

notoriously diverse North London suburb. Articles, interviews, and reviews are equally

likely to mention Smith’s hair (alternately worn straightened, in a natural afro, or tied up in a head scarf), her beauty, her high cheekbones, her youth (she had two novels published before she turned thirty), her skin color, and, as Clare Squires notes, at least one journalist reporting on Smith identified her as “ethnically interesting” (15). In this

section, I explore the intersecting personal and political histories, or to use Smith’s own

term from White Teeth, the root canals, that constitute this orientalist fascination.45

Smith’s eagerly anticipated and much publicized entry into the London literary scene at the dawning of the new millennium positioned her to speak for a new generation of young multicultural British subjects who were only marginally represented in the late twentieth-century work of authors like Hanif Kureishi or Salman Rushdie, authors who

have been consistently identified by critics as Smith’s literary “forefathers.”46 Smith’s

unwitting status as a multicultural icon should not be seen in isolation, but as part of a

larger trend that affects a vast and diverse group of postcolonial and marginalized writers:

the foregrounding and isolation of racial and cultural difference as the constitutive

element of these authors’ works, what Huggan refers to as the postcolonial exotic. This

pervasive discourse makes Smith a consumable, exotic commodity, but multicultural

paradigms, rather than enabling interpretations of Smith’s imaginative intervention in the

novel, prohibit a reading of the text as anything beyond realist mimetics.

In January 2000, White Teeth was released after several years of eager

anticipation in literary circles (Smith received a significant advance on the novel, which

made the news as early as late 1997). Great Britain, along with the rest of the world,

began trying to imagine what it meant to be living in a new millennium – with the

twentieth century as a backdrop and the twenty-first century still unknown. Smith was hailed as “young, Black, British and the first publishing sensation of the millennium”

(Merritt). Her work seemed to represent the experiences of a new generation of urban,

British youth for whom the late-twentieth-century racist, conservative policies of the

Thatcher administration and the widespread violence of the National Front were distant memories, replaced with an awareness of the mainstream fascination with multicultural

hip-hop, urban fashion, and street slang.47 Like her White Teeth characters Irie, Magid,

and Millat, Smith was born in 1975 and spent most of her adult life in post-Thatcherite

Britain. Smith and her contemporaries constitute a demographic of multicultural subjects

who are less discouraged by the retrograde policies and racist violence of the late 1970s

and 1980s. Discussing the interracial relationships that are so central to her novel, Smith stresses this generational difference: “I think the relationships in the book are something to be wished for, but I think they might exist now, and certainly in the future, with the amount of mixing up that has gone on. My generation, and my younger brother's generation even more, don't carry the same kind of baggage” (Merritt).

With the articulation of a new multicultural reality comes the need for multicultural icons able to speak for a generation of increasingly diversified British nationals. Within the context of the London literary scene, authors like Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi, both of whom achieved celebrity status through their explorations of multicultural England, no longer seem to speak for or to the new “mixed up” multicultural reality.48 The disparity between a late twentieth and an early twenty-first century literary articulation of multiculturalism is illustrated by juxtaposing two passages, one from Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and one from White Teeth.

The famous first lines of Kureishi’s novel exemplify a late twentieth century multicultural paradigm: “My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories. But I don’t care – Englishman I am

(though not proud of it)” (3). Here, Karim is meant to exemplify a paradigmatic late twentieth-century multicultural British subject - with a culture that is decidedly plural

(“two old histories”), with a national “home” that is singular (“Englishman born and bred”), with a sense of almost belonging, but not quite (“a funny kind of Englishman”), and with a relatively antagonistic relationship to the homeland (“though not proud of it”).

While Karim move towards an inclusive definition of Britishness and national belonging

(“Englishman I am”), the emphasis on the passage remains on the divisive differences

that separates Karim from traditional English identity.

Compare Karim’s declaration with the following from the third person narrator of

White Teeth:

This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course [….] Yet, despite all the mixing up, despite the fact that we have finally slipped into each other’s lives with reasonable comfort…it is still hard to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English [….] it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears – dissolution, disappearance. (271-72)

While Karim’s declaration emphasizes duality and distinction, this passage suggests a much more multiple and complicated multicultural mixing; Isaac Leung, for instance, is not a dual subject but rather is defined by his name as Jewish, Chinese, and British.49

While identity categories are kept relatively discrete in the passage from Kureishi’s novel

(there are two discrete “old histories” and while Karim is a new breed of Englishman, he is marked as peculiar and “funny”), Smith makes it clear that in today’s multicultural

Britain, histories have merged to become mutually constitutive, to the extent that “there is no one more English than the Indian” and vice versa. In Smith’s Britain, postcolonial histories have blurred the distinctions, between Indian and English for example, on which colonial enterprises and racist discourses are founded. Whereas Kureishi suggests that

Karim’s position as a mixed race British-Indian subject explicitly distinguishes him from

conventional definitions of Britishness, the passage from Smith’s narrator emphasizes the

“infection, penetration, [and] miscegenation” that promise not to alienate multicultural

subjects, but rather to remake Britishness in a new multicultural image. In other words,

while Kureishi’s multicultural narrator emphasizes difference and alienation, Smith’s

narrator suggests colonialism’s and multiculturalism’s roles in erasing difference and

creating a culture of “mixed up” sameness.50 This is not to say that Smith’s novel is

oblivious to the continued implications of difference in the early twenty-first century

(each of Smith’s ethnic characters experiences racism and xenophobia, and there are clear

indications that the legacy of colonialism persists), but for Smith, such racial problems

seem relics of a prior age – the increasingly “mixed up” reality makes such prejudice and

inequality based on race and/or ethnicity difficult to sustain.51

As a result of Smith’s representation of a multiculturalism for the new

millennium, there has been a tendency to pigeonhole her as a multicultural, racialized

writer. While her own mixed race background and her interest in British, urban culture

have helped confirm the viability of this classification, her position as a multicultural spokesperson should not be taken for granted as logically consequent or necessarily benign. Graham Huggan argues that through the discourse of the postcolonial exotic, the

reception and interpretation of postcolonial writers, whether writing from the margins or

from the metropole, are, to a great extent, dictated by a system of aesthetic and socio-

cultural assumptions that consistently emphasize cultural difference by exoticizing and

racializing writers, whether these writers resist or incorporate these assumptions into their

own self-identification and presentation. Huggan argues that the postcolonial exotic is

the result of “a pathology of cultural representation under late capitalism – a result of the spiraling commodification of cultural difference, and of responses to it, that is characteristic of the (post)modern, market-driven societies in which many of us currently live”(33). Huggan’s argument is elucidated by the commodified multiculturalism apparent in the MTV “define yourself” ad campaign. He points out that in a late capitalist global market defined by the exchange of goods and cultural products over national and continental borders, cultural and national differences must be managed and made consumable through discourses of the exotic other. Some authors, Huggan argues, mobilize discourses of the postcolonial exotic in order to facilitate the marketing and dissemination of their work by engaging in processes of “staged marginality,” which refers to a “process by which marginalised individuals or minority groups dramatise their

‘subordinate’ status for the imagined benefit of a majority audience [….and] may function in certain contexts to uncover and challenge dominant structures of power” (xii).

Authors engaging in this form of staged marginality, according to Huggan, include

Kureishi and Rushdie, Smith’s supposed literary antecedents.

Yet, Smith can hardly be said to be engaging in “staged marginality.” In fact, she has consistently downplayed and resisted her status as a “marginalized” writer. Smith has repeatedly disavowed attempts to classify her fiction as specifically multicultural or racialized, and in one of her many interviews with The Guardian, she sarcastically suggested that “I think I have brown people in my book, and so does Salman, and so does

Hanif Kureishi. So it's a genre, don't you see that?” (Hattenstone).52 Smith has also suggested that the book was not meant to be a “multicultural milestone,” and speaking

with Chris Jones from the BBC News Profile Unit, Smith stated, “I wasn't trying to write about race. I was trying to write about the country I live in" (“Zadie Smith: Willesden to

Whitbread”). Smith explicitly rejects the exoticization and racialization that Huggan identifies as central to the construction and consumption of the postcolonial exotic and the circulation of texts within a global system structured by postcoloniality. Instead,

Smith locates her work within the context of a racially nonspecific tradition of British literature. Similarly, the authors that Smith most often sites as particularly influential on her development as a writer are primarily white writers from the British, continental

European, or North American traditions. 53

Smith also critiques the exoticization of ethnic British nationals quite mercilessly in her work, particularly through the orientalist characters Joyce Chalfen and Poppy Burt

Jones. Consider the following exchange between the white British Joyce Chalfen and the second generation Bangladeshi British Millat Iqbal and biracial, Jamaican British Irie

Jones:

“Well,” said Joyce, released by Marcus and planting herself down at the circular table, inviting them to do the same, “you look very exotic. Where are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?” “Willesden,” said Irie and Millat simultaneously. “Yes, yes, of course, but where originally?” “Oh,” said Millat, putting on what he called a bud-bud-ding-ding accent. “You are meaning where from am I originally.” Joyce looked confused. “Yes, originally.” “Whitechapel,” said Millat, pulling out a fag. “Via the Royal London Hospital and the 207 bus.” All the Chalfens milling through the kitchen, Marcus, Josh, Benjamin, Jack, exploded into laughter. Joyce obediently followed suit. “Chill out man,” said Millat, suspicious. “It wasn’t that fucking funny.”(265)

In this passage, Joyce attempts to situate the young “brown” adolescents in her kitchen

according to the discourses of the postcolonial exotic, while Irie and Millat, like Smith,

actively resist this kind of racialized categorization by emphasizing their Britishness.

Millat’s final line in this exchange, tagged by Smith’s narrator as proceeding from his suspiciousness, illustrates his budding awareness of the ways in which he will be positioned as a racialized subject, and it simultaneously functions to prohibit any presumed collusion that the Chalfens, as a family of proud liberals, might attempt to create, in this case through common laughter, with the exoticized identity they have imagined for him. This explicit rejection of the reification and elevation of cultural difference as a category runs counter to the central tenets of multiculturalism. While the multiculturalist would celebrate Millat’s and Irie’s difference (his Bangladeshi-ness and her biracial-ness and Jamaican-ness), Smith, by allowing Millat a total victory of wit over

Joyce, emphasizes sameness and Britishness – not the exotic, but the mundane, not a village far away, but the Royal London Hospital and the 207 bus. In order to comprehend and contextualize Smith’s and Millat’s rejection of Joyce’s mobilization of

the postcolonial exotic, a brief discussion of the debates surrounding multiculturalism

will be useful.54

In the early 1970s, when multiculturalism surfaced as both a liberal philosophy

and a program for political policy making, it was viewed as a progressive intervention

into monocultural, ethnocentric, and racist social structures. It also constituted a way in

which to unite the multitude of social movements organized around polarizing identity

categories under one umbrella. However, philosophical and institutional

multiculturalism’s inability to deal with the many identity based conflicts that have

persisted since the early seventies (from the Brixton riots in 1981, 1985, and 1995 to

1992’s L.A. riots) has discredited the usefulness of multiculturalism as a paradigm for

change and progress. Instead, multiculturalism has come to be associated both with the

troubling issue of bureaucratic policy implementation and with a lack of theoretical

sophistication. As postcolonial theorist Sneja Gunew suggests in a 1997 essay:

Multiculturalism deals with theories of difference [….] multiculturalism deals with the management (often compromised) of contemporary geo-political diversity in former imperial centres and their ex-colonies alike. It is also increasingly a global discourse since it takes into account the flow of migrants, refugees, and diasporas and their relations with nation-states [….] Within critical theory it has often been an embarrassing term to invoke partly because it is seen as automatically aligned with and hopelessly co-opted by the state in certain conscious kinds of nation building. As a result, for example, it is consistently rejected by anti-racist groups in Great Britain. (22)

Multiculturalism, then, is no longer primarily associated with the kind of anti- establishment resistance epitomized by, for example, British anti-racist groups, but is instead seen as a tool for the “management” of diversity by government agencies and institutions. In the new millennium, multiculturalism – and its complementary philosophy, identity politics – are seen as outdated, the stuff of “tolerate difference” and

“celebrate diversity” bumper stickers. This process by which alternative discourses are

incorporated by and into the dominant is usefully theorized by Raymond Williams, who

argues that what he calls emergent discourses or cultures, or those “new meanings and

values, new practices, new significances and experiences” that emerge in opposition to

the dominant, are most often quickly and effectively incorporated into the mainstream.55

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In addition to multiculturalism’s problematic status as an incorporated discourse,

multiculturalism has been critiqued as a form of mere tokenism, as an essentialist

philosophy, and as a buzzword used to assuage liberalism’s sense of political

responsibility. Among multiculturalism’s harshest critics is Salman Rushdie. Writing

about multiculturalism in 1982, Rushdie states:

A language reveals the attitudes of the people who use and shape it. And a whole declension of patronizing terminology can be found in the language in which inter-racial relations have been described inside Britain [….] And now there's a new catchword: 'multiculturalism'. In our schools, this means little more than teaching the kids a few bongo rhythms, how to tie a sari and so forth. In the police training programme, it means telling cadets that black people are so 'culturally different' that they can't help making trouble. Multicultralism is the latest token gesture towards Britain's blacks, and it ought to be exposed, like 'integration' and 'racial harmony', for the sham it is. (Imaginary Homelands, 137)

For Rushdie, writing in the context of Thatcherism and National Front violence,

multiculturalism is a dangerous, proscriptive doctrine touted by liberals in response to racism. Multiculturalism is fostered through politically suspect institutions, such as

schools and the criminal justice system, and its effects are either limited to the superficial

(teaching little English lads to beat a bongo) or are explicitly detrimental (essentializing

cultural difference in such a way as to naturalize, for example, black criminality).56

For Zadie Smith, multiculturalism is quite different – not proscriptive, but

descriptive, not a political or social movement, but a simple reality. Speaking to Simon

Hattenstone from The Guardian, Smith reflects: “I was expected to be some expert on

multicultural affairs, as if multiculturalism is a genre of fiction or something, whereas it's

just a fact of life - like there are people of different races on the planet”

(“Hattenstone”).57

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The disparity between Rushdie’s and Smith’s critiques of multiculturalism

demonstrates what American theorist Stanley Fish refers to as the difference between

multiculturalism as a philosophical problem and as a demographic fact. While Smith and

Fish may seem to be strange bedfellows, Smith’s assertion that multiculturalism is just “a

fact of life” clearly resonates with Fish’s claim that “saying yes or no to multiculturalism

seems to make as much sense as saying yes or no to history” (385). If, in fact,

multiculturalism is better understood as a demographic fact than as a philosophical

system, then to read White Teeth as a work of multicultural fiction implies that the novel

functions primarily in the realist mode and that its greatest value lies in its ability to

mimetically represent urban diversity and difference. While one of the oft noted

strengths of Smith’s novel is its ability to realistically represent the language, psyche, and

experiences of her ethnically and generationally diverse cast of characters, the novel also

clearly engages narrative and imaginative strategies that push the diegetic world of the

story, and its consequent socio-cultural implications, into the realm of non-realist

fiction.58 Emphasizing the mimetic, realist aspects of White Teeth suggests that the novel is primarily concerned with the present, the “now” of a demographically multicultural

London. However, the novel’s release at the dawn of a new millennium suggests the extent to which the “now” of the novel is contingent upon a sense of the immediacy of the past and the future – the century past and the century yet to come.

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Postcolonialism and the Ripping Teeth

The tendency to approach Zadie Smith’s White Teeth through a paradigm of

multiculturalism has led many critics to privilege the novel’s mimetic representation of a

demographically diverse contemporary London. This has largely occluded any serious

consideration of the ways in which the novel critiques Britain’s colonial past by

mobilizing a literary tradition of postcolonialist historiography that exposes the

exploitative and racist foundations of the multicultural reality that many critics seem so

eager to accept. Postcoloniality, in other words, has the potential to erase Smith’s textual

postcolonialism. Specifically, I argue that Smith’s postcolonial historiography, an

integral part of what I will later discuss as Smith’s postcolonial nationalism, provides the

novel with its primary mode of narrative and cultural attack, or to use Smith’s metaphor,

its “ripping teeth.” This attack is primarily leveled through the inclusion of two narrative

strands in the novel – the stories of Mangal Pande and the Indian Mutiny and of

Ambrosia Bowden’s “education” and the Kingston Earthquake of 1907.59 Both of these

stories, though imaginatively told and connected through plot to the novel’s primary

narrative line, are to some extent based in historical fact.60 I argue that both historical

narratives establish a specific familial colonial legacy with implications for the characters in the novel’s present. This narrative engagement with colonial history challenges interpretations of White Teeth as a celebration of Britain as a “Happy Multicultural Land”

(384) and raises a question posed by a character in White Teeth – can Britain overcome

its colonial legacy and move forward, unified, into the future, or is there “[t]oo much

bloody history” (122)?

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For Samad Iqbal, great-grandson of Mangal Pande, Pande’s legacy is a reminder

of the glory of Bengali resistance, the imperative to resist westernization, whether in the

form of colonization or cultural imperialism and assimilation, and the distortion or

erasure of colonial and anti-colonial history in the postcolonial present. Because White

Teeth has been so commonly read as a novel that is first and foremost about the politics

of identity, Pande’s influence on Samad’s self-identification as a Bengali and a Muslim

living in England has been noted by critics. For example, Dominic Head suggests in his

“Zadie’s Smith’s White Teeth: Multiculturalism for the Millennium” that “[t]he identity

of Samad is determined partly through his pride in his great-grandfather, Mangal Pande,

who is rumoured to have triggered the Indian Mutiny” (112). For Samad, who struggles

throughout the novel with his theoretical rejection of his obvious and inevitable

westernization (apparent, for example, in his invocation of biblical passages to justify the

haraam act of masturbation), Mangal Pande stands as an exemplar of all that is culturally

and religiously pure. Therefore, it is of particular significance that according to the

“legend” of Pande that Samad subscribes to, Pande’s anti-colonial act, the firing of that

first mutinous shot, was the result of an affront to his religious faith.61 Pande, then,

comes to represent for Samad a familial legacy of anti-colonialism, anti-westernization,

and Islamic piety: “Samad […] saw that great-grandfather of his, Mangal Pande, flailing

with a musket; fighting against the new, holding onto tradition. ‘It runs in the family,’

[Samad] said” (150). Samad negotiates his own identity in such a way as to maintain a

sense of continuity between a legacy of anti-colonialism and his own resistance to

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western forms of cultural imperialism. While Samad’s resistance is problematic and

repeatedly compromised, his attempts to negotiate a rejection of westernization are

manifest in his philosophy of cultural and religious purity.62

The figure of Mangal Pande also serves as a vehicle for Smith’s literary

exploration of history and, specifically, of a postcolonial historiography. History constitutes one of the central themes of the novel – from the epigraph that states “what’s past is prologue” to the assertion of “too much bloody history.” The narrative of Mangal

Pande elucidates this theme by calling into question both historical relativity and the creation and dissemination of anti-colonial histories within the space of the former colonial power. Squires suggests that O’Connell’s Pool House, the site of Samad and

Archie’s repeated disputes over Pande’s history, “becomes the site of historical relativity.

White Teeth, then, is concerned with history as a motivating force and as a contestable value” (47). However, the case of Mangal Pande does not present an example of historical relativity; rather, it portrays the difficulty of retrieving and disseminating an anti-colonial history from within a former colonial power that wishes to suppress or trivialize narratives of resistance. Historical relativity, as a term and a concept, acknowledges the fact that history is consistently re-negotiated and reinterpreted due to the endlessly “contestable value” of the past, but it does not explicitly accommodate consideration of the structures of power and influence that often dictate and constitute

popular understandings of a contestable past. Furthermore, the concept of relativity

makes the force of history subject to the whim of the reader or interpreter; relativity

means there is not such thing as historical distortion and all value is contestable. In other

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words, to suggest that history is relative is not the same thing as to argue that

marginalized, in this case anti-colonial, histories are often erased or distorted by the

dominant.

In White Teeth, Smith’s narrator states that there are two camps in the Pande debate: those who believe Pande to be “[a]n unrecognized hero” and those who believe interest in the historical figure to be a “palaver over nuffin’.” Smith’s narrator goes on to list the members of each camp, and while the former includes only Samad Iqbal and A.S.

Misra (an Indian historian who writes of Pande’s heroism), the latter includes almost every other major character in the novel as well as “British scholarship from 1857 to the present day” (208). Both the Britishism of the expression “a palaver over nuffin’” and the emphasis on “British scholarship,” as opposed to Misra’s Indian historiography, indicates that the rejection of Pande as a heroic, or even noteworthy, figure is expressly linked to British intellectual histories and ideas, and this suggests that what is at stake for

Smith in the Pande debates is much more than historical relativity. Rather, the Pande debate illustrates the struggle of former colonial subjects to define their own history and experiences within the context of the former colonial nation. Samad recognizes the inequity of anti-colonial, historical representation, and he tells Alsana that when it comes to British representations of Indian history, “it is simply a matter of market economy, publicity, movie rights[….] Gandhi had Mr. Kingsley – bully for him – but who will do

Pande, eh? Pande’s not pretty enough, is he? Too Indian looking, big nose, big eyebrows. That’s why I’m always having to tell you ingrates about Mangal Pande.

Bottom line: if I don’t, nobody will” (188). In this passage, Samad makes a comparison

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between the “unrecognized hero” Pande and the quintessential hero of Indian history,

Mahatma Gandhi. While Gandhi is represented as marketable, “pretty,” and not too

Indian, Pande is identified as the opposite, making him unpalatable to British tastes. In addition, it is significant to note that while Gandhi is famous for his non-violent approach to anti-colonial struggle (a philosophy that, though often effective, has also historically been more palatable to colonial states, for rather obvious reasons), Pande is infamous for an act of political violence. Samad’s struggle to reinterpret Pande’s history suggests that under the influence of a system based on the remnants of an empire, retrieving anti- colonial history from either erasure or grave distortion constitutes a formidable postcolonial historiographical intervention. It is important to note that on this front, despite Smith’s boundary blurring and her national optimism (discussed below), the

British/Asian opposition continues to matter.

Smith’s narrative also makes it quite clear that the stakes of such a historical project are high, as characters in the novel without access to their own histories seem destined to repeat them. Millat, who through his conversion to fundamentalist, militant

Islam, begins to see the world through a strict and non-negotiable “us versus them” philosophy, dismisses his father’s attempts at historical revisionism. Millat thinks:

And that’s it. That’s why Pande hung from a tree while Havelock the executioner sat on the chaise lounge in Delhi. Pande was no one and Havelock was someone. No need for library books and debates and reconstructions. Don’t you see Abba? whispered Millat. That’s it. That’s the long, long history of us and them. That’s how it was. But no more. Because Millat was here to finish it. To revenge it. To turn that history around [….] Where Pande misfooted he would step sure. Where Pande chose A, Millat would choose B” (419).

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The incredible irony of Milat’s determination to both suppress and correct Pande’s legacy

is apparent, as he is completely stoned (as Pande was reported to be) and heading to the

Future Mouse premiere with a gun in his pocket that he will ultimately use to shoot the

wrong man. Millat, in fact, seems to be repeating the purported mistakes of his legendary

ancestor.

While the Iqbal family’s “root canals” are defined by a masculinist history of militant anti-colonial resistance, the Bowden family history exposes a narrative of colonial sexual exploitation and manipulation as well as an example of anti-colonial resistance that is specifically gendered feminine. The chapter of White Teeth that narrates

“The Root Canals of Hortense Bowden” begins “[a] little English education can be a dangerous thing” and tells the story of the academic, sexual, and political “education” of

Clara’s grandmother and Irie’s great-grandmother, Ambrosia Bowden of Kingston,

Jamaica (295). Ambrosia’s narrative figures the colonial encounter through a metaphor of sexual exploitation and love, and in doing so both comments broadly on the nature of colonial relationships and presents a history of the abuse and misuse of women of color at the hands of white men under colonial rule. Ambrosia’s story narrates her impregnation by British officer Captain Charlie Durham, her sexual relationship with him under the guise of English education, and her later sexual abuse by plantation owner and

“philanthropist” Sir Edmond Flecker Glenard during the 1907 Kingston Earthquake.

This narrative extends the historical fact of the rampant abuse that women like Ambrosia suffered at the hands of colonial officials in order to explore the “love” that binds colonizer to colonized. While there is no indication that Glenard’s sexual advances to

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Ambrosia constitute anything other than rape, Smith’s narrator assures the reader that

Captain Charlie does in fact “love” his black “maid”: “oh, he loves her; just as the

English loved India and Africa and Ireland; it is love that is the problem, people treat their lovers badly” (299). By figuring the colonial encounter through a metaphor of sexual love, Smith exposes the ways in which the feminization of colonized subjects and the consequent gendering of colonization results in power dynamics akin to those in traditional heterosexual relationships where ownership and paternalism produce relations of dominance and submission.63

While Ambrosia’s narrative functions to define the colonial encounter according to a paradigm of sexual exploitation, domination, and submission, it also records the process by which Ambrosia’s “English education” at the hands of British men establishes her as a resistant subject who, through her rejection of both Captain Charlie and Sir

Glenard, rejects colonial domination and achieves a level of independence and autonomy, making the declaration that “a little English education can be a dangerous thing” highly ironic. History has shown that one of the strange facts of colonialism is that the institution contains within it the seeds of its own demise. Through an “English education” that privileges enlightenment concepts of self-determination, democracy, individual agency, and independence, colonial subjects are confronted with the gross hypocrisy of colonial projects. In addition, colonial education often includes elements of

Christian religious instruction, and while the Christianization of colonial populations often compromises the maintenance of traditional cultural structures, it also exposes the immoral, anti-Christian nature of colonization and many of its accompanying practices,

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such as sexual abuse. Before Ambrosia’s “education” at the hands of Captain Charlie,

she is represented as exhibiting a youthful skepticism: “Ambrosia Bowden, a capricious,

long-legged, maga village-child who had not seen a schoolroom in all her fourteen years, knew this advice [to take Captain Charlie’s offer of education] was mistaken. When an

Englishman wants to be generous, the first thing you ask is why, because there is always a reason.” This initial skepticism is then developed as Ambrosia is introduced first to

Captain Charlie’s regiment of “[l]etters, numbers, the Bible, English history, trigonometry” and, of course, lengthy lessons in “anatomy” (296) and then to the

Jehovah’s Witnesses faith through an English woman named Mrs. Brenton, who takes in a visibly pregnant Ambrosia and converts her. By the end of Ambrosia’s narrative, she has been transformed into a resistant, anti-colonial subject, as she symbolically rejects colonialism by rejecting both Sir Glenard, who is crushed to death by the earthquake in front of her eyes, and Captain Charlie, who comes to take her out of Jamaica and away from the devastation of the earthquake and finds that Ambrosia will not speak to him.

Instead, she sends a young cousin to deliver a single verse from the book of Job to her former lover and teacher: “I will fetch my knowledge from afar” (301).

Just as the legend of Mangal Pande has considerable influence on characters in

White Teeth’s present, particularly Samad Iqbal, the history of Ambrosia Bowden deeply

affects Irie’s understanding of her own identity and familial legacy. For Irie, it is her

inability to access her family’s past, due in part to the air of secrecy surrounding

Ambrosia and Captain Charlie, that makes her feel as though some aspect of her identity

is lacking: “this was another example of the Jones/Bowden gift for secret histories, stories

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you never got told, history you never entirely uncovered, rumor you never unraveled”

(314).64 Irie’s disconnection from her familial past is most obvious in the fact that she

attends Glenard Oaks School, named for the man who raped her great-grandmother,

without any knowledge about the connection between the school’s founder and her own

personal history. This lack of historical knowledge creates in Irie a strong desire to know

and connect with a definable, matrilineal past – to connect to Jamaica and to Bowden history. This desire in Irie is so fervent that she begins to sleep with a photograph of

Captain Charlie, the lover who her great-grandmother defiantly rejected, under her pillow. Through the photograph of Captain Charlie, Irie believes she is establishing a connection to her family’s historical home:

And in the mornings it wasn’t Italianate vineyards out there anymore, it was sugar, sugar, sugar, and next door was nothing but tobacco and she presumptuously fancied that the smell of plantain sent her back to somewhere, somewhere quite fictional, for she’d never been there [….] She laid claim to the past – her version of the past – aggressively, as if retrieving misdirected mail. So this was where she came from. This all belonged to her, her birthright, like a pair of pearl earrings or a post office bond. X marks the spot, and Irie put an X on everything she found, collecting bits and pieces […] and storing them under the sofa, so that as if by osmosis the richness of them would pass through the fabric while she was sleeping and seep right into her. (331)

In this passage, the narrator makes it clear that Irie’s inclination to connect to her family history by recovering the fragments of the past and trying to cobble together a continuous relationship between her English self and a Jamaican history is naïve and misled. The language used in the passage, particularly the emphasis placed on “belonged to her” and

“Irie put an X on everything she found,” also suggests that this claiming, this fabrication of a belonging, is not dissimilar to a colonial endeavor, where the foreign and alien is incorporated into the domestic, into the self.

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On the last page of the novel the reader is presented with a slightly more

optimistic vision of Irie’s quest to connect to her past. Accommodating the desire for

narrative closure of “young professional women aged eighteen to thirty-two who would

like a snapshot seven years hence of Irie, Joshua [Chalfen], and Hortense [Irie’s

grandmother and Ambrosia’s daughter] sitting by a Caribbean sea,” Smith’s narrator allows Irie a more authentic moment of immersion in history and familial “homeland,”

albeit provisionally and hypothetically. Yet, while this narrative moment may initially be

experienced by readers as providing closure both narratively and thematically to Irie’s

desire for a history and legacy, it is immediately undercut by a warning that “surely to tell

these tall tales and others like them would be to speed the myth, the wicked lie, that the

past is always tense and the future, perfect” (448). 65 This quotation, which returns us yet again to the refrain cited earlier in this chapter, indicates that the consummation of Irie’s desire for history, place, and identity in a postcolonial context is yet to be determined;

Smith’s narrator is unwilling to allow this provisional optimism to dictate the fate of her historically burdened character.

Colonial histories are divisive, and projects of postcolonial historiography

approach and lay bare the exploitative dynamics of the colonial encounter in such a way

as to make the very notion of global or national healing seem impossible. In White Teeth,

Shiva, a Hindu waiter in a Muslim Bangladeshi restaurant, gives Samad some advice

about his extra-marital affair with the white, British Poppy Burt-Jones: “I been out with a

lot of white birds, Samad. A lot. Sometimes it’s worked, sometimes it ain’t. Two lovely

American girls. Fell head over heels for a Parisian stunner. Even spent a year with a

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Romanian. But never an English girl. Never works. Never” (122). Shiva’s warning

suggests the extent to which colonial history, more than race, ethnicity, or nationality – more, in other words, than any marker of multicultural identity – negates the potential for human connection and unification. According to Shiva, there is “too much bloody history” for even two individual subjects to overcome the relations of power established by colonialism. In this section, I have argued that colonial histories and legacies influence the identities and politics of Smith’s postcolonial characters, leading Samad

(and Millat in his own, equally compromised way) to reject the west and Britishness from within “the belly of the beast” and influencing Irie to turn away from what she perceives as a lack of history and identity within the context of Britain towards an imagined legacy of Jamaican-ness. These characters, each of whom is in one way or another immersed in the past, turn from Britishness and national identity, but, in order to do so, characters must also suppress significant elements of both their history and their present. If a consideration of the role of colonial history in the novel leads to the assumption that

British subjects such as Samad, Millat, and Irie illustrate the impossibility of national reconciliation and unification, this claim must be balanced with an acknowledgement of the novel’s optimistic treatment of human connection, unification, and, ultimately, British nationalism. Just as Smith is unwilling to accept the divisive assumptions of the postcolonial exotic, her novel is unwilling to endorse a pessimistic view of the potential for human connection.

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More Nationalist than the Nationalists

Since the publication in 1983 of Benedict Anderson’s seminal text on nations and nationalism, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of

Nationalism, much literary theory and criticism has been produced reflecting on the relationship between the nation and the novel.66 Many of these studies focus on the

novel’s ability to represent temporal simultaneity and Anderson’s concept of

homogenous empty time in order to create the imagination of a “deep horizontal

comradeship” that defines the nation (7).67 In this section of this chapter, I examine another formal aspect of the novel, its ability to foreground human connection through

intertwining and centripetal narrative strands. I argue that by forging these crucial narrative connections, White Teeth emphasizes sameness and imagines a unified British

nation that remains occluded when the novel is approached through paradigms of either multiculturalism or postcolonialism. I begin by arguing that the nationalism expressed in

Smith’s work is distinct – conforming to neither the often overly optimistic nationalism

espoused by emergent or newly formed nation-states nor the racist, virulently

exclusionary nationalism touted by cultural purists. I then examine what has become the

most well-known critique and analysis of White Teeth, James Wood’s chapter on

“Hysterical Realism” from his book-length study The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter

and the Novel (2004), and I argue that Wood has overlooked the thematic centrality of

narrative connectivity. Finally, I examine how two central characters in Smith’s fiction,

Archie Jones and the Future Mouse, function both as representations of British national

identity and as the narrative glue that holds Smith’s expansive fiction together.

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In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, nationalism flourished and was advocated by

activists, politicians, artists, and theorists alike, as anti-colonial movements, from

Gandhi’s non-violent Satyagraha movement to the militant Algerian FLN, won victories

across the formerly colonized world.68 It did not take long, however, for people to begin

to realize that with independence and a recognized nation-state came a whole new host of

problems, and that nationalism, while an effective unifying force for independence, was

also capable of masking and mobilizing a range of exploitations and abuses.69 Since that time, and until the present, nationalism has been looked at skeptically by many writers, activists, and theorists.70 In addition, a number of racist, xenophobic groups have used nationalism as a platform from which to advocate doctrines of hate and intolerance.

Within the British context, the most obvious contemporary example of this kind of politically retrograde, exclusionary nationalism is the British National Front.

Zadie Smith’s nationalism, however, does not follow these models. Instead,

Smith’s nationalism is founded on an inclusive definition of Britishness and an optimistic belief in the potential for British subjects to negotiate difference in the interest of unification. Smith’s nationalism is like the anti-colonial nationalism of the mid to late twentieth century in that it is not based on an understanding of how things are, but in a vision of how things can and should be. This is one of the fundamental ways in which her philosophy of nationalism differs from her representation of the demographic fact of multiculturalism. Unlike both anti-colonial nationalism and the exclusionary nationalism of groups like the National Front, however, Smith’s nationalism does not suppress diversity, nor does she advocate for nationalism’s power to incorporate and assimilate

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difference. While each of the ethnically and racially diverse families that populate the novel do, in various ways and to different extents, assimilate Englishness into their own

identities, Smith makes it clear that each family, whether the Joneses or the Iqubals or the

Chalfens, are also redefining what it means to be British. Smith’s text argues that

through human connection and the increased racial and ethnic mixing of British society,

British nationalism and the British nation itself will be transformed and rewritten.

Smith’s nationalism should be viewed in contrast to multiculturalism; while multicultural paradigms advocate a “tolerance” of cultural difference, Smith’s nationalism insists on a kind of ethnic and cultural entropy that will inevitably remake the nation itself (“there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English”).

Despite the novel’s obvious thematic concern with human connection and nationalism, the literary critic James Wood, who has worked for such major British publications as The Guardian and The New Republic, takes issue with Smith’s text for establishing what he perceives as excessive narrative connectivity. In The Irresponsible

Self: On Laughter and the Novel, Woods provides what is certainly the most well known and cited critique of Smith’s White Teeth (likely because it remains one of the very few articles or reviews overtly critical of the work, other than those penned by the consistently self-deprecating Smith). In the chapter, Wood points to Smith’s White Teeth as an example of a new kind of fiction, hysterical realism, that he argues is currently in vogue. Wood suggests that this new genre:

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[…] is excessively centripetal. The stories all intertwine, and double and triple on themselves. Characters are forever seeing connections, and links and hidden plots, and paranoid parallels. (There is something essentially paranoid about the idea that everything connects with everything else.) [….] There is an obsession in these novels with connecting characters with each other. (181)

The “essentially paranoid…obsession” of writers like Smith is especially unsettling to a critic such as Wood whose book repeatedly invokes Henry James and laments the movement in contemporary fiction away from the “fully human” or “human depth”

(182), “anything really affecting or beautiful,” or “the representation of consciousness”(185). What Wood’s critique is implicitly rejecting in Smith’s novel is the optimistic belief in human connectivity, and what he is rather more explicitly endorsing is a traditional view of fiction as a window into the individual psyche of the autonomous and independent, post-enlightenment, western human agent.

While White Teeth does provide interesting and engaging glimpses into the individual psyches of a varied cast of characters, though perhaps not enough to satisfy

Wood, Smith’s primary interest in the novel would seem to be forging a distinctly British

“deep horizontal comradeship” through the narrative enactment of the cultural work of connection that Anderson identifies as one of the central facets of the process of national imagining. Anderson argues that because it is impossible for real human connections to exist between all members of the nation, art, literature, newspapers, and other cultural texts circulate and create the imagination of community both by articulating shared values and by offering the opportunity for shared experience (think the internet today).

For Anderson, then, in the absence of a nation where it is physically or practically possible for human beings to connect with one another, culture steps in to create the

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illusion or imagination of these necessary connections.71 In White Teeth these impossible national connections materialize and dictate the fundamental structure of the plot. For example, it is clearly an improbability, if not an impossibility, that after half a century,

Dr. Sick, the Nazi doctor that Archie was supposed to have killed in the final days of

WWII but didn’t, should return and turn out to be the mentor of the man who employs and mentors Archie’s daughter. Similarly, it seems highly unlikely that Mo, the halal butcher, who saves Archie’s life in 1975, should end up twenty-five years later to be a compatriot of Archie’s best friend’s son, Millat, in the fundamentalist Islamic organization KEVIN (and yes, they are aware they have an acronym problem). While

Wood suggests that these “excessively centripetal” moments indicate an “essentially paranoid…obsession,” they also serve to creatively imagine a national space where the impossible connections that Anderson claims must be forged by culture are realized. In

White Teeth, narrative coincidence, recurrence, and connection are the glue that binds the nation together.72

One of the primary players in many of these moments of centripetal narration and human connection is the character Archie Jones, the English every-man. Archie is, in

many ways, the heart of the novel. Structurally, the novel begins with Archie’s attempted

suicide and ends with his inadvertent liberation of the genetically modified Future

Mouse. Narratively, Archie proves to be the impetus for the central action of the novel,

since his inability to either kill Dr. Sick or to tell Samad the truth cements the friendship

between these two men and between the two central families of the text, the Joneses and

the Iqbals. Archie is not only the glue that holds the novel together, but, in a sense, the

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hero of the narrative (if a narrative like Smith’s can be said to have a hero, an outdated

literary concept to be sure). At the very moment when the diverse factions that make up

the novelistic world of White Teeth – the Islamic fundamentalists, the secular scientists, the apocalyptic Jehovah’s witnesses, and animal rights activists – seem to be headed for tragedy and chaos, it is Archie who, literally and metaphorically, takes the bullet that threatens to destroy the balance between these groups of people. Archie, then, both epitomizes a mode of structural and narrative connection that is central in the novel and is the novel’s most convincing representation of a conventional definition of Britishness, with all its subsequent assumptions about race and ethnicity.

This seemingly central point about White Teeth has been overlooked by most reviewers and critics who tend to trivialize or ignore the importance of Archie in the novel and instead focus on the more “exotic” characters. Pilar Cuder-Dominguez goes so far as to argue that Zadie Smith

targets white Englishness and exposes its myths and prejudices. To that purpose, she has created a number of Caucasian characters led by the unremarkable Archie Jones, Samad's pal from their early meeting in World War II. Archie is a sort of “English Everyman” that readily acknowledges his own ordinariness: “I'm a Jones, you see. 'Slike a ‘Smith’. We're nobody. .. .My father used to say: ‘We're the chaff, boy, we're the chaff’. Not that I've ever been much bothered, mind. Proud all the same, you know. Good honest English stock'. He is a good man, neither actively racist nor very sensitive to issues of race. (186)

Instead of reading Archie as “unremarkable” or “ordinary,” I propose a reading of the character that focuses on his role in establishing connections between characters and narrative elements in the novel - as a centripetal and unifying figure. Archie, the most apparent symbol of conventional Britishness in the novel, connects the diverse cast of characters who constitute the “imagined community” that Smith creates. Reading the

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novel through the lens of Archie, White Teeth becomes less a celebration of the messy cacophony of irreconcilable voices that constitute contemporary Britain, and more a

recognition of the essential Britishness that holds these diverse voices together.

While Archie, as a representation of British nationalism, provides a unifying force in the novel, he is in no way a figure of the future – his old age is referred to repeatedly, and he is represented as having an unhealthy obsession with the past. It is another character, and a most unlikely one at that, that symbolizes Smith’s vision of a British nationalism for the twenty-first century. While Future Mouse does not have any dialogue in the novel, no back story, and no identity crisis, the genetically mutated creature does

occupy a central place in the narrative and functions, as Archie does, to facilitate the

impossible national connections that constitute Smith’s vision of British nationalism.

Like Archie, Future Mouse is responsible for connecting diverse characters, and it is at

Future Mouse’s debut that almost the entire cast of this expansive novel end up in one

place at one time – significantly, in a room described as “a new British room, a space for

Britain, Britishness, space of Britain, British industrial space cultural space space” (429).

Also like Archie, Future Mouse provides the impetus for much of the plot, particularly in

the latter half of the novel, as various factions, each of the family units, KEVIN, FATE,

and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, prepare to respond to Future Mouse’s

unveiling in some way.

Where Future Mouse differs significantly from Archie is in terms of the vision of the nation that each represents, and Future Mouse is particularly interesting in this regard because, as a symbol of an uncertain national future, he primarily accrues his meaning

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through negation. Future Mouse is the genetically engineered creation of Marcus

Chalfen, and the purpose of this scientific project is to “eliminate the random” (283) in

accordance with Marcus’s belief in “the perfectability of all life, in the possibility of

making it more efficient, more logical” (260). It is, of course, quite significant that

Marcus’s scientific mentor is Dr. Sick, whose work for the Nazis was in the service of

“[c]hoosing who shall be born and who shall not – breeding people as if they were so many chickens, destroying them if the specifications are not correct. He wants to control, to dictate the future” (100). While Marcus sees the Future Mouse project as an effort to allow humanity a measure of control over genetic diseases and defects, the Future Mouse experiment, particularly in light of its affinity with Nazi science, suggests an effort to eliminate the random, illogical, imperfect breeding that creates strange British subjects such as Irie (a “random” mix of white British and Jamaican, of colonizer and colonized) or Millat (an “illogical” Islamic fundamentalist with a weakness for marijuana, white women, rap music, and gangster movies). As such, the Future Mouse project is aligned with notions of racial and national purity – with the kind of nationalism advocated by the

National Front or similar retrograde, militant nationalist groups.

Future Mouse represents Smith’s vision of a new, inclusive and diverse British nationalism that accounts for the strange, random, and illogical British subjects that populate the world of White Teeth because the novel ends with the destruction of the

Future Mouse project; the perfectable and controllable mouse escapes his perfect and controlled environment into the random, illogical world of Britain at the dawn of a new millennium. Future Mouse, then, comes to represent the inviability of such projects of

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national and racial purity. Future Mouse unifies White Teeth’s diverse representations of

Britishness through a common rejection and recognition of the impossibility of such a

purist national project. It is particularly significant that the transition from the old vision

of British nationalism to the new is represented as a changing of the guard – from Archie

to Future Mouse. Amid the chaos that erupts at the Future Mouse premiere, Archie is

shot and the “rebel mouse” escapes. As Archie lies there wounded, he watches the

mouse, and the final lines of the novel narrate this moment: “[h]e watched it stand very

still for a second with a smug look as if it expected nothing less. He watched it scurry

away, over his hand. He watched it dash along the table, and through the hands of those

who wished to pin it down. He watched it leap off the end and disappear through an air

vent. Go on my son! thought Archie” (448). In this moment of connection between man

and mouse, between old Britain and new Britain, past and present fade away, replaced, instead, with a vision of an optimistic national future defined by unification and the maintenance of the “random,” the “illogical,” and the different.

Skeptical Optimism and The End of History?

So, what would Zadie Smith say to Shiva’s claim that there is “too much bloody

history” for a Bangladeshi man and an English woman to overcome the past and connect

– that is, for a postcolonial Britain to achieve some kind of national unity? Based on

White Teeth, Smith seems to cautiously contradict Shiva’s claim. In order to maintain

the delicate balance of skepticism and optimism that is the lynchpin of Smith’s vision of

contemporary Britain and the foundation of her refusal of Shiva’s claim – her insistence

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on both the divisive and binding implications of history - Smith explicitly rejects two primary, related worldviews detrimental to the maintenance of skeptical optimism and implicit in certain brands of multiculturalism and in the postcolonial exotic – the obsession with roots and fundamentalism. Samad is the character in the novel most associated with an unhealthy attachment to roots, and as Smith’s narrator suggests: “If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic [.…] To

Samad […] tradition was culture, and culture led to roots, and these were good, these were untainted principles [….] You would get nowhere telling him weeds too have tubers, or that the first sign of loose teeth is something rotten, something degenerate, deep within the gums” (161). Roots, both literally and metaphorically in this passage, are associated with a lack of critical consciousness and with degeneration. Samad’s investment in roots leads to his crippling obsession with the past, his moral corruption and hypocrisy, and his deteriorating relationships with his family. Roots, rather than providing a healthy connection to the past – a base from which people or teeth can grow

– impede the ability to change and anchor human beings unproductively to their pasts.

Later in the novel, the exploration of the negative consequences of the obsession with roots is connected to a critique of fundamentalism, which takes many forms in the novel and affects the lives of a number of Smith’s characters. The third section of the novel opens with the following definition of the word fundamental: “1. Of or pertaining to the basis or groundwork; going to the root of the matter. 2. Serving as the base or foundation; essential or indispensable.” This definition is immediately followed by a definition of fundamentalism: “The strict maintenance of traditional orthodox religious

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beliefs or doctrines” (341). By demonstrating the relationship between the definition of

fundamentalism and its root word fundamental (pun intended), Smith exposes the

intimate connection between the concept of roots and the more obviously condemnable

fundamentalism.

What is the correlation, then, between a rejection of the obsession with roots and the fundamental (here meaning foundational) and a rejection of history? A review from

The Economist suggests that the rejection of history is at the center of the novel, stating that “the real spark of the book is not post-colonial, but post-post-colonial. The younger generation--which is where Ms Smith is--has had history; they couldn't give an f-word for it, as they would say” (“Pulling Teeth”). Yet this assumption leads to a number of consequent questions. Is Smith, then, endorsing a kind of rootless cosmopolitan identity?

What might be the basis for national unification if not roots and history? What is the

relationship between history and place and/or displacement? Is Smith able to imagine a

world where there is not “too much bloody history” to forge a cohesive British identity

only by disavowing history all together? And, if so, why spend so much time narrating

and tracing the recovery of history in White Teeth? Each of these questions is suggestive

of the constitutive tension at the heart of the novel, as Smith’s eminently likeable and

deeply flawed immigrant and multicultural characters try to negotiate a simultaneous

looking forward and looking back that is symbolic of the larger collective experiences of

the British nation.

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If Smith’s skeptical optimism relies on an acknowledgement of the role of history,

especially colonial history, it also requires an ability to turn away from that past and

move forward into the present and the future, and it is with this movement away from the

past that most of Smith’s characters struggle. Smith’s work is not assimilationist in the traditional, conservative sense of the word, nor is she a cultural purist. Instead, Smith is what one might call a transformationist, adhering to the belief that as immigrant and demographically multicultural communities change and integrate into the British mainstream, the British mainstream itself will be transformed in radical and, though

Smith might not approve of the use of the term, fundamental ways. In the following section of this chapter on Smith’s career post-White Teeth, I examine the ways in which this representation of a transformed British nation – a nation defined not by difference, but by a common history and hopes for a unified future – is implicit in Smith’s self- marketing and her continued refusal of the postcolonial exotic. Instead of performing the staged marginality of artists like Rushdie and Kureishi, Smith’s literary career has the potential to transform the divisive and exoticizing categories that have defined the circulation of postcolonial literature and voices.

Smith’s work is new, as is the twenty-first century Britain that she writes about, and it is still unclear whether this version of a Britain based on postcolonial nationalism, skeptical optimism, and a rejection of the obsession with roots and fundamentalism will prove a radical challenge to outdated philosophies of multiculturalism or of conservative racism. Therefore, in a move tinged (I hope) with a Smithian irony, I end the first section of this chapter with a quotation from the conservative British politician Norman Tebbit

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that Smith also includes in White Teeth and that exemplifies the tension driving Smith’s

work: “The cricket test – which side do they cheer for? [...] Are you still looking back to

where you came from or where you are?”(103). Or, perhaps, are you looking to where

you will be?

Part 2: Zadie Smith, Post White Teeth

In section one of this chapter, I argued that through the discourse of the postcolonial exotic Smith has been positioned as a multicultural, racialized, and

“othered” contemporary author. This is despite the fact that Smith’s White Teeth critiques these discourses and offers, instead, postcolonial nationalism – a philosophy that moves away from a focus on difference and is premised on a highly critical awareness of the past combined with an optimistic belief in national unity and human connection that

is reflected thematically as well as structurally in the novel. Smith does not naively turn

away from divisive, colonial history, but she also refutes the unhealthy obsession with

roots and fundamentalism/the fundamental. Her nationalism is forward looking and

anticipates unity and the realization of human connection.

In what follows, I examine Smith’s post-White Teeth writing and literary career. I

trace the theme of human connection and the rejection of divisive paradigms of

difference in Smith’s fiction – particularly in The Autograph Man (2002) and On Beauty

(2005). I do not offer the same kind of sustained analysis of Smith’s work that I do in the first section on White Teeth. My focus, instead, is on considering Smith’s broader narrative and thematic choices in her later work. I also provide some important context

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for Smith’s novels and the worldview they communicate by considering how Smith has marketed herself as an author, thinker, and literary critic and how she has refuted her

position as a racialized writer by steering her career in unexpected directions that were

not anticipated in the wake of White Teeth’s amazing success. By adopting a new literary

lineage – from American McSweeneyism to British modernism – and by publishing in a

variety of genres and on a staggering assortment of topics from hip-hop to Katherine

Hepburn, Smith has redefined herself as a truly cosmopolitan author and thinker who

resists the limiting categories of race and the pluralistic assumptions of multiculturalism.

The Peculiar Second and Third Novels of Zadie Smith

While Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is a novel of postcolonial British nationalism,

The Autograph Man and On Beauty are not easily classified according to nationality/ism.

Expanding the boundaries of her story world to include the socio-cultural landscape of the United States, the novels lack the emphasis on newly defined Britishness and national optimism that is among the central themes of White Teeth, yet they also continue Smith’s obvious concern with the amazing potential for human connection in the face of what many perceive to be irreconcilable difference and diversity. Just as Smith has continued

to resist easy categorization as a writer (within the framework of the postcolonial exotic),

her post-White Teeth texts shuttle from nation to nation, cultural tradition to cultural

tradition, shirking any kind of easy classification based on stable categories or

consumable identities. The Autograph Man takes place primarily in London with a

significant second half foray to The United States and several major American characters.

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On Beauty is set primarily in a fictitious New England college town, features both British

and American characters (as well as characters from Africa and the Caribbean – most

notably Haiti), and several of the defining plot points in the narrative take place at a funeral in London.

Both novels feature demographically diverse characters; Alex Li Tandem, the protagonist of The Autograph Man, is British, Chinese, and Jewish, and his circle of

friends includes several white British Jews, two black British Jews who emigrated from

Harlem, one African American former prostitute and one black British “milk operative,”

as well as several American and British autograph aficionados. On Beauty focuses on

two families – the Belsleys and the Kippses. Howard, the troubled patriarch of the

Belsley clan, is a white British immigrant; his wife Kiki is an African American from the south, and their children negotiate their split identities with varying degrees of success.

The Kippses are Haitian British citizens temporarily living in the United States. As these

“mixed up” families and identities make clear, Smith continues to deal with many of the facets of multiculturalism as a demographic fact that were foregrounded in White Teeth

and that led to the classification of the book as an example of multicultural, racially

“othered” fiction. However, as in White Teeth, there are many elements of the novels, in

terms of theme, structure, influence, and circulation, that complicate the categorization of

the texts as multicultural fiction, and it is evident that Smith continues to consciously

push against a genrification of race and identity – against what has been done with her

texts in the processes of circulation and reception.

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In The Autograph Man, Smith tells the story of Alex Li Tandem, a professional autograph peddler and connoisseur of all things Hollywood. Alex lives in London where he drinks, drugs, and discusses Jewish mysticism with a small group of close friends, most of whom were present on the day that Alex’s Chinese father passed away at a wrestling match. In the wake of his father’s death, Alex fills the void by collecting traces of a bygone Hollywood era, epitomized by an obsession with a reclusive ex-starlet named

Kitty Alexander.73 The primary narrative action of the novel is initiated when an adult

Alex comes to from a long and destructive LSD trip to find he is in possession of a rare

Kitty Alexander autograph. This sets into motion a series of events that eventually leads

Alex to New York City where, with the help of Honey Richardson, an African American

former prostitute famous for fellating a British actor, he finds the reclusive Kitty and

convinces her to return to London with him.74 The novel ends as Alex and his circle of

friends perform the Kaddish on the anniversary of Alex’s father’s death, signaling a

return to and acceptance of the loss that provoked Alex’s unhealthy obsessions.

Another one of Alex’s unhealthy obsessions is his desire to split everything into

those things “Jewish” and those things “Goyish” – Jewish smells of the seventeenth

century, for example, include “rose oil, sesame, orange zest,” while Goyish smells of the

seventeenth century include “sandalwood, walnuts, wet forest floors” (77). This central

trope of the novel ends up epitomizing of one of Smith’s primary themes – the ability of history, faith, and human kindness to connect people across space, time, and hardship – despite the desire to focus on difference. Alex’s Jewish/Goyish fetish indicates a desire to neatly bifurcate the world, and it results in a book project – one that seemingly has no

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end. Alex carries around a small notebook and constantly makes notes on the relative

Jewishness or Goyishhness of things from mayonnaise to Lenny Bruce, getting nowhere

and finding no greater thesis.75 By the end of Smith’s novel, Alex has given up on the

project. Through a revelatory experience that begins with an LSD trip and the discovery

of the Kitty autograph and ends with a return to London to make amends and perform the

Kaddish, Alex learns that such classifications are useless and do nothing to help him understand his own unique position as a Chinese British Jewish autograph collecting,

Kitty-obsessed friend and grieving son; the obsession with difference is ultimately replaced with the realization that humans are bound by the undeniable fact of mortality:

“They were not [dead]. But they would be. All his people, all his loves” (324). Alex’s eventual realization of the ridiculousness of his taxonomic project mirrors Smith’s rejection of the attempts to categorize her work according to singular, reductive identity politics. (Should we bifurcate the literary world into those things “white” and those things “brown” – those things “domestic” and those things “exotic”? And, if so, where exactly does Smith fit?)

Alex’s meditations on Jewishness and Goyishness represent one of many themes and motifs throughout the novel that highlight a rejection of difference and an embrace of human connection and sameness. From the novel’s repeated invocation of “international gestures” that connect characters in moments of silent understanding, to the importance of Kabbalah in the text, The Autograph Man insists on the underlying interconnectivity of the human experience, on what James Wood might refer to as Smith’s tendency towards the “excessively centripetal [….] connections, and links and hidden plots, and paranoid

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parallels” (181). Kabbalistic Judaism provides both a thematic and structural emphasis

on connectivity. Structurally, the novel begins with an illustrated “Kabbalah of Alex Li

Tandem” (made up of a strange combination of nine Judaic elements – such as Yesod and

Hochmah – and secular cultural icons – Muhammad Ali and Virginia Woolf). Each of the chapters in the first section of the novel then picks up one of the Judaic principles and one of the cultural icons and weaves both into the fabric of the chapter.76 Here, again, we

can imagine a consternated James Wood sighing, but as Adam, the novel’s disciple of

Kabbalic principles, reminds Alex, the point of faith (and Smithian narrative) is “to

reunite…what has been dispersed” (118).

The importance, however, of this Judaic understanding of unification is most

significantly indicated in the novel’s concluding lines. The final scene of the novel finds

Alex, who has been defined throughout the text by his solipsism and unbelievable selfishness, surrounded by friends and family, reciting the Kaddish on the anniversary of his father’s death. This moment, which brings together most of the novel’s central characters (think the Future Mouse premiere in White Teeth), demonstrates the fulfillment of the reunification of Alex’s dispersed and fractured life. And among those present are

Eleanor Loescher and Jonathan Verne, “two people unknown to [Alex]” (345). The final lines of the novel focus on these two characters: “Eleanor Loescher held her small Belly with both hands. (And Alex wondered what this meant.) [….] Jonathan Verne yawned shamelessly. (And Alex wondered what this meant.) And all say Amen!” (346-47).

These lines, jarring at first with their sudden emphasis on such minor characters, serve to illustrate Alex’s development from an isolated, alienated (and alienating) “other” into a

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character that has been integrated into a community and a commonality that evinces

sympathy and recognizes the essential humanity of others. The repetition of “And Alex

wondered what this meant” foregrounds the significance of the character’s individual

ability to see beyond himself and attempt to forge a connection to others, and this, in turn,

is indicative of Smith’s optimism about the potential for a common humanity

While The Autograph Man does not represent the same kind of nationalist

centripetality that is evident in White Teeth – there is no Archie, no Future Mouse to hold

it all together – there is a sense that difference, particularly as it pertains to identity

politics, doesn’t matter as much as history and belief in communion and connection.

Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge that in The Autograph Man the narrative and thematic pieces don’t seem to tie together as well as they do in Smith’s first and third novels. That The Autograph Man does not come together as successfully as Smith’s other work, and that the text at times seems so stuffed with references, jokes, structural

experimentation, and other such clever narrative play, that it looses focus on the

characters and human connections central to its plot, has not been lost on critics.

Consider the following quote from Alex Clark’s review of the novel from The Guardian:

All this novel's paraphernalia - its themed chapter headings, in the first half taken from the Kabbalah, in the second from Zen Buddhism, its epigrams and aphorisms, its narrative disruptions (the reader is, at one point, invited to fill in a pair of blank parentheses if they can think of a better phrase than "like thundering elephants") - come to seem petty distractions from the main event, like a lack of confidence that seeks novelty to disguise itself. I'm not sure there's any need for this. Smith's basic story - one of deferred mourning and arrested development, of the attraction to and repulsion from emotional engagement - is strong in itself [….] Be in no doubt that this is a genuinely funny and entertaining novel: but the caperishness that marks its latter portions and that veers dangerously close to outright chaos, the more outlandish plot contrivances, some of the less funny

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jokes (two characters greeting each other as Kofi Annan and Boutros Boutros- Ghali for no apparent reason), we might well have done without.

Clark’s reservations about the novel depart from Wood’s critique of White Teeth. While

Wood’s primary issue with White Teeth is its centripetality – the unbelievable

coincidences that bind characters and narrative strands together, Clark’s review focuses

on the “petty distractions” and “chaos” that threaten to overshadow the “main event” –

the development of Alex from a state of emotional detachment and alienation to engagement and human understanding. Clark’s review seems to encourage more, not

less, centripetality. If White Teeth is unapologetically Dickensian in its connections and

intersections, The Autograph Man gestures to a novelistic postmodernism that maintains

an emphasis on fragmentation and discordance.

With the publication of The Autograph Man, Smith also began to increasingly

identify herself professionally and personally with writers like Dave Eggers and David

Foster Wallace who epitomize a McSweeney’s brand of American postmodern

aesthetics.77 There is no shortage of obvious connections between Smith and

McSweeneyesque writers like Eggers and Wallace. The following is just a sample: In

2003, both Eggers and Foster Wallace contributed to Zadie Smith Introduces the Burned

Children of America – a collection of short stories by American writers that cashed in on the celebrity of Britain’s hippest young novelist. Smith served as issue editor for The Best

American Unrequired Reading 2003, of which Eggers is series editor. Both Foster

Wallace and Smith have stories in 2004’s The Best of McSweeney’s: Volume One, edited, of course, by Eggers. And Smith wrote the introduction to the 2008 collection The Book

of Other People, to which Eggers contributed the short story “Theo.” Smith and Eggers

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are known to be good friends, and about Foster Wallace, Smith states, “Wallace is not for

everyone, but he is for me. My blind spot in my own work is ‘the evil that men do.’ I

think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don’t know anything about

hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don’t have the guts to admit that I do” (“Zadie

Smith’s Bookshelf”). The McSweeneyization of Zadie Smith has not gone unnoticed, and

has not been particularly well received (The Autograph Man is the least well reviewed of

Smith’s novels). For example, in an article on the “menace” of McSweeneyism for

Slate.com, Ruth Franklin states: “Even established writers began showing a desire to get

in on the game [of McSweeneyism]; a painful case in point is Zadie Smith, who appeared

in the magazine not long after the publication of her excellent debut White Teeth. About a

year later, she came out with her horrendously disappointing—and noticeably

McSweeney-esque—second novel, The Autograph Man.”

Leaving aside the issue of whether or not The Autograph Man and Smith’s

McSweeneyism prove as narratively satisfying as the more traditionally novelistic White

Teeth, it is worth asking why Smith, who was anointed successor to such black British masters as Rushdie and Kureishi, would shirk nationality, black and/or multiracial identity, and, to an extent, style in order to affiliate herself with a distinctly white

American literary tradition and institution.78 In her McSweeneyism, Smith would seem to

be privileging generational affinity and a sense of “now-ness” over multicultural or

postcolonial textual politics. McSweeney’s is a literary institution that supports the young

and hip, and these qualities continue to be Smith’s trump cards. However, there is another possible motive for Smith’s embrace of the McSweeney’s aesthetic and

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publishing institution. Smith, a writer who has seen her literary debut turned into a

celebration of multiculturalism, used McSweeneyism, and its roots in white, American

postmodernism, as a way to shift the focus on her work from identity politics to craft.

Recognizing what had been done with her first novel, Smith’s second novel does

something that flies in the face of assumptions structured by the postcolonial exotic. In

the short fiction and non-fiction writing that follows The Autograph Man, Smith increasingly displaces race as a focus and moves towards a McSweeneyish interest in the processes of writing and reading – especially evident in her increasing visibility as a literary critic (discussed below). The Autograph Man is the novel that signals her shift from a “Young, Black, British” writer to a writer’s writer. One who privileges aesthetic and creative influence over race or nationality. Nonetheless, it is clear that Smith is still involved in the work of establishing connections – making the case for an artistic community that extends across the Atlantic Ocean and that highlights the experiences of human beings who attempt to build communities that do likewise.

On Beauty is, similarly, a novel that attempts to create artistic communion through literary influence. At first, the text, which begins with a set of emails from

Jerome Belsley to his father, Howard, would seem to recall the stylistic postmodern experimentation of The Autograph Man, but it soon becomes clear to many readers that the emails are actually an attempt to reproduce and update the letters that begin the

British modernist novel that On Beauty adapts and pays homage to: E.M. Forster’s

Howard’s End.79 On Beauty tells the story of Howard Belsley, a professor of art history

who disdains all “representational art” and embraces postmodernism and typical, liberal

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politics. Howard, a white man who has emigrated to the U.S. from Britain, has a large,

African American wife named Kiki, but he has recently had an affair with a thin, white

American poet named Claire, a fact which comes out early in the text and disrupts the relative calm of the Belsley family. At the same time, Monty Kipps, Howard’s academic rival and a black British Caribbean conservative, moves to the small New England town where Howard lives and teaches. The two families become deeply involved in each other’s lives, and through a series of events that includes Howard’s infidelity with Monty

Kipps’s daughter (and his own son’s former girlfriend), a sexual battle waged over a young, African American rapper/poet, and the bequeathing and robbery of a Haitian painting, Howard and Kiki both come to realize the beauty of love, history, and a connection to other human beings. The title for this chapter, “Only connect” comes by way of the epigraph to Forster’s Howard’s End. This imperative is indicative of Smith’s philosophy of human connection in On Beauty and in her work more generally.

In many ways, On Beauty signals a return to White Teeth’s “excessively centripetal” narrative strategies and the foregrounding of the interaction between two families, whose differences and, ultimately, whose similarities symbolize the larger socio-cultural landscape of the contemporary moment. While the Belsley family represents American liberalism and secular intellectualism, the Kippses represent

Christian conservatism and academic traditionalism. The novel also signals a return to a more properly British Smith, as the general structure of the plot is based on a classic story of a new British nationalism. However, the novel is set primarily in the States (Smith was a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard for part of the time that she was writing the

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book). The novel shifts its focus from a national community to the transnational community of academia; most of the characters share little in terms of race or ethnic background, but much in terms of privilege and intellectual interest and community. On

Beauty, then, is a book based on a British classic by a British author studying in the U.S. that is set primarily in the U.S. and that features characters from a variety of racial/ethnic, class, and political identities.

The return to a highly centripetal narrative structure in On Beauty is evident at the level of plot in numerous instances. Take, for example, the character of Carl, who

Howard’s youngest son Levi meets after inadvertently exchanging C.D. players with him at a performance of Motzart’s Requiem in Boston. Carl resurfaces later as a spoken word poet and hip-hop prodigy in a club in the small college town where the Belseyes live on a night when both Levi and his sister, Zora, are in attendance. Zora, coincidentally, or centripetally, is there with Claire, her teacher and Howard’s former lover. Realizing

Carl’s talent, and in a brilliant display of academic liberalism, parodied by Smith, Claire enrolls Carl, as well as another promising African American, Chantelle, in her class despite their non-student status. Zora manages to fall head over heels with Carl, who, again coincidentally, manages to fall head over heels with Victoria, who is Monty Kipps’ daughter, Zora’s older brother Jerome’s ex-girlfriend, and her father Howard’s former lover. Because in On Beauty no character or narrative strand remains “un-connected,” in the novel’s climax, it is revealed that Monty Kipps has also had an affair with Chantelle,

Carl’s fellow academic “charity case.”

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In another instance of the excessively centripetal, the group of Haitians who Levi

befriends as a part of his search for an “authentic” black identity end up involving him in

the robbery of a Haitian painting that just so happens to have belonged to Monty Kipps’

late wife, Carlene. The painting, unbeknownst to any of the Belsleys, was bequeathed to

Levi’s mother Kiki on Carlene Kipps‘s death (a fact that the Kipps family keeps a secret).

When Kiki discovers the stolen painting in her son’s room, she is in the odd position of

discovering that her son has stolen a painting from her husband’s nemesis that is, in all

legal actuality, hers to begin with. While this sort of reliance on coincidence and random

occurrence is foundational to the basic structure of the novel as a form, Smith’s

interconnecting characters and narrative strands seem a bit like the novel on steroids.

(Wood, again, sighs and wishes for the extreme interiority and singularity of James.)

As with White Teeth and The Autograph Man, centripetality and connection at the

level of plot reflect an interest in human connection at the level of theme in On Beauty,

and it will be useful here to turn to Smith’s adaptation of Forster’s Howard’s End in order to unravel the implications of this thematic connectivity. Howard’s End, like most of

Forster’s work, expresses his interest in the ways that people connect with one another

across political and ideological divides (of particular interest to postcolonial studies in this regard has been 1924’s A Passage to India). Howard’s End focuses on the

intersecting lives and fates of three families: the half-German, intellectual, bourgeois

Schlegels; the Wilcoxes, who are wealthy, “new money” capitalists that made their

money in colonial enterprise; and the Basts, a lower-middle class couple struggling to

move up the social and economic ladder. In Smith’s retelling of Forster’s basic plot

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structure and character conflicts, the intellectual, liberal, and mixed-nationality Schlegels

become the intellectual, liberal, and multiracial Belsleys; the capitalist, colonialist

Wilcoxes become the conservative, colonial elite Kippses; and the working class Basts

become the African American “charity cases” Carl and Chantelle. A more complete

study of Smith’s adaptation is warranted, and it is apparent that the ways in which she

updates each of these familial, class, and ethnic constituencies deserves attention.80 For

our purposes in this chapter, however, what is important is Smith’s adaptation of

Forster’s thematic focus on the ways in which humans struggle with and overcome

difference and diversity in the interest of establishing connection and community.

“Only connect” – the epigraph and philosophical center of Forster’s novel – is

expanded on by Margaret Schlegel: “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.

Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be

seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer” (214). In this seminal passage, the

idealistic Margaret reflects on the importance of art, beauty, passion, and love in

establishing human connection. And by the end of the novel it is, indeed, at the idyllic

setting of Howard’s End – the house bequeathed by Mrs. Wilcox to Margaret Schlegel

out of a sense of sisterly love and commonality – that representatives from each of the

three families come together and live in harmony (the national/ist implications of this should be clear). It is ironic, then, that in On Beauty Howard espouses a philosophy that denigrates art and beauty, hence his ban on representational art. Howard’s anti-

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aestheticism is most evident in his criticism of the perceived “genius” of Rembrandt (the source, again ironically and coincidentally, of his academic and personal feud with

Monty Kipps, a great Rembrandt defender).

The final scene of the novel especially emphasizes the importance of art and beauty in fulfilling the human desire to “only connect.” As the scene begins, Howard and

Kiki, who had to overcome racial, national, professional, and philosophical differences to find love and raise three children, are most definitely “on the outs.” Having learned about

Howard’s infidelities with Claire and Victoria, Kiki has moved out to an undisclosed location – leaving Howard with the kids. However, on the day of Howard’s big lecture on Rembrandt, which is to signal his return to scholarly excellence, Kiki attends

Howard’s talk. Howard, however, forgets his speech at home, and shows up to the talk with only his power point to guide him. As he stands frozen in front of his wife and colleagues, he begins to flip through his slides, ending up on Rembrandt’s Hendrickje

Bathing. The following lines close Smith’s novel:

On the wall, a pretty, blousy Dutch woman in a simple white smock paddled in water up to her calves [….] She seemed to be considering whether to wade deeper [….] Howard looked at Kiki. In her face, his life. Kiki looked up suddenly at Howard – not, he thought, unkindly. Howard said nothing [….] Howard made the picture larger on the wall [….] The woman’s fleshiness filled the wall. He looked out into the audience once more and saw Kiki only. He smiled at her. She smiled. She looked away, but she smiled. Howard looked back at the woman on the wall, Rembrandt’s love, Hendrickje. Though her hands were imprecise blurs, paint heaped on paint and roiled with the brush, the rest of her skin had been expertly rendered in all its variety – chalky whites and lively pinks, the underlying blue of her veins and the ever present human hint of yellow, intimation of what is to come. (442-43)

The final moment of the novel is, in many ways, reminiscent of the final scene in The

Autograph Man, where ritual and faith allow Alex to “only connect” with his friends,

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family, and with humankind more generally. In On Beauty’s final scene, the cynical, selfish Howard, without his academic anti-aestheticism to shield him from the beauty of

Hendrickje, is moved through art to a greater love and understanding for his wife, Kiki.

But that is not all. In the final sentence of the novel, art and beauty force Howard to acknowledge a common humanity – through an almost religious communion with the painting, Howard becomes aware of Hendrickje’s beauty, her skin, and “the ever present human hint of yellow, intimation of what is to come.” This visceral reminder of the power of beauty clearly runs counter to Howard’s earlier articulation of the inadequacy of art and aesthetics to initiate moral reflection and education: “Howard asked his students to imagine prettiness as the mask that power wears. To recast aesthetics as a rarified language of exclusion. He promised them a class that would challenge their own beliefs about the redemptive humanity of what is commonly called ‘Art’” (155).81

My reading of these final lines, and of Smith’s execution of Forster’s call to “only connect,” runs counter to the analysis proposed by Max Watman’s short review of the novel in The New Criterion. Watman argues that as a novelist

your first job is to connect with your characters, and at this Smith excels. Your second job is to connect your characters, and here Smith falls short [….] nowhere in the book does the intersection of characters change their course. For Smith, one’s fate is determined. People rot from the inside: “the ever present human hint of yellow” is an “intimation of what’s to come.” Smith’s truest thought about the human condition […] is that the rot is there, under your skin, already in play. (59)82

I find it difficult to reconcile the excessive centripetality of the novel – the constant intersection of characters and storylines, the sense that the world is small and full of coincidences – with Watman’s general claims about Smith’s intent. His assertion that

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“nowhere in the book does the intersection of characters change their course” seems

patently untrue – Kiki is certainly changed through her connection with Carlene Kipps, as

is Levi by his interactions with the Haitian Choo, and the final lines of the novel suggest that Howard has the potential to be transformed though his connection to Kiki,

Rembrandt, and Hendrickje. Taking into consideration the larger themes of On Beauty as well as Smith’s treatment of fate and destiny in White Teeth, Watman’s reading of the final line, the inevitability of human rot, and the “ever present human hint of yellow” also appears off base. Even assuming that Smith is using yellow to symbolize some kind of human rot, already a stretch considering that the color yellow has many possible meanings, that rot, and the “intimation of what’s to come” are ambiguous but binding.

Or, to put it another way, within the context of this moment of communion and love between Howard, Kiki, and Hendrickje, it is hard not to see in that rot the human imperfection and mortality that connects all people.

What is, however, troubling about this moment of human connection and reconciliation is that characters like Carl and Chantelle do not have opportunity to be saved and redeemed as Howard and Kiki do. Carl, after being berated and humiliated by

Zora at a party, disappears from the university and is later accused of the theft of Carlene

Kipps’s painting (he is, of course, let “off the hook” when Levi’s crime is discovered).

Similarly, after her affair with Monty Kipps is exposed, Chantelle leaves the university in disgrace. In Howard’s End, the relative harmony of the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes is predicated on the destruction of the Basts. (After the affair between Henry Wilcox and

Mrs. Bast is revealed, Mrs. Bast is disgraced, and Wilcox’s son attacks Bast and

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inadvertently kills him.) As in White Teeth, Smith readily acknowledges the inequality

perpetrated as a result of the human exploitation of difference; On Beauty’s small college

town, like London, is not a “Happy Multicultural Land” (Smith, White Teeth 384).

However, in both Howard’s End and On Beauty, there is the hope, the optimism, that the

local and individual connections – between Kiki and Carlene, Kiki and Howard, Margaret

Schlegel and Henry Wilcox – are indicative of a broader human capability to connect across boundaries. In both novels, characters and families stand in for particular philosophies and identities that resonate in a broader context, and so these individual connections take on greater socio-cultural weight. In this sense, as in White Teeth,

Smith’s skeptical optimism resurfaces as a central force in the narrative. In On Beauty, then, it is apparent that, in an echo from White Teeth, the past may be “tense,” but the future promises to be perfect.

Just as we considered how and why The Autograph Man seemed to rely so heavily on postmodern American McSweeneyism, it is important to briefly address

Smith’s motives for adapting Forster. Smith’s prior two novels capitalized extensively on their author’s hip quotient, so to turn to Forster’s early twentieth-century modernism and culturally conservative nationalism seems an odd choice. But perhaps not. After all,

Smith began her literary career with what some critics considered a Dickensian novel in line with the British tradition. And to return to one of the central claims of this chapter, it again becomes evident that Smith is rejecting the discourse of the postcolonial exotic and the genrification of race and difference. Rather than embracing a multicultural, racialized literary tradition, Smith defines herself in her third novel by returning to a classic text of

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British nationalism and optimistic humanism. Smith’s homage to and adaptation of such

novel also serves to underscore her position as a “serious writer,” and, in conjunction with the academic themes of the novel, it shifts her work and influence into the realm of the more properly academic.

Smithism Versus Multiculturalism and the Postcolonial Exotic

Smith’s interest in establishing herself as not only a significant contemporary author but an influential literary and cultural critic would seem to indicate another bid to cement her reputation as a legitimate voice within academia, and again we see Smith define her peers and her intellectual community in ways that challenges the racially and ethnically identified community that multiculturalism dictates to authors of color. Since becoming a “literary celebrity,” Smith has penned articles on George Eliot, Franz Kafka,

E.M. Forster, Zora Neale Hurston, and Graham Greene. Her interest in these classic, critically acclaimed writers also illustrates her dedication to craft and her role as a

“writer’s writer” that was so evident in The Autograph Man. Smith is also scheduled to

release a book of criticism titled Fail Better in 2009 that will expand her discussion of

writing and the ethics and morality of the novel by treating a range of texts from a variety

of traditions. The book length version of Fail Better follows an essay published in The

Guardian in 2007 by the same title. “Read Better,” also published in 2007, on the ethics of reading and interpretation, provides a companion piece. From a “Young, Black,

British” publishing phenomenon to a respected voice within the world of academic literary criticism, Smith has come a long way in the eight years since White Teeth’s

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international success, and her career trajectory continues to challenge the assumptions

and expectations established by postcoloniality and the discourse of the postcolonial

exotic.

In addition to positioning herself as an academic literary critic and a “writer’s

writer,” Smith has actively courted a popular audience – an audience at times similar to

the MTV audience that viewed the “define yourself” commercial that began this chapter.

In 2005, Smith published two interviews with hip-hop stars: “The Zen of Eminem” appeared in Vibe magazine and “We Are Family,” an interview with up and coming rapper Doc Brown, Smith’s little brother, appeared in The Guardian (Barton). She has

also published popular pieces on Katherine Hepburn (for The Guardian in 2003), Greta

Garbo (again for The Guardian in 2005), the war in Iraq (The Guardian again, 2003), and

on the politics of international tourism (for The New Yorker in 2004). It seems clear that

Smith has shifted from simply referencing pop culture and global politics in her

“multicultural” novels to becoming a critic of pop culture and politics in her own right.

After the amazing success of White Teeth, Smith did not need to shift to such an

engagement with mainstream popular culture in order to cement her literary celebrity.

This provides further evidence of Smith’s broad self-marketing and her resistance to the

postcolonial exotic in the establishment of her career trajectory.

Smith has also had success with her short fiction, which has appeared in a variety

of collections, literary journals, and popular magazines (see discussion of McSweeneyism

above). It’s outside the scope of this project to offer overview and analysis of all Smith’s

short fiction, but in order to provide some consideration of this integral part of the

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author’s literary career, what follows is a brief discussion of two of Smith’s most famous short stories, “Hanwell in Hell” (2004) and its companion piece “Hanwell Senior”

(2007). Both were published in The New Yorker, and “Hanwell Senior” also appears in

The Book of Other People (2007). “Hanwell in Hell” begins with what is, presumably, an advertisement from the classifieds section of a newspaper: “I am looking to enter into correspondence with anyone who remembers my father, Mr. —— Hanwell, who was living in the central Bristol area between 1970 and 1973. Any details at all will be gratefully received by daughter trying to piece together the jigsaw. Please write back to

P.O. Box 187.” The remainder of the story is comprised of the first person account of a man named Clive who spent one night with Hanwell when both men were alone and at low points in their lives. The story is written as a response to Hanwell’s daughter, and throughout the course of the narration, both men’s stories are revealed: Clive’s fall from financial success and professional happiness and the suicide of Hanwell’s wife, followed by his estrangement from his children and his undying optimism. In the final scene of the story, Clive’s cynicism dissolves as the color-blind Hanwell asks him to help paint a room “Deepest Sun” yellow for his daughter’s eventual arrival; Clive helps Hanwell paint the room without letting on that “Deepest Sun” is actually a “violent, hellish deep red.”

Finally, Clive implores Hanwell’s daughter: “More and more, I suspect that men of our generation were not to be lived with. We made people unhappy because we ourselves were made unhappy in irrevocable ways….I think you are too hard on him. And I think

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you were wrong to think that he knew all the time you and your sisters wouldn’t come, or that he didn’t want you to. Hanwell had a beautiful way of hoping. Not many men can hope red yellow.”

“Hanwell Senior” explores the “irrevocable ways” that men like Hanwell were made unhappy by delving into Hanwell’s relationship with his absentee father, Hanwell

Senior. Hanwell’s story is again examined from the outside in by a homodiegetic narrator, this time one of Hanwell’s daughters from his second marriage. Her portrait of

Hanwell Senior is not nearly as generous as the representation of Hanwell in either of the two stories: “Hanwell Snr was Hanwell’s father. Like Hanwell, he existed in a small way.

Not in his person—he was a “big personality,” in that odious phrase—but in his history, which is partial, almost phantasmagoric. Even to Hanwell he seemed a kind of mirage, and nothing pleasant about it.” The narrator then goes on to recount a number of

Hanwell’s failed attempts to connect with his father, who came into and out of his life at irregular intervals. When Hanwell Senior died in 1986, the narrator tells us, Hanwell did not go to him, just as “Twenty years later, Hanwell’s son would not go to Hanwell when his hour came.” After recounting a recurrent dream in which her dead corpse is covered by the cool stones of Brighton, her father’s ancestral home, she ends the story stating, “I was Brighton bedrock now, as Hanwells had been (in my dream logic) since there were

Hanwells in England. There have always been Hanwells in England. But I am a female

Hanwell and lost my name when I married.”

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These two beautifully written and emotionally effective stories crystallize many

of the themes and ideas that have been central to this chapter’s definition of literary and

philosophical “Smithism.” First, the two stories continue Smith’s exploration of human

connection and the potential for healing and communion in the face of distance and

alienation. Clive, the narrator of the first Hanwell story, establishes a meaningful bond

with Hanwell that stands the test of time and eventually results in the potential for some

sort of reconciliation between Hanwell’s daughter from his first marriage and her

deceased father. In “Hanwell in Hell,” the sadness of Hanwell’s failure to connect with his father, and his son’s subsequent disavowal, are somewhat mitigated by Hanwell’s

daughter’s desire to connect to her father and paternal line, frustrated as that attempt may

be by the constraints of a patriarchal family structure. Both narrators seem to establish

some further connection with Hanwell through the telling of his story, and Smith’s

audience is connected to Hanwell through the opportunity to explore the character from

two perspectives over the course of three years (from the publication of “Hanwell in

Hell” to “Hanwell Senior”). That these human connections are fragile and fraught with

the imperfections of life and family drama is only properly Smithian. And it is in Smith’s

trademark optimism about the potential for reconciliation and healing that the Hanwell

stories are most moving and most symptomatic of the philosophy evident in her body of

work as a whole. Like Hanwell, Smith is able to “hope red yellow.”

The Hanwell stories also demonstrate that Smith deserves to be taken seriously as

an author based on her ability to craft interesting and compelling stories, not fetishized

based on her youth, beauty, and/or skin color; the Hanwell stories maintain focus on

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exploring unique ways to tell the human story. Smith continues to resist the limiting

paradigm of the postcolonial exotic and the expectations of postcoloniality and, instead,

positions herself as a writer to be taken seriously based on her own narrative merits.

What makes “Hanwell in Hell” and “Hanwell Senior” so effective, in addition their exploration of shared lives and shared stories, is their experimentation with narrative

distance. In the first Hanwell, Smith’s narrator recalls the story of man he met only once

“thirty-four years ago.” And he recalls that story to a naratee who possesses knowledge

that the reader does not. As a result, backstory that is crucial to a full understanding of

events is revealed slowly to the reader, who is filled in only when it is dictated by the

unfolding of the plot. This creates an interesting tension between what the narrator, the narratee, and the reader know at any particular moment in the story. Some of the information presumably known by the narratee, the fact that Hanwell remarried and had a

second family, for example, is not known by the narrator or the reader – at least until

“Hanwell Senior.” The narration is more straightforward in “Hanwell Senior,” though

even in this story it remains unclear what, if any, relationship the narrator has to Hanwell

or Hanwell Senior until the end of the narrative. This revelation recasts the significance

of the story and, especially in light of the first Hanwell narrative, throws into question the

purpose and audience for the story. Ultimately, Smith’s narration functions to involve all

the disparate participants in the sharing of Hanwell’s story in the process of “trying to

piece together the jigsaw.” The subtlety and power of Smith’s technique underscores her

position as a writer’s writer, and her focus on the human and the universal moves her

outside the realm of pluralistic multicultural politics.

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According to Huggan’s model, Smith’s work, no matter its humanistic, optimistic politics and philosophy, is part of a field of “culturally othered goods” that are undeniably “bound up with” the “commodity culture” of postcoloniality. Postcoloniality, which thrives on the postcolonial exotic and the fetishization of difference, ensures that

Smith’s “rhetoric of resistance” will inevitably become a “consumer product.” And to a certain extent, this seems to be the case. It is unlikely that Smith will stop being perceived and interpreted as “Young, Black, British” anytime soon. However, it also seems clear that she has done much to define herself on her own terms, ironically heeding the call to “define yourself” from the MTV ad that opened this chapter. Smith has made challenging the system of postcoloniality an integral part of her postcolonialism by critiquing the postcolonial exotic and paradigms of difference and otherness in terms of both her fiction and in terms of the control she exerts over the shape of her literary career.

While the previous chapter argued that the reception of Raoul Peck’s two Lumumbas was largely structured by postcoloniality, to the detriment of the filmmaker’s postcolonialism, and though the third chapter will suggest that Bahman Ghobadi’s cinematic postcolonialism is served by a strategic negotiation of the market and postcoloniality,

Smith offers an example of an artist whose postcolonialism is partially defined by a rejection of postcoloniality and its exoticist assumptions.

My point here, and in this chapter more generally, is not that Smith’s privileging of aesthetics or her refusal of multiculturalism are antithetical to political engagement or an acknowledgment of the very real consequences of race and difference in the contemporary world. Nor am I suggesting that we “whitewash” Smith. Rather, I am

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arguing that in her rejection of discourses of multiculturalism and the postcolonial exotic,

Smith embodies an alternative way of approaching difference in the twenty-first century.

Smith, like many of her characters, has spent her adult life in a world where evidence of

difference has become increasingly prolific and proportionately commonplace and un-

exotic. Smith is part of a series of generations of young people in the developed world

who have lived their lives surrounded by the multitude of identities and cultural traditions

that circulate globally and aware of the ease with which these artifacts of difference are

subsumed into the consciousness of an increasingly globalized culture.83 For those of us who have, like Smith, spent most of our lives with access to Irish punk rock, Korean

“slasher” films, Japanese electronica, Northern European indie rock, African-American hip-hop that samples heavily from Middle Eastern and Northern African musical traditions, etc., etc., etc. – a cultural buffet that is a mere click of the mouse or turn of the dial away – difference becomes something less than exotic. It becomes unremarkable, a

“fact of life - like there are people of different races on the planet” (Smith, “White

Knuckle Ride”).

It is not difficult to imagine how this proliferation of differences, this emphasis on the globalization of culture could lead to the articulation of a postmodern world where identity, race, and culture are all for sale – mere tokens of multicultural “hipness” that can be used to “define yourself,” ala an imperative from an MTV advertisement. But

Smith does not slip into this postmodern trap – this celebration of the global forces of postcoloniality.84 Instead, as difference becomes commonplace, human connection and recognition of the universal take center stage as the defining characteristics of Smith’s

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philosophy and her approach to her craft. This philosophical embrace of an optimistic humanism also translates into a practical refusal of a market driven system based on the exoticization of difference and the other. Smith’s “slippery” career as a postcolonial novelist, writer’s writer, cultural critic, and literary scholar (to name only a few of her many manifestations) is so difficult to pin down because Smith challenges the categories and assumptions that so easily could have defined her work and her celebrity.

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CHAPTER 3

COMMUNICATING KURDISTAN: NON-STATE CINEMA AND THE INTERNATIONAL MARKET

The forty million Kurds are not so much a tribe as a nation, a people. And for us, cinema is a new art of which we have been deprived for a long time. For this reason, I prefer not to have a personalized or individualistic view of it. I believe art is not for art's sake, art is for people's sake. That is why I want to be amongst people. I want to bring the subjects of my films out of people’s hearts, so that I can make my films for the people. --Bahman Ghobadi (Koch)

Our neighborhood [in Iranian Kurdistan] has produced 13 filmmakers. In the town of Baneh, I have a couple of cabdriver friends who had saved up money for taking care of their families, but ended up buying video cameras to make feature length films. It’s impossible not to find thirty or forty young filmmakers in any Kurdish town these days. They work in absolute poverty. They travel long distances to borrow a home camera and make a 20-minute film in two days. Last year, Kurdistan was the top Iranian province in producing quality short films. The Kurds are winning most of the top awards in domestic and foreign festivals for short films. This is happening under circumstances where there are no film schools, no quality films to watch, and no decent film books to read in Kurdistan. The filmmakers are solely inspired by their own personal experiences. I think in the very near future we will have twenty or thirty Kurdish films every year instead of just one. --Bahman Ghobadi (Marooned in Iraq)

In the introduction to this dissertation and previous two chapters, we have considered the production and international circulation of texts representing the postcolonial nationalism of a former colony, the indigenous nationalism of a people subjected to internal colonization and disenfranchisement, and the cosmopolitan-

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nationalism of a second generation postcolonial British subject writing from the metropole. In this final chapter, we turn our attention to the case of a non-state nation struggling for international recognition and political sovereignty, and, in doing so, we take into account people and experiences that have remained largely on the margins of postcolonial studies. The field of postcolonial studies, as theorist Anne McClintock has astutely pointed out, has been limited by its own semantics. In “The Angel of Progress:

Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-colonialism,’” McClintock argues that “the term ‘post-

colonialism’ nonetheless re-orients the globe once more around a single, binary opposition: colonial/post-colonial….The ‘postcolonial scene’ occurs in an entranced suspension of history, as if the definitive historical events have preceded us, and are not now in the making” (85-86). McClintock further suggests that the term postcolonialism

is often “prematurely celebratory” (87), and that we might productively “distinguish

theoretically between a variety of forms of global domination,” such as colonization,

internal colonization, deep settler colonization, imperial colonization, and imperial

power, that fall under the proper purview of postcolonial studies as a field (88).

McClintock challenges both the simplistic linearity of the “post” and the lack of political

specificity of the “colonialism,” forcing postcolonial scholars to examine the

presuppositions inherent in the articulation of the field. McClintock’s call to interrogate

the assumptions of “post-colonialism” as a term and to challenge the ways in which these

assumptions structure and restrain a field of inquiry offers a much needed intervention

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into an academic discipline that, to a great extent, has confined its analysis and theoretical

investigation to the former French and English colonies in Africa, South Asia, and the

Caribbean.85

McClintock’s revised articulation of the field enables the investigation of the

political and cultural role of the non-state nation within a global order predicated on a

nation-state system.86 The concept of a “non-state nation” is difficult to define and has

been vastly under-theorized; the designation is most often used by groups engaged in

nationalist struggles for sovereignty as a way to assert their right to self-determination

and/or statehood. Groups classified as or claiming non-state national status include the

Roma and the Basque in Europe, various indigenous groups in the Americas and

throughout the Pacific, the Hmong in East Asia, and the Palestinians and the Kurds in the

Middle East, to name only a few.87 At first glance, these groups seem to have little in

common. The Roma and the Hmong have fairly dispersed populations, while the

Basques, many American and Oceanic indigenous nations, Palestinians, and Kurds all

have a bounded territory that they consider a national home. The Palestinians and

indigenous nations have experienced an approximation of direct, deep settler

colonization. The rest of the groups mentioned live under the strictures of what

McClintock would call internal colonization.88 In response to their colonized status, the

Basques, Palestinians, and Kurds have all enacted a strategy of violent, militant nationalist struggle in the contemporary period, while the Roma, Hmong, and most indigenous groups have not. Furthermore, the Palestinians, some Kurds, and some

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indigenous groups have limited political sovereignty within the context of established

nation states and/or international law, while the Roma, Basques, and Hmong remain

relatively powerless as international geopolitical players.

However, despite these apparent differences, there are two central similarities that bind these non-state nations together. First, each of these groups is engaged in nationalist

struggle, demonstrating that McClintock’s claim that the term postcolonial is

“prematurely celebratory” is essential and that struggles against colonialism, in their

various forms, are ongoing. Second, each of the non-state nations mentioned above is, in

one way or another, asserting their right to self-determination as mandated in Principle

Five of the Declaration On Principles Of International Law Concerning Friendly

Relations And Co-Operation Among States In Accordance With The Charter Of The

United Nations (1970). The Declaration states:

By virtue of the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, all peoples have the right freely to determine, without external interference, their political status and to pursue their economic, social and cultural development, and every State has the duty to respect this right in accordance with the provisions of the Charter….The establishment of a sovereign and independent State, the free association or integration with an independent State or the emergence into any other political status freely determined by a people constitute modes of implementing the right of self- determination by that people. (“Declaration on Principles of International Law”)

While international law and U.N. mandates often do not prove practically enforceable,

they do provide a platform from which people without recognized national status can

make a case to the international community for their rights. This is a point that I will

return to later in this chapter.

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This discussion still does not offer a concrete definition of what a non-state nation

is, however, nor does it explicitly distinguish, for example, between a non-state nation

and a minority or ethnic group. In his seminal Imagined Communities: Reflections on the

Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson makes a passing reference to what

I am calling non-state nations when he argues that “many ‘old nations,’ once thought

fully consolidated, find themselves challenged by ‘sub’-nationalisms within their borders

– nationalisms which, naturally, dream of shedding this sub-ness one happy day” (3).

This brief moment in Anderson’s book-length study is helpful insofar as it suggests that

what defines a sub- or non-state nation is the desire of a people to shed their sub-ness –

Anderson places the onus of classification on the people as geo-political agents. But

Anderson’s assertion is also problematic in that it privileges the “old nations” through

emphasis on a “sub-ness” that positions non-state nations as disgruntled upstarts,

somehow “new” and secondary, and essentially derivative. To define the non-state

nation, then, it may be more useful to turn to Anderson’s oft cited definition of the nation

itself: “I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political

community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6). This definition

of the nation is not specific to the nation state, and, therefore, can be useful in delineating

where nations exist without official recognition or formal state boundaries (both of which

are noticeably absent from Anderson’s definition). Anderson’s definition of the nation

can be broken down into four constituent terms – “imagined,” “community,” “limited,” \

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and “sovereign” – and through consideration of these four terms we will be able to

formulate a working definition of the non-state nation sufficient to our needs in this

chapter.

Anderson’s first claim, that the nation is imagined, is not meant to suggest that nations are fabrications or falsehoods. Anderson’s point, rather, is to argue that it is only

through a creative act of political imagining that “in the minds of each [citizen] lives the

image of [a national] communion” (6), or, to put it another way, it is only through

imagination that the vast geographical space and demographic diversity that constitutes a

nation can be reduced to a bounded singularity. For Anderson, recognizing the role of

imagination in the formulation of nations is essential because it facilitates the

investigation of “the style in which [nations] are imagined,” and this is certainly one of

the clear contributions that Anderson’s work has made to subsequent theories of the nation, particularly within the Humanities as a discipline and Postcolonial Studies as a field (6). Anderson’s emphasis on the role of imagination or creative invention in the consolidation and maintenance of the nation has also been rightfully critiqued as discounting the significant role played by coercive forms of ideology and power in the creation of nations, but, for the purpose of defining the non-state nation, the concept of imagination is enlightening. The importance of imagination to Anderson’s definition implicitly suggests two things: first, that insofar as nations are imagined they are fluid and can be re-imagined as well, and, second, that the existence of the nation is, at least to some degree, subject to the invention (and/or reinvention) of the people (as a collective).

Within Anderson’s definition, then, a non-state nation could, theoretically, acquire the

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imaginative power to collectively re-imagine national affiliations in order to initiate disjuncture in the official status of the nation state.

The next two constituent terms in Anderson’s definition, “community” and

“limited,” are integrally interrelated. The national community is imagined as “a deep horizontal comradeship…that [has made] it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people not so much to kill, as willingly to die” for their country. And this national community is understood as limited “because even the largest of them…has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations” (7). National communities are predicated upon the assumption of insiders and outsiders, of boundedness and exclusion, and the “deep horizontal comradeship,” and all of its interpellative power, often relies upon the strangeness and/or threat of the “other” that exists outside the community’s boundaries. Practically, this means that national communities must delineate identifying markers of insider and/or outsider status, and these markers then acquire cultural value and are coded in a way that is advantageous to the maintenance of the nation or nation state. In the case of most nations, whether non-state or “stated,” some combination of markers such as language, race or ethnicity, religion, geographical location, and culture are used to determine insider/outsider status in addition to recognized standards of citizenship. While it would be futile to try and argue that any one of these determining aspects universally and acontextually trumps the others, it would seem that in the case of nation states, geography and language (here meaning some official state language) are of particular importance.

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The centrality of the concept of sovereignty to the imagination of the nation,

Anderson argues, is due to the fact that the nation rose to prominence as a political and ideological construct in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution “were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm,” and in the stead of an almost blind adherence to God and King, the nation promised freedom. Anderson states: “nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state” (7). Freedom and sovereignty must clearly be central facets of any definition of the non-state nation as well, but while nation states believe themselves to be free, non-state nations strive for freedom, sovereignty, and self-determination in some form. As the UN Declaration of 1970 cited above makes clear, freedom, sovereignty, and self-determination do not necessarily require nation state status as a goal (“The establishment of a sovereign and independent State, the free association or integration with an independent State or the emergence into any other political status freely determined by a people constitute modes of implementing the right of self-determination by that people.”). I would argue, however, that in order for the designation of non-state nation to have any real meaning or geopolitical currency, “the establishment of a sovereign and independent State” must constitute at least one goal of nationalist struggle (which is not to say that every nationalist party must advocate for statehood, since nationalist struggles are inherently diverse and discordant, but, rather, that statehood should be a part of the political discourse and activist history determining the struggle). This limitation is intended to make a distinction between nations that

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imagine their community and identity outside the parameters of the nation state system

and those for whom the concept of the state, and the non-state, are central terms in the

establishment of national and political agendas.

Based on our exploration of the four constituent terms of Anderson’s articulation

of the nation, we can now offer a working definition of the non-state nation as the following: a group of people with a collective identity that does not correspond to an internationally recognized nation state. This collective identity is predicated upon the

imagination of a “deep horizontal comradeship” among insiders and the exclusion of the

“other” who exists as a perceived threat outside the community’s boundaries. Non-state

nations hope to acquire the power to collectively re-imagine national affiliations in order

to initiate disjuncture in the official status of the nation state with the express goal of

achieving sovereign statehood. According to this definition, non-state nations can be considered “wannabes” – they are striving for a statehood already granted to the nation state/s their imagined community is situated within in the geo-political order. Yet these non-state nations are not necessarily derivative; they do not seek to replicate the structures, values, or systems of any pre-existing nation state. In this chapter, we will

consider the national cinematic production and international distribution of the world’s

largest non-state nation, the Kurds, and we will attempt to answer questions such as the

following: What purpose does cinema play for the non-state nation as it seeks to

challenge and re-imagine national borders and identities? How does a non-state national

cinema circulate in the context of an international film market that is largely dependent

on national affiliations, funding, and recognition? How does this international circulation

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both reflect and refract artistic and political purpose? The remainder of this chapter

attempts to answer these questions by examining the nationalist films of the prolific

Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi. 89

Before moving on to an analysis of Ghobadi’s films, their circulation, and their

role in the establishment of a Kurdish national cinema, it may be helpful to provide some

background on the Kurds and their contemporary geopolitical status. The total number of

Kurds worldwide, living both in the Middle East and in the diaspora, is heavily disputed,

but there may be as many as thirty-five to forty million Kurds globally. Kurdistan, the

land that has been occupied by the Kurds for centuries, exists unrecognized

internationally or legally in the mountainous border regions of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and

Syria. Kurds constitute the fourth largest ethnic demographic in the Middle East, after the

Arabs, Turks, and Persians. The ethnic origins of the Kurds are uncertain, but one likely interpretation is that the Kurdish people are descendants of the Zagros and Indo-European tribes that entered the area in the second millennium (Ghassemlou 34). The late Abdul

Rahman Ghassemlou, Professor of Economics and former Secretary-General of the

Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), defines the borders of Kurdistan:

[make a] straight line starting at Mount Ararat in the north-east leading southward and reaching as far as the southern part of Zagros and Pishtkuh; from this point, we draw a straight line westward as far as Mosul in Iraq; then a straight line westward from Mosul to the area of the Turkish port of Iskandarun; from this point a line in the north-eastern direction as far as Erzerum in Turkey, from Erzerum eastwards as far as Mount Ararat. The entire area of Kurdistan would thus cover approximately 409,650 km², i.e. larger than the territories of Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and Denmark put together.” (14)

Kurdistan, therefore, is both geographically and demographically vast, making the establishment of a single political or cultural nationalist agenda a difficult task.

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Despite this geographic and demographic diversity, Kurds have a sense of a unified culture, of common origins, and of discrete national identity (Kurds, for example, have a national flag despite having no recognition from the international community).

On the other hand, the up to 35-40 million Kurds worldwide are spread out primarily over four nation states, and many have allegiances either to nation-state identities or to regional-national Kurdish factions. Kurds share a common language, though there are dialectical variances. There are at least four major Kurdish dialects (North Kurmânji,

South Kurmânji or Sorâni, Dimili, and Gurâni), each of which is broken down into numerous regional dialects (North Kurmânji, for example, is broken down into

Adyamani, Bekraní, Bírjendí, Botaní, Bayezídí, Hekkarí, Jiwanshírí, Qocaní, Senjarí,

Urfí, Yunekí, Surcí and various dialects spoken by the Kurdish communities in the

Elburz mountains in Northern Iran). As a result of this linguistic variation, it would be extremely difficult for a Kurd from North Western Iran to communicate with a Kurd living in Southern Turkey.90 Taking these factors into consideration, it becomes evident that the issue of national definition for Kurds is vexing.

Despite the complexities of the national question, the Kurds have been involved in a century-long fight for statehood.91 Kurdistan has never been a recognized state;

Kurds have existed on the margins of empires and nation states for centuries. Yet, perhaps because of their peripheral and mountainous geographic location, the Kurds have managed to maintain a fairly distinct language, culture, and identity. Nationalist aspirations have become more prevalent among Kurds in the twentieth century with the increased emphasis on the modern nation state among the countries of the region. After

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the First World War, the European powers promised the Kurds their own nation-state, but

they reneged on the promise. Before the rise of nation-stateism in the region, Kurds

established relatively autonomous principalities throughout the Persian and Ottoman

empires, but as the move towards a nation state system strengthened, Ottoman Turkey

and Persia (soon to become Iran) attempted to consolidate their power over the Kurds

(Hassanpour xxiv). The long history of Kurdish struggle demonstrates that it is a distinct

nationalist phenomenon within the region. For example, while many nationalist

movements in the Middle East have used the discourse of Islam to win support for their

cause, Kurdish nationalism has maintained a highly secular focus (most Kurds are

nominally religious Sunni Muslims). This secularism has prevailed despite the fact that

the two “great men” of Kurdish nationalism were Mullahs (Ahmadi Khani and Haji Qadir

Koyi).92 In addition, prominent Kurdish intellectual and Professor of Communications

Amir Hassanpour argues that

unlike most nationalist movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America (in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), Kurdish nationalism emerged before the spread of European colonialism. It acquired anti-colonial direction only later, in the period after World War II, when it was radicalized by the impact of revolutionary movements in the Middle East and in other parts of the “Third World.” (xxv)

Primary Kurdish nationalist parties influencing contemporary politics in the region today include the KDP (Democratic Party of Kurdistan) in Iran and Iraq, PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan), a splinter group pf the KDP established by current Iraqi president Jalal

Talabani, and the oft vilified PKK (Worker’s Party of Kurdistan) in Turkey.93 The PKK

is on the United State’s official list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). The

number of nationalist parties and their often conflicting relationships to global powers

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indicate both the diversity of Kurdish nationalist politics and the vexed position of

Kurdish struggle in the international context. For example, Talabani, the founder of the

PUK, has support in the west, and Iraqi Kurds, in general, are viewed sympathetically by

many westerners. The PKK, on the other hand, is viewed as a terrorist organization and

Kurds in Turkey, a nation state ally of western powers, are seen as radical insurgents.

Kurdistan has been the site of incessant war and struggle. Since the end of the

First World War, the almost continuous periods of warfare and armed resistance in Iran,

Iraq, Turkey, and Syria have taken a toll on the Kurdish people. Iraqi attempts at

genocide against the Kurds in the Anfal campaign were especially devastating. With a

history and a contemporary reality defined by war, genocide, and armed struggle, life in

Kurdistan is not easy. In large swathes of the region, there is little access to education, health care, or modern amenities, and much of the Kurdish territory is littered with the remains of the many military conflicts that have taken place in the past several decades

(landmines, in particular, have made the beautiful Kurdish landscape extremely treacherous). The geography and climate of the region also make life in Kurdistan harsh, and the natural resources in Iraqi Kurdistan (oil) make that particular part of the region vulnerable to the greed and manipulation of foreign interests.

The Kurds have not only been subjected to severe economic, military, and political exploitation, they have also suffered cultural repression, with restrictions throughout the region on language use and artistic or cultural expression. The subversion of these cultural restrictions has been a central aspect of Kurdish nationalism. As

Guinean liberation theorist Amilcar Cabral suggested in 1973:

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to take up arms to dominate a people is, above all, to take up arms to destroy, or at least to neutralize, to paralyze, its cultural life. For, with a strong indigenous cultural life, foreign domination cannot be sure of its perpetuation. At any moment, depending on internal and external factors determining the evolution of the society in question, cultural resistance…may take on new forms (political, economic, armed) in order to fully contest foreign domination. (39)

Because of the central role of culture in national liberation struggles, I turn in what

follows to Kurdish cinema as a potential site of resistance and as a gauge of the impact and reception of a Kurdish national agenda in the international arena. However, I proceed with an awareness of the precarious position of non-state national cinema and the complexities of the global channels of circulation and distribution within which postcolonial texts circulate. Ghobadi’s audience is vast and his purpose is provocative, and this has the potential to complicate the communication of his nationalist message.

However, Ghobadi’s success within the world of global cinema indicates his ability to strategically negotiate the rhetorical exchange between a non-state national filmmaker and an international audience.94

This chapter, like the preceding chapters, is focused on attending to the interactions and implications of circulation and intent, or postcoloniality and postcolonialism – terms coined by Graham Huggan to distinguish between two divergent impulses apparent in postcolonial studies. Huggan argues that there is a “constitutive split within the postcolonial, the entanglement of its ostensibly anti-imperial ideologies within a global economy that often manipulates them to neo-imperial ends.” Within

Huggan’s bipartite framework, postcolonialism “concerns largely localised agencies of resistance,” while postcoloniality “refers to a global condition of cross-cultural symbolic exchange” (ix). Huggan goes on to argue, and it is worth quoting at length:

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Postcoloniality…is a value-regulating mechanism within the global late-capitalist system of commodity exchange. Value is constructed through global market operations involving the exchange of cultural commodities and, particularly, culturally ‘othered’ goods. Postcoloniality’s regime of value is implicitly assimilative and market driven: it regulates the value equivalence of putatively marginal products in the global marketplace. Postcolonialism, by contrast, implies a politics of value that stands in obvious opposition to global processes of commodification. Yet a cursory glance at the state of postcolonial studies at Western universities, or of the worldwide marketing of prominent postcolonial writers like Salman Rushdie, is enough to suggest that these two apparently conflicting regimes of value are mutually entangled. It is not just that postcolonialism and postcoloniality are at odds with one another, or that the former’s emancipatory agenda clashes with the latter’s; the point that needs to be stressed here is that postcolonialism is bound up with postcoloniality – that in the overwhelmingly commercial context of late twentieth century [and early twenty- firstcentury] commodity culture, postcolonialism and its rhetoric of resistance have themselves become consumer products. (6)

Huggan’s lucid distinction between postcolonialism and postcoloniality challenges critics and scholars to attend to the ramifications of the terms’ mutual “entanglement,” of the

“bound up with” relationship between these two seemingly opposing global political and cultural trends. However, it would be negligent to simply argue that the nefarious specter of postcoloniality invalidates or inevitably compromises the postcolonialism of authors, filmmakers, artists, and thinkers whose work has circulated within late-capitalist global channels.95 My project in this dissertation, generally, and in the following chapter on the

Kurdish nationalist films of Bahman Ghobadi, specifically, is to argue for a model of reading that specifically engages the “entanglement” of these two trends by considering postcolonialism and intent refracted through a critical awareness of the implications of postcoloniality and international circulation.

This is particularly significant, as I suggest that Ghobadi’s films are largely directed to an international audience – many Kurds do not have easy access to the

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technologies of viewership, the films are heavily marketed to the festival circuit crowd, and Ghobadi’s non-state nationalist message must be validated by the international community in order to facilitate the kind of geopolitical change necessary to intercede in the ongoing exploitation of the Kurdish people. Ghobadi’s postcolonialism, his contribution to the cause of Kurdish self-determination, functions in several ways. First, he serves as a spokesman for a nation that, due to its marginal, non-state status, has traditionally been silenced within a global order dominated by nation stateism. Second, by beginning to establish a Kurdish non-state national cinema that vies with national cinemas for cultural capital and critical acclaim within the context of international film festivals and distribution networks, he is staking a claim for cultural sovereignty and self- definition that plays a vital role in reimagining the nation and “initiat[ing] disjuncture in the official status of the nation state with the express goal of achieving sovereign statehood.” However, Ghobadi’s postcolonialism is not immune to the effects of global postcoloniality, especially insofar as his international audience has access to his cultural and political communications only through the channels of the global culture market with its reliance on the nation state as the central apparatus of representation, circulation, and classification. As such, Ghobadi must strategically negotiate within the confines of the market in order to ensure that his Kurdish nationalist message is heard. Laying the groundwork for an internationally recognized non-state national cinema is crucial to

Ghobadi’s project, as it allows him both to affirm the cultural sovereignty of Kurdish film and to simultaneously re-imagine and work within the confines of a global market that marginalizes and ignores the narratives and experiences of non-state people.

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As Alan Williams suggests in the introduction to Film and Nationalism, there is no single, agreed upon definition of what national cinema is. Instead of attempting to formulate a distinct category of national cinema, Williams argues,

[w]e might do better to think about national cinemas in the way that Rick Altman proposes that we study film genres – as sites of conflict among different interest groups….the underlying process [of defining and typologizing national cinemas] is dynamic and perpetually unfinished. We must also remember that such typologies tend to make “national cinemas” seem things-in-themselves, and not part of a complex dynamic in which they do things to and for nations. (5-6)

This definition of national cinemas emphasizes conflict, dynamism, and incompleteness, and, as such, it allows us to consider the role of national cinema in not just reflecting, but developing and defining a nation in progress. In addition, Williams’ claim that what is crucial about national cinema is not what it is but what it does to and for nations echoes one of the major claims of this dissertation – that a crucial part of postcolonial analysis is attending to the distinction between and entanglement of postcoloniality and postcolonialism. Applying Huggan’s terms and interest in texts representing marginalized, formerly or presently colonized, or deterritorialized people to Williams’ claim about national cinemas more generally, we can say that national cinemas are both an element of postcoloniality, structuring the way marginalized texts circulate and are consumed and interpreted globally, and are tools of postcolonialism, a broadly defined attempt at political self-definition and autonomy. Ghobadi’s nationalist films and his dedication to the establishment of a new Kurdish national cinema, therefore, are both indicative of his provocative artistic postcolonialism and open up a “site of conflict” where Kurdish national identity and culture can be negotiated and defined.

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Viewing Ghobadi’s films as sites of conflict and identity negotiation again raises

the question of the intended audience for a Kurdish national cinema, generally, and

Ghobadi’s body of work, specifically. The question of audience is crucial insofar as it structures our understanding of the purpose of the negotiations taken up by the filmmaker

and, consequently, of the very definition of a burgeoning Kurdish national cinema. In an interview with Ghobadi, included in the press kit for the filmmaker’s third feature Turtles

Can Fly, Iranian film critic and historian Mamad Haghighat asks Ghobadi the following:

“Bearing in mind Yilmaz Guney [a Turkish Kurdish filmmaker, discussed below]’s films and those of the filmmakers of the region, can we speak of a Kurdish cinema today, with a specific Kurdish identity?” Ghobadi’s response, instead of focusing on national cinema as a site of conflict or negotiation, or on issues of nationalism and the communication of specific national experiences and cultures, is primarily concerned with audience: “I think it’s too early as yet. When there are at least two or three movie theatres, laboratories and the like, in each and every Kurdistan town, well, we’ll then be able to talk of a Kurdish cinema. But today there are virtually no theatres and if by chance you find one, there’s no audience because the people have no money. They’ve spent it all on food and weapons!”96 Based on Ghobadi’s response, it is clear that he is working with a definition

of what constitutes Kurdish cinema that is at odds with Williams’ definition and with the

definition of Kurdish non-state cinema that underlies the claims of this chapter. I do not

wish to challenge the validity of Ghobadi’s assertion that national cinema is defined by

audience and reception (in fact, this claim is made by film theorist Andrew Higson in his

essay “The Concept of National Cinema”), but I suggest that considering a native or

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insider audience is only one way to approach the purpose of a national cinema.

Ghobadi’s films, as they circulate internationally, not only give voice to the suffering and

survival of a nation that has been historically silenced, they also insist on the importance

of the circulation of these voices and indicate the extent to which cinema, generally, and

a nationalist cinema, specifically, plays a role in ensuring that the Kurdish people will not

continue to be relegated to the margins within a nation-state system. As Ghobadi himself

notes: “The invisibility of the Kurds is exactly because of their voicelessness. If they

could make themselves heard, they would have secured at least a minimum measure of

peace and security to live under.” (Marooned in Iraq).97

Ghobadi is not the first Kurdish filmmaker to attempt to speak on behalf of the

Kurds to an international audience. In 1983, the year before his death in exile in Paris,

Turkish Kurdish director, actor, and screenwriter Yilmaz Güney expressed his desire to tell the story of the birth, or rebirth, of the Kurdish people: “The Kurdish question is a very difficult one. One day I would like to shoot the film telling the story of the fight of a

people for its birth -- or rebirth. Now, it is a very difficult problem” (Kutschera, “Yilmaz

Güney’s Last Film”). Throughout Güney’s prolific and politically volatile cinematic

career (he spent many years writing screenplays while serving time as a political

prisoner), he was involved in numerous films that represented the plight of Turkey’s

economically and culturally suppressed Kurdish population, most notably 1978’s Sürü

(The Herd), which he described as “the history of the Kurdish people.” Güney, however,

was a self-proclaimed “assimilated Kurd,” his films did not exclusively treat Kurdish

themes and issues, and his body of work is entirely in Turkish. As Güney noted, the

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decision to film in Turkish was simple: “if we had used the Kurdish language, all those

who took part in this film would have been sent to jail.” As this linguistic restriction

suggests, Kurds have faced particularly virulent oppression and cultural suppression in

Güney’s native Turkey, where a majority of the Kurdish population lives. Operating under extremely adverse political circumstances, it is no wonder that Güney refers both to the Kurdish question as a “difficult one” and to the “difficult problem” of Kurdish filmmaking in the several short lines quoted above. The tone of the passage, retrospectively, is both mournful and wistful, as the actor/screenwriter/director at the end of his life and career laments the film that he would “[o]ne day” have liked to make detailing the nationalist fight of his people. It is telling that the single most famous

Kurdish actor/screenwriter/director in the history of cinema remained, throughout his life, artistically, culturally, and linguistically distanced from his Kurdish roots.

Sixteen years after Güney’s death, Iranian Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi released his first feature film, Zamani Barayé Masti Asbha (A Time for Drunken Horses), and a new incarnation of Kurdish cinema was born. Since 2000, Ghobadi has released three other feature length films, Avazhaye Sarzamine Madariyam (Marooned in Iraq or

The Songs of My Mother’s Land)98 in 2002, Lakposhtha Hâm Parvaz Mikonand (Turtles

Can [Also] Fly)99 in 2004, and Niwe Mang (Half Moon) in 2006, as well as a number of

fiction and documentary shorts.100 Emerging as a distinct voice from the internationally

renowned world of Iranian cinema, Ghobadi’s compelling cinematic narratives and his

defiant Kurdish nationalism make him one of the most influential advocates for Kurdish

rights today. While severe political and artistic restrictions prohibited Güney from

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realizing his goal of creating a truly Kurdish film, Ghobadi has begun to plant the seeds

of a Kurdish cinematic tradition and industry, particularly with the establishment of his

Mij Film Company, which he began in 2000 with the express purpose of “supporting

Kurdish nationalistic cinema” (“Mij Film”)101 This is not to say that Ghobadi has not

faced his share of challenges; his films, like all films produced in Iran, are subject to

intense scrutiny and censorship. Half Moon, his most recent film, has been banned in

Iran, and despite Ghobadi’s attempts to alter the content of the film in order to

accommodate censors, the film has never been shown. Ghobadi has also repeatedly

referred to his struggle to find funding for his films, and he is often only able to realize

his cinematic visions by using his personal assets and securing personal loans.102 These restrictions and Ghobadi’s subsequent cinematic negotiations of Iranian censorship practices will be discussed at greater length later in this chapter. Nonetheless, Ghobadi has been able to communicate an uncompromised and uncompromising vision of a unified Kurdistan struggling and surviving in the face of devastating and horrific political violence. Unlike Güney’s body of work, all four of Ghobadi’s feature films primarily use

Kurdish language dialogue, and his third film, Turtles Can Fly, is entirely in Kurdish.103

Defining Kurdistan is, inevitably, a difficult and politically complex endeavor.

For Güney, an “assimilated Kurd” who grew up in Adana, Turkey, a city with a primarily

Turkish population, Kurdistan does not exist. When he refers to his desire to tell “the story of the fight of a people for its birth – or rebirth,” he suggests that while Kurdistan may have existed in the past, and may exist in the future, there is no Kurdistan in the present. Ghobadi, on the other hand, seems to be channeling theorist Benedict Anderson

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and his definition of the nation as an imagined community when he describes Kurdistan:

“The Kurds are so scattered, but in my head, there is a country of the Kurds. There exists

a virtual, a mental country. Not a physical one. Therefore, I would like to think of myself

as a Kurdish filmmaker that makes his films for the Kurds” (Koch). Ghobadi, like

Anderson, defines the nation not as a physical entity, but as a virtual or mental construct,

as an imagined kinship that exists among a dispersed population. Furthermore,

Ghobadi’s interest in making films “for the Kurds,” particularly when viewed in

conjunction with his investment in Mij Film and the establishment of a Kurdish

nationalist cinema, suggests that Ghobadi, like Anderson, emphasizes the role of popular

culture in the imagination and maintenance of national identity.104 That Kurdistan exists

as an imagined community for Ghobadi, in contrast to Güney, may be the result of the

fact that Ghobadi has spent most of his life in Iranian Kurdistan, surrounded by Kurdish

people and culture. Ghobadi was born and raised in Baneh, a small Kurdish town very

close to the border between Iran and Iraq; a vast majority of the population in Baneh is

Kurdish. As a teen, he moved with his family to Sanandaj, the capital of Iranian

Kurdistan. And while Sanandaj has a much more diverse and urban population than

Baneh, the city displays a pride in its Kurdish culture, with, for example, The Kurdish

Ethnological Museum (devoted to Kurdish costuming, crafts, and cultural practices) and

a small Kurdish archaeological museum.105

However, just as Güney was aware of his hyphenated identity as an “assimilated

Kurd,” Ghobadi acknowledges his complicated “in-between” position, both nationally

and cinematically, as an Iranian Kurdish artist: “[t]here are many first-class filmmakers in

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Iran and I don't want to portray myself as separate from this construct, ‘Iranian Cinema’.

But within it, I would like to be a Kurdish filmmaker. I am in and from Iranian cinema.

But I am a Kurdish filmmaker making films for the Kurds” (Marooned in Iraq). This

quotation illustrates the complex negotiations of national and cinematic alliances that

Ghobadi’s works navigate and raises a number of questions that this chapter addresses.

What is the relationship between Ghobadi’s claim that he is a “Kurdish filmmaker

making films for the Kurds” and his reluctance to “portray myself as separate from this

construct, ‘Iranian Cinema,’” or, more broadly, how might we understand the relationship

between a Kurdish national cinema and the established cinema of a “stated” nation?

Furthermore, how do the associations between Kurdish non-state cinema and Iranian

national cinema affect the marketing and reception of Ghobadi’s films? In what ways does Ghobadi mobilize global public interest in Middle Eastern politics and conflicts to

garner an audience for his Kurdish nationalist films? Moreover, what significant factors

distinguish Ghobadi’s Kurdish national cinema from a tradition of Iranian filmmaking?

How do these differences define the boundaries of Kurdish national identity, cinema, and

culture? Finally, how do assumptions about Ghobadi’s body of work based on his

negotiations of national and cinematic categories either enable or impede the successful

communication of Ghobadi’s brand of cinematic Kurdish nationalism?

In what follows, I argue that Bahman Ghobadi’s films communicate a provocative

vision of a unified and resilient Kurdistan to an international audience and,

simultaneously, begin to establish a Kurdish national cinema. However, because Third

World cinema is largely produced and distributed within the parameters of a system that

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privileges national film industries, and because acquiring a broad international audience

is central to Ghobadi’s cinematic and nationalist project, the processes of marketing and

circulation are used to affiliate the Kurdish films with Iranian national cinema,

specifically with New Iranian Cinema, despite their apparent differences from Iranian

film as a politically and aesthetically defined category.106 The films are also marketed as direct responses to the tumultuous contemporary events occurring in the Middle East, as cinematic meditations on the day’s headlines relevant to the humanitarian and/or political concerns of a global viewing audience. These various marketing strategies, however effective, can lead viewers and critics to overlook the thematic and political centrality of

Kurdish nationalism. In other words, access to Ghobadi’s postcolonialism (defined by his claims for Kurdish national sovereignty) has the potential to be impeded by the influence of postcoloniality (predicated on the filmmaker’s desire to reach a global audience). Nonetheless, Ghobadi has attempted to work from within to strategically negotiate postcoloniality and the global culture market, despite its reliance on nation state classifications, in order to effectively communicate the continued exploitation and struggle of a non-state nation and its people. Ghobadi’s films both challenge national borders – cinematically, culturally, socially, and even politically – and insist on maintaining the borders around Kurdish identity and culture that make Kurds distinct as a nation and a people.

Before moving on to offer close readings of Ghobadi’s work and its circulation and reception, I offer a brief synopsis of each of his four films. I summarize the films in the order of their release, beginning with A Time for Drunken Horses and ending with

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Half Moon. I offer further explication of relevant themes, techniques, and scenes from the films throughout the remainder of this chapter. A Time for Drunken Horses (2000) is set in the rural and mountainous Kurdish border region between Iran and Iraq and focuses on the trials and tribulations of a family of orphaned Iranian Kurdish children (the children’s mother has died in childbirth before the film begins, and one of the very early scenes depicts the children’s discovery that their father has been killed by a landmine – these deaths serve to underscore the harsh realities of Kurdish life). While Marooned in

Iraq, Turtles Can Fly, and Half Moon all contain elements of humor that ironically blend with the films’ expositions of the struggle for survival, A Time for Drunken Horses is uncompromisingly bleak. One of the film’s protagonists, who also serves as a voice over narrator early in the film, is Amaneh, the second youngest child in the family and the middle girl. Amaneh’s brother, Ayoub, struggles to earn enough money to send Madi, their physically and mentally disabled older brother, to Iraq for an operation that might prolong his life by several months. In order to earn the money, Ayoub takes up the dangerous and strenuous business of smuggling goods back and forth over the border between Iran and Iraq. The work is so difficult that in order to get the mules to make the long journey over mountains and through the snow, the animals must be plied with liquor

– giving the film its title and highlighting the animalistic working conditions that Ayoub and the other Kurdish smugglers face. The young orphans sacrifice everything to try and help the terminally ill and suffering Madi, with the oldest sister, Rojine, even marrying an

Iraqi Kurd who promises to help finance the surgery (a promise that he does not keep).

After a series of harrowing events, Ayoub decides to take Madi across the border and into

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Iraq alone, and the film ends with the ambiguous image of Ayoub carrying Madi over the

barbed wire border that slashes through the snowy Kurdish landscape. This concluding border scene will be recast and revisited in the final frames of Marooned in Iraq.

In Ghobadi’s second feature film, Marooned in Iraq (2002), the filmmaker borrows from the genres of the road trip and adventure film in order to take viewers on an ethnographic tour of the land, culture, and people of the border region of Kurdistan between Iran and Iraq, where A Time for Drunken Horses is also set. The film narrates the story of three Kurdish musicians, Mirza and his two sons, Barat and Audeh, who are well known performers throughout the region. As the film begins, Barat is traveling to his father’s village, having been beckoned by Mirza. Upon arriving in the village, where his brother Audeh also lives, Barat learns that Mirza’s former wife, Hanareh, has asked

Mirza to come to her in Iraq. Both Barat and Audeh resist their father’s request to accompany him over the border because they are bitter that their family honor has been tarnished by Hanareh’s decision to leave Mirza and Iran in order to move to Iraq after the

Islamic Republic outlawed public singing by women. However, the two young men are soon persuaded, and the three embark on a journey across the Kurdish region in search of a trace of Hanareh. As they travel, the men encounter a camp of Iraqi refugees fleeing

Saddam Hussein’s Anfal Campaign against the Kurds, a traditional wedding gone terribly wrong, and a community of Iranian and Iraqi Kurdish orphans living in the mountains. In each of these locations, the three musicians perform traditional Kurdish folksongs, or goraanis, for the troubled population, and each stop along the road constitutes its own tragicomic vignette of Kurdish life. Along the way, Audeh, who has many wives and

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daughters but no sons, adopts two boys from the orphan’s community, and Barat falls in

love with a mysterious woman who defies Iranian Islamic law by singing in public. In each of the places the three men visit, they find clues leading them closer and closer to

Hanareh. Finally, Mirza makes the dangerous crossing into Iraqi Kurdistan alone, where

he finds a community of women who have survived the massacre and chemical bombing

of Halabja. Hanareh is among these women, but she refuses to see Mirza; she has been

disfigured and her voice ruined by the chemical attacks. However, she asks Mirza to take

her infant daughter Sanooreh, the progeny of Hanareh’s relationship with Mirza’s late

musical partner, Saeed, back over the border into Iran to grow up away from the threat of

Saddam. In a final scene reminiscent of A Time for Drunken Horses, the film ends as

Mirza, carrying Sanooreh back into Iran, tramples the barbed wire border separating the

two nation states.

In Turtles Can Fly (2004), Ghobadi returns his attention to the plight of Kurdish

children, also treated in A Time for Drunken Horses. However, he shifts location in his

third film, setting the story in Iraqi Kurdistan near the border with Turkey (Turtles Can

Fly was the first film shot in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein). The film takes place

in the days leading up to and just following the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The

protagonist of the film is “Satellite,” a boy in his early teens who is the leader of a band

of orphan children, many of them physically disabled, who make a living by collecting

live mines from the fields around the village and selling them to the highest bidder.

Satellite is a dynamic leader, and his ability to install satellite dishes, which the adults in

the village need in order to keep up with the global events that they believe will influence

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their lives in significant ways, gives him power and prestige in the community.

Satellite’s life changes, however, when three new children come to town – a mysteriously

silent young girl, Agrin, her brother, Hengov, who has no arms, and a young blind child,

Riga, assumed by the people in the community to be the youngest sibling. As the

narrative progresses, it becomes apparent that these three children are haunted by crimes and traumas so scarring that even the disabled refugee children that make up Satellite’s gang cannot understand the depth of their pain. It is soon revealed that Agrin, Hengov, and Riga have spent years fleeing the terrors inflicted on the Kurds by Saddam Hussein.

During a Baathist raid on their village, Agrin was raped by an Iraqi soldier in front of a powerless Hengov, and the child, Riga, is the result of this sexual violence. In the wake of the trauma, Agrin has become emotionally detached from the world around her, and

she is both suicidal and infanticidal, repeatedly trying to kill the blind Riga by leaving him near cliffs or bodies of water. Hengov, who loves Riga dearly and attempts to forestall Agrin’s efforts, develops the ability to see visions and forecast the future – a gift that he eventually uses to inform Satellite of the coming of the American troops. The arrival of the troops, however, proves anticlimactic, and the children continue to struggle for survival despite American intervention. In the end, Satellite, who, throughout the film, has extolled the virtues of American culture, becomes disenchanted with the possibility of foreign intervention and aid and, in a final scene, turns his back on the passing American troops. This disillusionment is largely due to his inability to save

Agrin, who, despite the efforts of Satellite and Hengov, drowns Riga in a lake and then throws herself off a cliff. The title of the film, Turtles Can Fly, simultaneously alludes to

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Riga’s drowning, Agrin’s brief moment of freedom as she “flies” to her death, and to the

hard, shell-like baskets that Satellite’s gang carries on their backs when collecting mines.

The mixture of beauty and pain, air and water, hope and despair evident in the title

echoes throughout this moving and emotionally effective film.

Ghobadi’s fourth film, Half Moon (2006), returns to a number of the locations,

themes, and narrative structures central to his second film, Marooned in Iraq. The film is

set just after the fall of Saddam in the border region between Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, with

a majority of the action taking place in Iran (the film was primarily shot in Iranian

Kurdistan, though for several scenes Ghobadi’s crew crossed over into Iraq to shoot).

The episodic narrative structure is driven by a plot involving father-son musicians on a cross country journey to get to Iraq to perform a concert. In Half Moon, the charismatic father figure is Mamo, a famous musician with many sons who, through a series of visions and prophecies, realizes that he is nearing the end of his life and decides that his final act will be to organize a concert, enlist his sons and his loyal follower Kako, and become “the first to play the music of Kurdistan in a free Kurdistan.” Mamo and Kako, using a bus borrowed from a friend, travel around Kurdistan picking up Mamo’s musician sons, some of whom come along willingly and others who must be coaxed into joining the journey (the recruitment of Mamo’s sons offers ample opportunity for

Ghobadi to weave moments of comedy and absurdity into the narrative). They also travel to a surreal village that is home to 134 female exiles who “sing with one voice,” and there they pick up Heshow, a female vocalist who is an infamous outcast in Iran due to her refusal to submit to laws forbidding women to sing in public (a theme explored through

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the characters of Hanareh and the “woman with the voice” in Marooned in Iraq). On

their journey, they face a number of perilous obstacles – from American bullets at the

Iran-Iraq border to cruel Iranian gendarmerie who destroy their instruments and temporarily arrest Heshow (she is freed by a Kurdish officer who assists the musicians).

As the journey becomes more and more fraught with trouble, Mamo’s sons begin to desert the mission, and, eventually, even Heshow leaves Mamo; she is seen disappearing into the fog with five mysterious men in one of the many ambiguous and potentially supernatural moments in the film. Full of despair and a sense of impending doom, Mamo gives up, his health deteriorates, and he begins his descent into death. However, at just this moment, Niwemang, or Half Moon, appears – apparently falling from the sky onto the roof of the bus. Niwemang, who was prophesized by Heshow in a letter left for

Mamo before her departure and whose voice is even more beautiful than Heshow’s,

agrees to sing with the group. Without ever explaining why or how, Niwemang begins to

usher the musicians through an elaborately orchestrated network that she has put in place

to help Mamo and his sons cross into Iraq. Mamo’s health, however, is declining, and as

Mamo begins to realize that Niwemang is the manifestation of the woman dragging a

coffin who has haunted his visions, a coffin appears and Niwemang, after promising to

get Mamo to the concert, dead or alive, abandons a dying Mamo who eventually climbs into the coffin to escape the bitter cold. When Niwemang returns with one of Mamo’s remaining sons, the old man is dead, and the film ends as Niewmang and the son drag the coffin, with Mamo in it, across the snowy landscape towards Iraq. Half Moon, like the

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rest of Ghobadi’s films, ends ambiguously. This fourth and final film, however, due to

its magical realist tropes and reliance on the supernatural, leaves even more questions unanswered and resolutions deferred.

Part One: A Kurdish Non-State Nationalist Cinema

It is possible, therefore, to separate Ghobadi’s body of work into two distinct

categories, with A Time for Drunken Horses and Turtles Can Fly offering emotionally

evocative stories of suffering children and Marooned in Iraq and Half Moon focusing on

musicians and utilizing an episodic narrative structure. The consistencies and distinctions

between the four films are significant in that they indicate the extent to which Ghobadi is,

in fact, delineating a coherent cinematic tradition. These two apparent tendencies in

Ghobadi’s oeuvre are also suggestive of the fundamental aesthetic and political purposes

of the filmmaker’s work, which constitute the subject of the following analysis. I articulate three primary purposes of Ghobadi’s non-state Kurdish national cinema, each of which interacts with the definition of a non-state nation stated above. First, Ghobadi’s films critique the existing nation-state system in the Middle East and foreground the continued marginalization and disenfranchisement of the Kurds within established nation-states. This cinematic critique of nation-stateism comprises one aspect of

Ghobadi’s attempt to initiate disjuncture in the epistemological validity and official status

of the nation state. Second, because Ghobadi is aware that the audience for his films is

largely an international audience, one of his primary objectives is to communicate a

particular version of Kurdistan and Kurdish people to a global community with little

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information about the culture, history, or politics of the region. Specifically, Ghobadi’s

Kurdistan is defined by a collective identity predicated upon the imagination of a “deep

horizontal comradeship” among insiders, the exclusion of the “other” who exists as a

perceived threat outside the community’s boundaries, and also by the assertion of cultural

and national sovereignty. Ghobadi is careful to posit a nation and a nationalism that is

not predicated on the reactionary politics of a patriarchal and repressive cultural atavism.

Third, Ghobadi engages the international community by representing stories that exude

pathos and create empathy in order to shape and manipulate global opinion about the

Kurdish humanitarian crisis and Kurdish sovereignty. Because it is only through

international recognition that Kurdistan can truly achieve self-determination, as defined

in Principle Five of the Declaration On Principles Of International Law Concerning

Friendly Relations And Co-Operation Among States In Accordance With The Charter Of

The United Nations (1970), communication and engagement with the international

community is of the utmost importance. These three purposes are not meant to be

exhaustive, but they demonstrate three of the primary ways that Ghobadi uses his films to

advocate a Kurdish nationalist agenda.

Purpose One: The Critique of Nation-Stateism

In order to assert the validity of a non-state nation’s claim to self-determination, it is first necessary to discount the adequacy of existing nation-state identifications and geopolitical configurations. Ghobadi goes about doing this in two primary ways in his body of work: first, by representing the political, economic, and cultural marginalization

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that Kurds are subjected to in the Middle Eastern nation-states in which they live.

Ghobadi limits his critique to the treatment of Kurds in Iran and Iraq, assumedly because

of his own Iranian identity, his geographical proximity to Iraq as a young child growing

up in Baneh, and his preference for setting and shooting films in the two once warring

nation states. It is also true that international interest in Iranian and Iraqi cultures and

politics in the post-911 era makes these sites of cinematic exploration particularly

appealing to a global audience, which, in turn, facilitates the wide distribution of

Ghobadi’s Kurdish nationalist message.107 The histories of Kurdish struggle and

resistance are dramatically different in each of the four nation states in which a majority

of the population resides, and Ghobadi’s distance from Turkish and Syrian Kurds is a

direct result of the divisiveness of a nation state system that has effectively used a

geopolitics of borders to keep the Kurds physically disconnected and politically divided.

Each of Ghobadi’s films contains a critique of the treatment of Kurds by Iranian and/or

Iraqi institutions and systems. In A Time For Drunken Horses, Ghobadi exposes the

economic and humanitarian effects of trade policies between Iran and Iraq that, during

the rule of Saddam Hussein, forced Kurds into dangerous and illegal cross-border

smuggling practices.108 In both Marooned in Iraq and Turtles Can Fly, Ghobadi

confronts the viewer with the horrific after-effects of Hussein’s state sponsored genocide

of the Kurds during the Anfal Campaign by unflinchingly representing the victims of

ethnic violence. In addition, Marooned In Iraq provides a critique of the patriarchal legal restrictions women in Iran continue to live under (whether Kurdish, Persian, Arabic, or

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from any of the other many ethnic groups that constitute Iran’s population), and Turtles

Can Fly foregrounds the continued decimation of the Iraqi Kurds by the landmines left behind by decades of wars fought on Kurdish soil.

However, it is Ghobadi’s most recent film, Half Moon, that offers the most direct and uncompromising portrait of the treatment of Kurds by the Iranian state apparatus, making it unsurprising that Ghobadi was unable, for the first time, to get his film past the

Iranian censors.109 Half Moon is the first of Ghobadi’s films that features a villain (in his previous films the forces that the protagonists struggle against are less defined or personified). In the film, the oppression of the Kurds is manifest in the character of a

Persian gendarme who, without provocation and despite Mamo’s official permission to travel, does everything in his power to keep Mamo and his sons from crossing the border into Iraq. The gendarme stops and searches Mamo’s bus for no apparent reason, destroys all the instruments on board, forces Mamo and his sons to speak Persian instead of

Kurdish, refuses to let a number of Mamo’s sons continue the journey because they lack unimportant official documentation, and, eventually, arrests Heshow. It is only through the assistance of a Kurdish officer that Heshow is eventually released, and it is also suggested that if it were not for the watchful eye of a uniformed Kurd, the family of musicians might very well have met a more dire fate. The character of the Persian gendarme, with his position as official representative of the Iranian regime, is clearly meant to represent the cultural insensitivity, cruelty, and mistreatment of the Iranian state towards the Kurds.

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The second way that Ghobadi critiques existing nation state geopolitics is through

his cinematic and narrative treatment of national borders. In an interview included on the

DVD extras for Marooned in Iraq, Ghobadi has the following to say about borders:

To me, border is a nonsensical, grim, and disgusting word. It’s something imposed on us. I always wish I had enough power to get rid of all the borders on the face of earth. In my films, I always show borders as the dirtiest things. It’s thanks to these borders the four Kurdish regions have always lived in deprivation. I don’t care if you are Iranian Kurd or Iraqi Kurd, Iranian Turk or Iranian Kurd. We are all the same.

For Ghobadi, borders, which represent the concrete manifestation of nation-stateism, are

responsible for the fragmentation and consequent exploitation of Kurdish land and

people. Borders are thematically significant in all of Ghobadi’s films, and in A Time for

Drunken Horses, Marooned in Iraq, and Half Moon crossing borders becomes a primary impetus for the narrative action. In his films, Ghobadi both laughs at and laments the influence of the national borders that disrupt the unity of Kurdistan while positing a cohesive Kurdish community and identity.

In Turtles Can Fly, for example, an early joke at the expense of a village elder helps establish Satellite’s character and indicates the tragic absurdity of national borders.

Satellite is trying to convince the elder to organize the villagers to purchase a satellite dish. The elder, concerned about the expense, responds: “But we are only 30 families.

Just 30!” Satellite points to a cluster of houses in the distance: “What about the houses on that side?” “Now they are in Turkey,” the elder rejoins. “They have separated us.

They won’t let them pay for the satellite.” Taking a dig at the old man, Satellite replies,

“Your wife was from that side. Now you’re strangers?” The old man simply restates,

“They have separated us.” This combination of derision and sadness is also apparent in a

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later border scene from Turtles Can Fly. The young blind boy Riga stands at the border

between Iraq and Turkey clutching the barbed wire and weeping. Satellite and his second

in command, Pashow, approach Riga. They hug and kiss the boy, act childish and silly,

and, laughing, try to cheer him up. In a moment indicative of Ghobadi’s ability to

confront viewers with the uncomfortable realities inevitable in life in a war zone, Pashow cradles his crippled leg in his arms and pretends to use it as a machine gun, “shooting” the Turkish soldiers patrolling over the border. When the Turks open fire, the boys grab

Riga and run away laughing. This scene, read literally, underscores Ghobadi’s treatment

of borders in his work as places that both disrupt the everyday lives of Kurds with their

official significance and are, essentially, absurd, the butt of a child’s joke and the inconsequential location of a scene of everyday life. On the other hand, if the scene is read symbolically, with Riga representing a traumatized and violated Kurdistan, the moment seems to suggest the violence of the border separating Kurds and preventing their national and psychic healing.110

A Time for Drunken Horses, Marooned in Iraq, and Half Moon all deal explicitly with crossing borders, and in the final scenes of both A Time for Drunken Horses and

Marooned in Iraq, characters stomp down the visible manifestation of the border separating Kurd from Kurd. Borders play an especially important role in A Time for

Drunken Horses, as Ayoub, like his late father before him, makes a living smuggling goods from one nation state to another. However, the border is not a benign source of work; it is fraught with violence and corruption. The smugglers risk their lives (they are attacked by Iraqi bombers policing the border region, for example), and they are often

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swindled out of payment by the men who profit off of the legally impermeable border

between Iran and Iraq (these men, of course, are Kurds themselves). In addition to the

border’s role in facilitating an economy based on dangerous smuggling, the border in A

Time for Drunken Horses functions as an impediment to Madi’s medical treatment. The surgery that Madi needs to stay alive is only available in Iraq, so the dangerous trip

across the border alone becomes Ayoub’s only option. Literally, the film offers an

indictment of a nation-state health system that is an obstacle to the health of the Kurdish

people. Symbolically, and if we read Madi as a representation of an ailing Kurdistan, the

film argues that the border is detrimental to the health of the Kurdish nation. Either way,

the ambiguous ending of the film and Madi’s story emphasizes both Ghobadi’s awareness

of the bleak state of Kurdish existence and his insistent optimism about the possibility of

a brighter future.

Ghobadi’s films both critique the borders of nation states and negotiate the

borders around Kurdish identity. Consider, for example, the following exchange from

Marooned in Iraq between Audeh, an Iranian Kurd who is leaving for Iraqi Kurdistan,

and one of his wives:

Wife: “Do as you like, but don’t come back with a non-Kurdish wife.” Audeh: “I swear I will not leave women alone until I have a son. But I will not come back with a foreigner.” Wife: “You’ll be in trouble if you do.”

This passage, in addition to providing commentary on Kurdish gender roles and family

structures, explicitly distinguishes between the domestic and the “foreign.” Audeh and

his wife, despite their marital disagreement, agree upon a Kurdish national identity

whereby an Iraqi Kurd is a cultural, social, and familial insider, while an Iranian non-

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Kurd would be defined as foreign – existing outside the borders of the nation despite

being located within the same nation state. The borders that Ghobadi establishes around

Kurdish identity are a part of his imagination of Kurdistan and will be discussed at

greater length in what follows. What is apparent, however, is that just as the policies and borders of nation states are exposed as detrimental to the human and political rights of

Kurdish people, a sense of Kurdish nationalism is maintained. This contradiction in

Ghobadi’s nationalism is not resolved in the films; the critique of the geo-politics of

borders is never reconciled with a cultural nationalism predicated on establishing borders

that define a sovereign Kurdistan. In fact, this contradiction may be fundamental to the struggle of the non-state nation, as in an age defined by strict borders and a politics of national citizenship, affiliating with one imagined community necessarily means disavowing the absolute legitimacy of another.

Purpose Two: Imagining Kurdistan and Kurdish Nationalism

The year 2000, which saw the release and international success of A Time for

Drunken Horses, was a good year for Kurds on film. The 2000 Cannes Film Festival featured not one but two films focusing on the Kurdish struggle for survival in the mountainous region between Iran and Iraq, and both films garnered awards. In addition to A Time for Drunken Horses, 2000 Cannes honored the film Blackboards, directed by

Samira Makhmabaf, daughter of acclaimed Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. 111

The film stars none other than Bahman Ghobadi and tells the story of two teachers

roaming the Kurdish countryside looking for pupils while dodging the bombers flying

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overhead. In an interview about the film and her motivation for approaching the Kurdish

experience, Makhmalbaf refers to her interest in the Kurds as a “homeless people”

(Blackboards). To say that the Kurds are “homeless” is not the same thing as to say that

they are stateless. Homelessness suggests rootlessness, lack of community, and an alienation from geographical surroundings. While Makmalbaf’s Blackboards seems to

suggest that this definition of homelessness constitutes the Kurdish experience,

Ghobadi’s films clearly offer a different perspective.112 In Ghobadi’s films, the Kurds

have a home in Kurdistan, a country that, while it may not be recognized by organizations such as the United Nations or by surrounding nation-states, is, nonetheless, a real, experiential home for the millions of people spread out across the region. To return to a passage cited earlier in this chapter, Ghobadi claims: “The Kurds are so scattered, but in my head, there is a country of the Kurds. There exists a virtual, a mental

country. Not a physical one” (Koch). I argue that Ghobadi’s cinematic Kurdish

nationalism functions to call the Kurdish nation into being within the representational

space of his films and then to communicate that vision of Kurdistan to an international

audience. Despite the fact that a Kurdish nation state is a “fabrication” or a “falsity,” it is

simultaneously imagined and created as a reality for Ghobadi, the viewer, and for

Ghobadi’s characters.

Both Half Moon and Marooned in Iraq demonstrate Ghobadi’s commitment to

the advancement of a cultural nationalist agenda. Cultural nationalism resists the

imposition of the dominant, oppressive culture and insists on the cultural autonomy of the

occupied and oppressed. For many artists, invested as they are in the culture industry and

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the continuation of indigenous expression, cultural nationalism is a primary interest. It is unsurprising, then, that Marooned in Iraq and Half Moon both emphasize the vitality and survival of Kurdish cultural traditions, especially the continued relevance of folk music, which permeates Ghobadi’s soundtracks with the sounds of Kurdistan. One way in which

Ghobadi evokes the Kurdish nation in these films is through the introduction of the

Kurdish tradition of goraani, which Ghobadi calls “the music of elation and celebration”

(Marooned in Iraq). In Marooned in Iraq, for example, traditional Kurdish instrumentation is emphasized. Mirza is a kamancheh player. Barat plays the sorna, and

Audeh plays the daff.113 In the orphans’ camp and at the high-jacked wedding of a couple introduced by an incompetent matchmaker, Mirza, Barat, and Audeh establish distinctly Kurdish communities through the collective singing of popular goraanis, and in these scenes Ghobadi often highlights the range of Kurdish people, from very young children to the elderly, participating in the cultural production. Ghobadi also represents the reproduction and continuation of these cultural traditions; Mirza teaches music in his village and Audeh’s greatest desire is to have a son to whom he can pass his musical art.

In fact, after Audeh determines to adopt two of the young boys in the orphans’ camp, he and Barat place a sorna and a daff, the instruments that they play, on the beds of the sleeping boys, indicating that the two young future musicians will continue the cultural work of the two brothers.

Ghobadi’s film itself is also engaged in the process of representing and preserving

Kurdish cultural traditions, clearing a space for the songs of Kurdistan within international film festivals and the global market. As Marooned in Iraq begins, for

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example, the soundtrack is dominated by the sounds of planes, assumedly bombers,

flying overhead and drowning out the faint sounds of a song playing on the radio, and

throughout the film the sounds of bombers and music battle for audio space. The film

ends with Mirza carrying Sanooreh over the border, and as Mirza walks out of the frame,

all that is left is the snowy landscape creating a white screen with the barbed wire border

slashing across it; the planes can be heard overhead and the sound of bombs is audible.

Then the screen goes black, the credits begin, and the music returns, punctuated by the

occasional sound of planes and gusts of wind. It is possible to read a progression in the

soundtrack. First, there is the obfuscation of music by the pain and violence of Kurdish

existence (the sounds of bombs and planes). Then there is music, which represents a

synthesis of Kurdish pain and Kurdish art and culture. This progression aptly reflects

Ghobadi’s belief that “[t]hat’s how we get by. Music and humor are the nutrients of our

bodies and souls.” Through this representation of the dual nature of Kurdish existence,

defined by immense pain and a vital culture, Ghobadi establishes a symbolic space

synonymous with Kurdistan within the parameters of his film.

Of Ghobadi’s films, Marooned in Iraq offers the most thorough and fully realized presentation of Kurdistan to the viewer. Through its stylized national imaginings,

Marooned in Iraq is able to represent the “deep horizontal comradeship” that exists between Kurds despite the vast distances, many borders, and political repressions that have historically divided Kurdish communities. The genre of this film, a road movie, makes it particularly adept at representing the geography and people of Kurdistan to the viewer, as Ghobadi offers an ethnographic tour of Kurdish landscapes and villages,

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travelers and refugees to his international audience. Condensing the space of the vast

Kurdish region that the men journey through, Mirza and his sons are recognized and

known all throughout the mountainous region, and knowledge of Mirza’s relationship

with Hanareh consistently precedes him. In this way, the expansive Kurdish countryside

is represented as a tight knit community – as a “deep horizontal comradeship.” Within the cinematic space that Ghobadi creates in Marooned in Iraq, Kurdistan is bound and unified as a coherent and cohesive geographic and cultural entity.

In addition to using the ethnographic potential of film to introduce viewers to a unified Kurdistan, Marooned in Iraq makes extensive use of two symbolic tropes that have historically been used in the service of representing the nation. One of these symbolic tropes conflates the Kurdish family and the Kurdish nation, allowing Ghobadi to represent the reconstitution and re-imagination of the Kurdish family as a process of national regeneration and continuation into the future. Just as Ghobadi’s film creatively represents a unified and whole Kurdistan, Ghobadi’s characters must learn to imagine new formulations of family within the context of a disrupted land and history. When the film begins, Barat is unmarried and living at a distance from his father and brother, Mirza has lost Hanareh and stopped performing, and Audeh has seven wives but is unsatisfied because he has eleven daughters and no sons. Yet each of the protagonists, throughout the course of the film, will come to re-imagine family in a creative way and, through that imagining, will further Ghobadi’s representation of Kurdistan and Kurdish nationalism.

Although Mirza, Barat, and Audeh’s quest for Hanareh and, therefore, Kurdistan, is incomplete, the film ends with Barat taking a wife, Audeh adopting two sons, and Mirza

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stomping down the barbed wire border between Iran and Iraq with a new “daughter,”

Sanooreh, in his arms. Through such representations, Marooned in Iraq conveys the reconstitution of the Kurdish family as a process of national regeneration.

Each of the familial reconstitutions within the film has an important role in

defining the Kurdistan that Ghobadi represents. Both Barat and Audeh establish families

that, at least to some extent, challenge the patriarchal oppressions of traditional Kurdish

unions – Barat accepting the demand for a public voice made by the aptly named

“woman with the voice” and Audeh finding sons to pass on his musical legacy to without

marrying an eighth wife. Ghobadi’s Kurdistan, therefore, is one in which the patriarchal

structures of oppression are questioned and subverted, a point that will be taken up at

greater length below. Mirza, meanwhile, is unable to retrieve the disfigured Kurdish

nation that Hanareh represents, yet he is able to destroy the border that separates Iranian

and Iraqi Kurds. Sanooreh is the key to Ghobadi’s optimism, the child of a new nation

not bound by the borders that separate Kurds from one another. The film ends with the

symbolic destruction of the divisions between Kurdish territories and establishes a new

imagined community of a unified family and a unified Kurdistan.

A Time for Drunken Horses, Turtles Can Fly, and Half Moon also represent

cinematic attempts to creatively imagine and represent a unified Kurdistan through the

trope of the family. A Time for Drunken Horses is Ghobadi’s least nationalistic film, but

it is still possible to see Ayoub’s young orphan family as a symbolic representation of a

Kurdish nation struggling to survive. Like the Kurds, Ayoub and his siblings struggle

alone, rebuffed in their attempts to secure assistance from either their Iranian Kurdish

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uncle/guardian or the Iraqi Kurdish family that Rojine marries into with the hope of

securing health care for Madi. At the end of the film, the fate of the children, Ayoub and

Madi in particular, is left ambiguous, as Ayoub tramples the border into Iraq with Madi

on his back. In this final scene, Ghobadi seems to symbolically suggest that the fate of

Kurdistan is unforeseeable and tenuous. This final moment, which is so apparently

similar to the final scene of Marooned in Iraq, does not express the same nationalist optimism implicit in Ghobadi’s second film. Unlike Mirza, who returns to Iran with

Sanooreh, the hope for a new Kurdish future, Ayoub and Madi are heading into the unknown.

Turtles Can Fly offers a compromise between the painful ambiguity of Ghobadi’s first film and the optimistic nationalism of Marooned in Iraq. Turtles Can Fly depicts a gang of orphan children who establish their “own small nation” that serves as a metonymic representation of Kurdistan (“Turtles Can Fly Trailer”). Like Kurdistan, the children are scarred and traumatized; yet, above all, they are survivors, many of whom, under Satellite’s tutelage, learn to laugh in the face of their own painful existence. Like

Ghobadi, who is known for approaching the bleak life of the Kurds through a narrative style saturated with dark humor and irony, Satellite and his followers joke, play, and live out their childhoods in the minefields and the weapons markets of Iraqi Kurdistan. By the end of the film, Satellite’s childhood and his sense of play have been vanquished by

Agrin’s death, the arrival of the Americans, and a crippling landmine blast, but he, and by extension the Kurds, has learned a valuable lesson about autonomy that will be discussed at greater length below. An alternative and more symbolically complex version of the

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Kurdish nation is represented by Agrin, Hengov, and Riga’s family unit. Within the

context of the film, Agrin is associated with the Kurdish past (she repeatedly relives her rape by Iraqi forces), Hengov’s prophetic powers connect him to the future, and Riga embodies the present (as a young child, he indicates the future, but he is killed before that

future is actualized precisely because he represents a material reminder of the horrors of

the past). By the end of the film, only Hengov, the mysterious yet compassionate

prophet, is left alive, indicating continuation and the resiliency of a Kurdish future.

Like Turtles Can Fly, Half Moon’s representation of a Kurdish family that serves

as a synecdoche for the Kurdish nation blends Ghobadi’s national optimism with a

realization of the bleak reality of Kurdish existence. Mamo and his sons, who embody

the culture of Kurdistan through their maintenance of the traditional Kurdish goraanis and

their geographically and demographically dispersed identities, begin the film as the

harbingers of a new national hope – the hope of a cross border Kurdish revival in the

post-Saddam age. However, by the end of the film, Mamo has died, many of his sons

have returned home either by choice or because of the power exercised upon them by

Iranian authorities, and the Kurdish cultural revival that the film promises has been, at

best, deferred. However, as is often the case in Ghobadi’s films, this oppressive

pessimism is thrown into relief when read against a symbolic interpretation of the film.

Specifically, the title character of the film, Niwemang, comes to embody Ghobadi’s

Kurdish national optimism, as the ambiguous ending of the film suggests that she will be

the character who, despite Mamo’s death, brings the deceased musician and his dream of

Kurdish revivalism to the Iraqi Kurds. Niwemang, before she magically materializes and

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is dropped on top of the musicians’ bus (significantly at a crossroads between Iran and

Iraq), is the manifestation of what Mamo refers to as a “celestial voice,” singing so

beautifully at the funeral of one of Mamo’s deceased musician friends that the man

briefly comes back to life before dying again. About this celestial voice, Mamo says, “[it is] a voice that was lost all those years. A voice that was killed. A voice that was extinct.” The use of past tense is extremely important in this passage, as Mamo (and

Ghobadi) seem to be clearly suggesting that Niwemang’s voice, symbolically the voice of the Kurdish people, has been resurrected. While Mamo, the voice of an old Kurdistan, has died, the celestial voice of a new Kurdistan is being born to, literally and symbolically, carry the relics of an antiquated and repressed order into the future.

As is evident from this reading of Half Moon, as well as the centrality of the family and women in Ghobadi’s first three films (especially the characters of Hanareh,

Sanooreh, and Agrin), the Kurdish nation is also imagined through the mobilization of a woman as nation trope. But what are the effects of such gendered nationalist imaginings?

Anti-colonial nationalism and feminism have had a long and tumultuous relationship. In

principle, the emancipatory projects of the two factions, both of which are, ostensibly,

focused on overturning a dominant and oppressive order in the interest of sovereignty and

equal rights, should make anti-colonial nationalists and feminists perfect allies.

However, history has demonstrated that this is not the case. Many white, Western

feminists have been, and continue to be, unsupportive of or downright hostile to global

manifestations of anti-colonial nationalism (particularly in cases where the nationalism is

tied to a fundamentalism or traditionalism). On the other hand, many anti-colonial

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nationalist movements, and the postcolonial governments that they establish, have

continued to oppress and limit the lives of the very same women who fought beside them for independence.114 In addition, within the context of many nationalist movements,

women have primarily served as mere gendered images in an arsenal of politically

mobilizing symbols. As Ania Loomba suggests in Colonialism/Postcolonialism: “[a]nti-

colonial or nationalist movements have used the image of the Nation-as-Mother to create

their own lineage, and also to limit and control the activity of women within the imagined

community” (216). Ghobadi participates in this controversial nationalist tradition that

metonymically associates native women with the nation. Yet, I argue that Ghobadi’s

nationalism also explicitly challenges the oppressive ramifications of this patriarchal

model and posits a feminist response to the tradition of masculine nationalism.

In an interview about Marooned in Iraq included in the DVD extras, Ghobadi

discusses the central trope of the woman as nation:

[a]s the name of my homeland Iran is a woman’s name, I have always thought of Kurdistan as a woman, a mother as well. The story of Hanareh, in fact, is the story of Kurdistan. It’s the story of all Kurdistan. When we get to where Hanareh is supposed to be, there is no Hanareh. Kurdistan has not been realized yet. There is only Hanareh’s child who is going to grow up and, in that, there is a promise of a brighter future for us as Kurds. (Marooned in Iraq)

As Ghobadi suggests, Hanareh is symbolic of the scarred and illusive Kurdistan of the present, the Kurdistan that Mirza and his sons set out to find, while Sanooreh is representative of the hope for the future and Ghobadi’s national optimism, which is what the protagonists of the film receive. In the context of Ghobadi’s narrative, it is especially significant that woman and nation are aligned, as women are consistently represented as

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survivors in the film, from the elderly refugee woman Daheh Amin to the young and

defiant “woman with the voice.” The strength and resiliency of Kurdish women is

extended to Kurdistan as a whole through their symbolic association with the nation.

Hanareh and Sanooreh are not the only women in Marooned in Iraq with

symbolic nationalist value. In an important scene early in the film, Ghobadi portrays a

group of village women making khesht, or earthen bricks, a job that would not

traditionally be performed by Kurdish women. The impact of the scene is enunciated by

the driving, percussive Kurdish music in the background, and the entire process is

choreographed as a dance. The significance of this central scene is its evocative portrayal

of women as, quite literally, constructing the nation out of the earth. The women and

young girls, doing the traditional men’s work of making khesht, are transforming earth

into the building blocks of their Kurdish village while two children fly a kite that looks

unmistakably like a flag flapping in the breeze against a perfectly blue sky. The gendered

nationalist message in this scene is clear.115

However, as Janet Klein points out, “[i]n the Kurdish case, as with many other

contemporary nationalist movements, the ‘woman question’ was not so much about and

by women themselves, but was, rather, a topic whose importance was determined mostly by men, and was a symbol for other issues – a battlefield on which struggles over broader

questions facing society were fought” (26). Ghobadi’s invocation of the woman as nation

trope raises potential questions about patriarchal nationalism for feminist critics.

However, Ghobadi does not only represent women in the film symbolically, but also

portrays a Kurdish feminist voice that is prevalent throughout the film and is articulated

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by three primary characters: Hanareh, “the woman with the voice,” and Rojan, who is a teacher at the orphans’ camp. It is suggested in the film that Hanareh left Iran after the

1979 Islamic revolution and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini, which precipitated the ban on women singing in public, and Ghobadi has explicitly stated as much in interviews.

Hanareh, therefore, does not operate only as a gendered symbol in the film, but as a site

of feminist critique of Islamist restrictions on women’s public role in Iran. Similarly, the

elusive “woman with the voice” who Barat falls in love with when he overhears her

singing, already a subversive act, tells Barat she will marry him only if he teaches her to

sing and allows her to sing in public – a demand that Barat eventually submits to. Rojan

offers a feminist critique of Audeh’s patriarchal ideas about the family, and she

eventually persuades him to take home two adopted sons instead of an eighth wife. She

tells Audeh, “You’re a joke, getting married to seven wives.” And while Rojan does

eventually negotiate with Audeh within the confines of the patriarchal family structure

that places value on a son, she also suggests that if Audeh wants to pass his art on to one

of his offspring, “why not teach your daughters?”

Neither A Time for Drunken Horses nor Turtles Can Fly, with their almost

exclusive focus on children, include any characters that would be considered women in

most contexts, yet both films present feminist critiques that deal with explicitly gendered

issues negotiated by Kurdish girls and young women and include female characters that

have central roles in defining the trajectory of the plot. In A Time for Drunken Horses,

both Amaneh and Rojine are confined by and fall victim to the realities of the Kurdish

patriarchal family structure. In a scene about halfway through the film, Amaneh, a

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character who is defined by her sweetness, adventurous spirit, and unwavering loyalty to her family, goes, without permission, to visit her father’s grave. When Ayoub, the de facto head of the household of orphans, finds her at the gravesite, he responds with a quick smack to Amaneh’s jaw. Amaneh is stunned, but the viewer is not. Ayoub, who has been forced into an adult, masculine role that he is unprepared to assume at such an early age, is unable to dispatch his paternal duties with kindness and restraint, and, in light of the harsh conditions of Ayoub’s life, the viewer readily excuses the boy for his actions and instead condemns the system that produces such violence. Similarly, Rojine, the oldest sister in the family, ends up married at a young age to a man she does not love based on the false promises of an arranged marriage brokered without the involvement of the bride’s parents. Both of these young women, Ghobadi suggests, are doubly oppressed; first, by a global order that exploits Kurdish people, and, second, by an indigenous family system based on patriarchal privilege.

Nonetheless, there are indications in the film of a potential alternative for

Amaneh. After Ayoub is forced to quit school in order to provide for his family, Amaneh stays on and continues her education. When Ayoub begins to make money from his smuggling enterprise, he buys Amaneh black market workbooks so that he can tutor her in math and writing in the evenings. Amaneh is also granted a degree of power within the context of the narrative through her role as a voice over narrator. As the film begins,

Ghobadi presents his viewer with a somewhat disorienting opening scene. There is a black screen, and a man’s voice, retrospectively associated not with a character in the

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diegesis, but with the filmmaker himself, questions Amaneh about her family and her situation. The following is the entirety of their exchange:

VOICE. What’s your name? AMANEH. Amaneh VOICE. How old are you? AMANEH. I’m younger than Madi VOICE. Who’s Madi? AMANEH. My brother. He’s a cripple. He’s always ill. That’s him there. He’s the one in the yellow jacket. Today we took him to the doctor at the hospital. VOICE. What does your dad do? AMANEH. He’s a smuggler. He takes goods to Iraq on our mule and brings goods back. VOICE. Do you have a mother? AMANEH. No, she died, giving birth to my little sister. Rojine’s our mother now. VOICE. Who’s Rojine? AMANEH. She’s my sister…my elder sister. VOICE. Is Rojine here? AMANEH. No, she’s at home looking after my little sister. That’s Ayoub over there. My big brother. VOICE. How many? AMANEH. Three sisters, two brothers. VOICE. What are you up to? [Cut from the black screen to a close up on a child’s hands wrapping packets and then a pan to children’s faces as they wrap glasses and other fragile objects] AMANEH. We’re wrapping up packets in newspaper to protect them. Me and Ayoub and other village kids. We come here almost all the time. VOICE. Where’s your village? AMANEH. It’s far from here, on the border with Iraq. [The sounds of marketplace become increasingly audible.]

I reproduce this entire exchange to emphasize the significant narrative power that

Ghobadi grants his young, female protagonist. Amaneh, in cahoots with the ever powerful “voice of the filmmaker,” provides the viewer with backstory, sets up the film’s central conflicts, offers necessary explanation of character and setting, and begins to establish the thematic and political stakes of the narrative. As a result of this narrative intimacy between Amaneh and the viewer, the viewer identifies with the young girl –

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experiencing much of the action of the film from her perspective. Even as the film

progresses and Ayoub’s struggle becomes the focus of the plot, Amaneh remains the

perspectival and emotional center of the film. Amaneh, through Ghobadi’s skillful

manipulation of identification and empathy, becomes more fully “human,” and her status

as either victim or symbol is complicated by the viewer’s intimate relationship with her

as a character.

Turtles Can Fly’s Agrin is certainly the most tragic female character in Ghobadi’s

first three films. Throughout the film, Agrin accumulates all the political trauma and

national symbolism Ghobadi can heap upon her, and her response – infanticide and suicide – is both symbolically efficacious and conforms in a number of ways to traditional gendered assumptions about Third World women. While the film should be applauded for its treatment of the important issue of sexual violence against women in times of war and its effects, feminist critics such as Ania Loomba and Janet Klein, both quoted above, have reason to be concerned about Agrin’s role as symbol for a scarred and victimized Kurdistan. Like Amaneh, Agrin plays an important narrative role, as her arrival in the village and eventual suicide structure the film and propel the plot.

However, unlike Amaneh, the viewer is never invited to identify with Agrin, and her primary function in the story seems to be to instigate Satellite’s growth and increasing sense of cynicism.

On the one hand, this problematic gendered representation of Amaneh may

suggest that Ghobadi, like so many artists before him, is guilty of uncritically

reproducing patriarchal discourses about women in order to further a nationalist agenda.

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On the other hand, it should also be noted that many young, Kurdish girls like Agrin

struggle with the twin traumas of war and sexual abuse, and their stories deserve to be

told, whether they conform to gendered expectations or not. In reality, Ghobadi’s representation of Agrin can probably be attributed to some combination of these two

factors.

Purpose Three: Engaging the International

While Turtles Can Fly’s treatment of gender may leave something to be desired,

the film’s approach to the interrelated questions of national autonomy and

humanitarianism is sophisticated and warrants its own discussion. Turtles Can Fly must

strike a delicate balance. On the one hand, the film argues that external intervention does

little to help the Kurds – nation-states with their military forces invade, leaders rise and

fall, political battles are fought, but for the Kurds, nothing changes. As Ghobadi states in

an interview about the film, “Once the film is over, you realise that the past is bitter and

the present is bitter and you should look up to no one but yourself for the future.

Powerful foreigners have no intention to create a heaven for us. As far as they’re

concerned, they are exploiting us to have wonderful places they can enjoy” (“Turtles Can

Fly Press Kit”). On the other hand, the film is clearly invested in initiating awareness

about and empathy for the plight of the Kurdish people, and, as such, it serves as a call

for humanitarianism – a form of interventionism. At first glance, these two intentions

seem at odds; to refute the value of external intervention and then hope for humanitarian

aid seems a contradiction of terms. Ghobadi’s strategy seems to be to both critique and

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acknowledge the relative powerlessness of the Kurds in the global arena, as it both enables the kind of politics that have led to the Kurd’s ongoing oppression and necessitates humanitarian assistance.

Ghobadi’s critique of interventionism in the film is depicted through the character

Satellite and his metamorphosis from an advocate of U.S. politics and popular culture to an anti-U.S. cynic. Throughout the majority of the film, Satellite delights in all things

American, which, to him, means “Titanic, Washington, San Francisco, Bruce Lee, and

[French soccer star] Zinedine Zidane.” This list indicates not only Satellite’s zeal for all things “American,” but his naïveté. “Titanic, Washington, San Francisco” suggests the

young boys infatuation with an iconic, big America (a huge Hollywood blockbuster, the

national capitol, and the image of the Golden Gate Bridge), while “Bruce Lee, and

Zinedine Zidane” demonstrate his distance from that iconic America; Satellite has

mistaken global celebrity with “American-ness,” and his association of an Asian and a

French-Algerian star with the United States proves his inability to comprehend and define

the object of his affection (in true Ghobadi style, Satellite’s inability is both comic and

tragic).116

Satellite also peppers his speech with English words and phrases, and he is able to

consolidate his power among the local children by convincing them that one of the prime

buyers for their recovered mines is an American U.N. worker who speaks no Kurdish (the

man is actually another Kurd). Satellite’s limited English knowledge also comes in

handy when the village elders need someone to translate American news footage in order

to get an update on the coming war, though his translation is hardly accurate (Bush’s

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declaration that “If we really had to, we probably could solve the problem of Saddam

Hussein by ourselves – invade, occupy, rebuild” is translated as “it’s going to rain”).

However, by the end of the film, Satellite has changed, and the final scene depicts his rejection of his former pro-American sentiments. Satellite and his “right hand man”

Pashow stand by the side of the road as an American military convoy passes. As Satellite turns his back to the soldiers, a perplexed Pashow, unaware of the change in Satellite, exclaims: “Look! Didn’t you want to see the Americans?” Satellite doesn’t respond and slowly walks off screen with Pashow following.

A number of things happen in Turtles Can Fly explaining the change in Satellite’s

perspective about the role of the United States and other outside interventionist forces in

Iraqi Kurdistan. One reason for Satellite’s conversion is that he is maimed by a live mine

while in the process of saving the blind boy, Riga, who has wandered into a minefield unattended. One of the village elders, returning Satellite to his makeshift home (which is, actually, just the shell of an abandoned tank), chides the boy: “You kept saying USA,

USA, until you fell on a USA mine.” This reference to a “USA mine” is one of many

throughout the film (early on, Satellite encourages his gang to prioritize USA mines for

collection since, he says, they are of the highest quality) and is Ghobadi’s way of

confronting an American audience with his belief that U.S. foreign policy must

acknowledge its responsibility for the limbless orphans that populate the landscape of

Turtles Can Fly.117 Perhaps most important to Satellite’s evolution is the death of Agrin.

While the viewer is not expected to assume that young boy fully comprehends the

complex history of U.S.-Iraqi relations that Ghobadi’s film argues is partially responsible

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for Agrin’s suicide118, Agrin’s death seems to supply him with a more immediate and

human justification for his cynicism. For Satellite, the trauma of Agrin’s life and death

stands in stark contrast to the triviality of the U.S. invasion, which amounts to little more

than a massive leafleting campaign and “[t]he children…watching the prohibited

channels with the American soldiers.” In Turtles Can Fly, Ghobadi suggests that U.S.

involvement in Kurdistan specifically, and international intervention in the region more generally, has done much more harm than good, and he parodies American interventionism through the content of the fliers dropped on the village as the invasion begins. As the leaflets fall from the sky, Satellite reads the message aloud in voiceover.

It is unclear whether he is faithfully reproducing what is written or inventing the content himself, but, either way, the satirical jab is clearly at the U.S.: “Over here it is written:

It’s the end of injustice, misfortune and hardship. We are your best friends and brothers.

Those against us are our enemies. We will make this country a paradise. We are here to take away your sorrows. We are the best in the world.”

Despite Turtles Can Fly’s condemnation of the simultaneous ineffectiveness and potential danger of interventionism, part of the effect of the film is to initiate awareness and humanitarian action in viewers who are part of the very system the film critiques.

The following quotation, taken from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)’s discussion board, illustrates the desire to engage in humanitarian intervention that defines some viewers’ experience with the film:

I understand that the likelihood of my question being answered here is slim to none, but I'm at a loss about where else to go. Does anyone have any contact information for anyone involved in the production of this film? After seeing the movie and reading up on it to find out that the actors were not actors at all, but

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actual refugee children, I haven't been able to sleep. I know that there are thousands of refugees in Iraq, but after seeing this movie I have to know that these kids are ok. Does anyone think that since they were in the film something was done to help them? Anything at all? I don't know, it's probably stupid, I just can't be ok with knowing that that's happening and I can't do anything to help. (dani- 56)

Five other concerned viewers responded to this thread, each expressing similar concerns and a desire to act.119 This empathetic, interventionist impulse is both humane and understandable; the film is clearly meant to stir such emotional responses in its viewers and to initiate reflection about the role of the international community in the ongoing oppression of the Kurds.

However, the narrative evocation of empathy with the intention of initiating some kind of political or social activism and change can have dangerous consequences and certainly has a dangerous history. And the implications of this activist narrative empathy are especially vexing because anti-interventionism is at the heart of Ghobadi’s film. As

literary scholar Suzanne Keen notes in her study of empathy and the novel:

To put it baldly, how can we know that readers’ passionate involvement with fictional others didn’t inspire a desire to collect and control people they did not personally know? Or, perhaps, closer to the bone, might not novel reading enable individuals living on incomes from the investment funds that profited from the slave trade to feel moral indignation on behalf of imaginary readers brought near by fiction, while indirectly exploiting the suffering of real people far away? (xx)

In Ghobadi’s case, might not watching a film about the suffering of limbless, abused

Kurdish children enable viewers who profit off the imperialist economic policies that

have shaped Mid-East politics to feel moral indignation and empathy on behalf of

fictional characters while indirectly supporting the continued exploitation of real Kurdish

resources and people? If viewers like those posting on IMDb are to be commended for

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their empathetic response to the suffering of Ghobadi’s young actors, should they also be

condemned for not more explicitly recognizing that their own privilege may be dependent

on the continued suffering of boys like Satellite and girls like Agrin?

Keen attempts to theorize these conflicting political ramifications of empathetic

responses, reflecting:

I regard human empathy as a precious quality of our social natures. Despite the disrepute of generalizations about universal human traits among postcolonial and feminist theorists, I observe that women writers and novelists from around the world endorse the notion of shared human emotion when they overtly call upon their readers’ empathy. I sympathize with their ambition, while remaining skeptical about consequences beyond immediate feeling responses. (vii-ix)

While Keen’s argument focuses on international women writers, her concerns and claims are certainly also applicable to male filmmakers from around the globe attempting to engage viewers’ empathy in order to achieve aesthetic, political, and affective responses.

Many filmmakers who, like Ghobadi, are acutely aware of the flaws and dangers inherent in a universalizing humanism predicated on the erasure of difference and specificity still engage their international audience’s empathy strategically in order to communicate and persuade across national and cultural boundaries. For a non-state filmmaker like

Ghobadi, a bid for international empathy that might initiate humanitarian and political intervention is crucial, as there is no recognized Kurdish national government to speak for the people, and claims to nation-state status must be acknowledged and legitimized by the international community. The contradiction between Ghobadi’s non-interventionist claim to sovereignty and self-determination and the implacable necessity of using all available rhetorical means, from the pedagogical to the empathetic, to create understanding and compel political action in the international community is implicit in

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the United Nation’s principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, discussed earlier in this chapter. The charter is explicit that “all peoples have the right freely to determine, without external interference, their political status and to pursue their economic, social and cultural development,” but its claim that “every State has the duty to respect this right in accordance with the provisions of the Charter” rings a little hollow in light of the vicious struggles over sovereignty that continue to play out around the world.

We can better understand the consequences of Ghobadi’s attempts to strategically negotiate this contradiction, evident in the responses of the IMDb posters, by turning again to Keen. Keen distinguishes between three different types of strategic empathy in

Empathy and the Novel: bounded strategic empathy (“operates within an in-group, stemming from experiences of mutuality and leading to feeling with familiar others”); broadcast strategic empathy (“calls upon every reader to feel with members of a group, by emphasizing common vulnerabilities and hopes through universalizing representations”); and ambassadorial strategic empathy (“addresses chosen others with the aim of cultivating their empathy for the in-group, often to a specific end”) (xiv).

Only broadcast and ambassadorial strategic empathy are relevant to our discussion of

Ghobadi’s cinematic communication with an international audience. If Ghobadi’s films are viewed through the lens of broadcast strategic empathy, we then encounter precisely the anxiety Keen points to in her critiques of the political effects of empathy and the problematic interventionism potentially at play in the humanitarian responses from IMDb viewers. Empathizing through universalized commonality, for example, might produce a

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viewer response to Turtles Can Fly that could be logically reduced to explain the reaction

of the IMDb posters as follows: Satellite, Agrin, and the other children suffer. They are

not unlike my children, with human hopes and dreams. My child could also suffer. The suffering of children is unjust, and, as a result, I should do something about the fact that

children suffer in other countries. This response fosters humanitarian intervention but

does little to acknowledge the complex and politically important issues of Kurdish

national sovereignty and continued imperialist exploitation in the region.

On the other hand, if Ghobadi’s films are viewed through the lens of

ambassadorial strategic empathy, the critical questions revolve around the “chosen others,” the “in-group,” and the “specific end” articulated in Keen’s definition, and

attention to each of these categories functions to foreclose universalist responses to the

film. The “chosen others” Ghobadi addresses are an international audience defined by their likely affinity for art house films and global cinema as well as their interest in contemporary current events in the Middle East (I discuss these characteristics of

Ghobadi’s audience and his manipulation of their expectations at greater length below).

There may additionally be an assumption that there is some preexisting political agreement between the filmmaker and his target audience that would facilitate an empathetic response. The “in-group” Ghobadi presents as an empathetic object is, literally, Kurdish children and, symbolically, the Kurdish nation. Satellite, Agrin, and the other children are referred to as a “tribe of orphans building their own small nation any way they can” in the trailer and, as I discussed above, a symbolic reading of the children as representations of various visions of a Kurdish nation is evident. The “specific end”

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that Ghobadi is attempting to achieve through his strategic ambassadorial empathy, as

I’ve argued throughout this chapter, is to make a case for Kurdish sovereignty and self- determination and, in the specific case of Turtles Can Fly, to critique U.S. intervention in

Iraq. Therefore, a viewer responding through a paradigm of ambassadorial empathy to

Ghobadi’s film might have a reaction such as the following: This director is evoking an

empathetic response from me, a member of a global community of serious film viewers

engaged in international politics. The objects of my empathy are young Kurdish children

who suffer and whose pain and triumphs mirror the pain and triumphs of the Kurdish

nation. The director is asking me to empathize with this object in order to advocate a

Kurdish nationalist and anti-interventionist agenda. There is absolutely no guarantee

that a viewer whose empathetic response to the film is structured this way will, as a

result, begin to petition her national government to put pressure on Middle Eastern nation

states to support Kurdish sovereignty or to protest the ongoing war in Iraq, but such a

response leaves this option open while avoiding the pitfalls of universalizing empathy

discussed above.

This is not to say that the fairly benign reactions of a small sample of IMDb members posting responses to a film constitutes evidence that Ghobadi’s film has been universally misread or his audience politically naïve. It simply indicates the difficult balance that Ghobadi must strike between evoking empathy to achieve specific political and cultural ends and emphasizing a universal humanity that breeds continued intervention cloaked as liberal compassion and charity. One way that Ghobadi attempts

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to strike this balance and negotiate his difficult rhetorical and narrative situation is by working towards the establishment of a Kurdish non-state national cinema that communicates to a global audience.

Part Two: Non-State Cinema in the International Market

Imagine yourself walking into the dark aisles of a small art house cinema to see the latest foreign film that has been getting rave reviews in all the major papers. As you sit down, the previews begin. Haunting, exotic music begins to play, and the sound of planes is barely audible. As you look up at the screen, you see a moon set against a pitch black sky. In onscreen text: “From the acclaimed director of A Time for Drunken Horses.

Somewhere on the border between Iran and Iraq.” The scene then cuts to reveal a beautiful and snow covered mountain in the distance. This is followed by a number of images of a vast and rugged countryside. The camera cuts to hands sifting dirt through a sieve and then to women, dressed in clothes that look distinctly native, rural, and foreign, then on to children standing on a dirt wall. The standard preview voice over begins:

In a land of exquisite beauty, in a time of extreme danger, an ordinary man is about to embark on an extraordinary journey. His search for the woman he loves will take him across the border into a war zone. Amid the chaos of battle, past despair and destruction, sometimes a simple journey can take you to a place where hope is eternal.

As the voice over narrates, the camera cuts between a number of different images – long shots of mountainous landscapes and “primitive” looking villages, men in traditional dress, some with guns, women wearing hijab or chador120, human figures set against desolate snowy backdrops, indicating harshness and inhospitability. The voice over

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progresses, and the images become increasingly brutal, with scenes of war, bombs

falling, people in distress, refugee camps, the digging of mass graves, and women

mourning. As the voice over narrator states “…sometimes a simple journey, can take you

to a place where hope is eternal,” the tone of the scenes shifts; the screen is painted with

light colors and there are images of children laughing. The music then changes abruptly

from the ambient, haunting music of the previous scenes to rhythmic, distinctly Middle

Eastern folk music, and images of musical performance and groups of joyful people flash

across the screen interposed with onscreen text reading ““The sounds of a people. The

spirit of a culture. The soul of a nation.” This final onscreen text is followed by the

standard listing of awards received by the film (“Award Winner Cannes Film Festival.

Award Winner Chicago Film Festival. Award Winner Sao Paulo Film Festival. Award

Winner Buenos Aires Human Rights Film Festival”). After this, the camera focuses on

several close-ups of children’s faces and a long shot of a group of children raising their

arms into the air as if in victory, and then the final onscreen text: “Marooned in Iraq. A

film by Bahman Ghobadi” (Marooned in Iraq). After a brief pause, the next preview

begins.

What does this preview tell viewers about Ghobadi’s film, and what kinds of

assumptions about Marooned in Iraq does it initiate? The preview demonstrates to the viewer that Marooned in Iraq will, in many ways, conform to certain expectations about

“Third World” film: the ethnographic element is apparent in the costuming and in scenes

of cultural performance, the narrative engages moments of pain and hope, and a culture

definitely marked as “foreign” or “other” is represented for an outsider audience. The

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preview also appeals to the audience’s presumed commitment to films that have been validated by the international film festival circuit, with Cannes signifying the highest

level of critical approval.121 In addition, viewers with even limited knowledge about

international film are likely to assume the movie is Iranian based on the setting “on the

border between Iran and Iraq,” as Iraq has no national film industry to compare to Iran’s

formidable cinematic output and reputation. However, perhaps more immediate in the

minds of viewers watching the film when it was released in 2002 would have been

questions about the film’s political affiliations and relationship to current events.122 In

2002, with the Second Gulf War looming on the horizon and the air still reverberating with Bush’s pronouncement of an “Axis of Evil,” including both Iraq and Iran as well as

North Korea, the preview reads like the day’s headlines. The preview makes it very clear to viewers that the film is about “a people,” “a culture,” and “a nation” under attack and struggling for survival in the throes of war and chaos. Yet it refuses to be specific. What people/culture/nation are we watching in the preview? What war is being fought? Who is responsible for the pain evident in the scenes of violence and mourning? And how might the answer to these questions enlighten global understanding of the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East? These are politically loaded questions, and each viewer’s interpretation of them, is likely based on her knowledge about and individual response to current events. Some might assume, for instance, that the bombings in the preview suggest that the film takes place during the first Gulf War; the bombs then become

American bombs, devastating an Iraqi civilian population. Others might argue that the film is Iranian and that its national origin is evidence that the war is the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq

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War; the victims are the Iranians subjected to the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.123 Either

way, the film seems to have considerable contemporary relevance to an international

audience watching closely to see how things develop in a volatile region and among so- called “rogue states.” However, based on the preview alone, it is entirely unlikely that anyone would assume that Marooned in Iraq is a Kurdish film about the Kurdish people/culture/nation.

The Marooned in Iraq trailer indicates the complexities of successfully marketing a non-state cinema in the early stages of its inception; in order to appeal to a potential audience of international film “buffs,” a number of strategic negotiations are enacted in

order to make visible a cinema and a people relegated to the margins by nation-stateism

and neo-imperial practices that thrive on the continued silent exploitation of a group

without recognition or voice in the international forum. The film is associated with both

an established national cinematic tradition and an international contemporary political

situation in order to garner interest and a degree of audience familiarity that is necessary

in order to assure that the film is as widely viewed as possible - and that the film is

widely viewed is crucial to Ghobadi’s cinematic goal of raising awareness for the

national struggle of the Kurds and their continued oppression. This is perhaps most

evident in the fact that the film’s original title was changed in the context of international

circulation. The film’s Persian title, Avazhaye Sarzamine Madariyam, which translates as

The Songs of My Mother’s Land was changed to Marooned in Iraq when it was released internationally. While the Persian language title clearly references the film’s central thematic concern with the role of music in maintaining Kurdish national identity and

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culture, Marooned in Iraq indicates an obvious bid to capitalize on a potential audience demographic interested in representations of Iraqi people and culture as international military involvement in the country seemed increasingly inevitable upon the film’s initial release. These strategic negotiations of the international market suggest that filmmakers such as Ghobadi are acutely aware of the pressures of postcoloniality and the late- capitalist marketplace, where the commodification of conflict, politics, and contemporary global crisis is at a high premium.124

Does this mean that Ghobadi has “sold out”? That his Kurdish nationalism, his postcolonialism to use Huggan’s term, has been trumped by the pervasive and overwhelming power of global postcoloniality? I would argue that even to pose these questions ignores the fact that, as Huggan suggests, postcoloniality and postcolonialism are “entangled” and “bound up with” one another. For the savvy filmmaker, then, the question becomes how to use this entanglement, this inextricability of postcolonialism from the culture markets and global configurations that constitute postcoloniality, in order to further the agenda of an emancipatory politics. In the case of Ghobadi’s Kurdish nationalist cinema, the answer involves manipulating and negotiating the assumptions and expectations of the international cinema market in order to ensure that his films are as widely viewed as possible and that awareness of Kurdish struggle and resistance is fostered in a global audience. The danger of these strategic negotiations of postcoloniality, however, is that within the context of circulation, his Kurdish nationalist message can be obscured. In this section, I consider ways in which the circulation and marketing of A Time For Drunken Horses, Marooned in Iraq, Turtles Can Fly and Half

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Moon interplay national and international aesthetic and political classifications in order to create interest in the films, and I then go on to suggest that these negotiations have the potential to influence the films’ critical reception. These negotiations illustrate the concessions and compromises that must be made in order to assure a receptive audience for non-state cinema and also indicates both the possibilities and limitations of using global cinema to communicate a political or cultural message to an international audience.

On the cover of Hamid Reza Sadr’s 2006 Iranian Cinema: A Political History is a stunning cropped still: an out of focus green background and half a young girl’s face - intense eyes, a soft yet defiant expression. The still is a close up of Agrin, one of the central characters in Ghobadi’s third film, Turtles Can Fly, and Sadr devotes the final pages of his study to a brief lecture on the current political status of the Kurds in Iran and an even briefer explication of the film. In the seminal 2002 collection New Iranian

Cinema: Politics, Representation, and Identity, edited by Richard Tapper, Ghobadi is mentioned in the introduction as one of a set of promising new Iranian directors along with Persian Iranian filmmakers Majid Majidi (Children of Heaven, The Color of

Paradise), Ja’far Panahi (The White Balloon, The Circle), and Samira Makmalbaf (The

Apple, Blackboards). Hamid Dabashi offers a slightly more thorough treatment of

Ghobadi’s work in his 2001 Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future, where he includes a discussion of A Time for Drunken Horses in his chapter on “Whither

Iranian Cinema? The Perils and Promises of Globalization.” In this chapter, Dabashi argues that Ghobadi is “at the ethnic and sectarian margin of Iranian Shiism” and that he

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“represent[s] the full poetic pulverization of the creative ego that defined [his] artistic

mentor”; the second claim is based on Ghobadi’s refusal to follow in the creative

footsteps of the two Iranian masters, Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, with

whom Ghobadi trained as a young man. For Dabashi, Ghobadi, along with other

filmmakers breaking from the traditional techniques and aesthetics of Iranian cinema,

represent the future of the Iranian New Wave. Ghobadi is also mentioned in Cineaste’s

Summer 2006 edition, “A Special Focus on Contemporary Iranian Cinema,” in an article

by Rahul Hamid titled “Panning Out for a Wider View: Iranian Cinema Beyond Its

Borders.” Like Dabashi’s “Whither Iranian Cinema,” Hamid’s article is most interested

in positing Ghobadi as an example of an increasingly decentralized and globalized

Iranian Cinema that includes films that examine various minority communities

(Kiarostami’s 1999 The Wind Will Carry Us and Majid Majidi’s 2001 Baran) or that are set outside Iran’s borders (Makmalbaf’s 2001 international hit Kandahar and

Kiarostami’s 2001 documentary ABC Africa). Hamid’s article, however, offers a distinct perspective on Ghobadi’s work, arguing that Ghobadi’s films “assert[ ] a Kurdish national identity….He and they [his characters] live defiantly in Kurdistan.” Hamid goes on to suggest that “Ghobadi trained in Iran, even serving as an assistant to Kiarostami, and works with familiar elements that announce New Iranian Cinema….His purpose, however, is to give voice to his people [the Kurds] who do not fit within the boundaries of the Iranian nation” (49). Of the four sources cited above on New Iranian Cinema, one does not mention that Ghobadi is a Kurd (Tapper), two mention Ghobadi’s Kurdish minority status but still choose to treat him as an integral part of Iranian cinema (Sadr and

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Dabashi), and only Hamid, through his insistence on Ghobadi’s Kurdish nationalism, implicitly begins to suggest the possibility of an alternative classification for Ghobadi’s body of work.

This is not to say that classifying Ghobadi’s work within the category of New

Iranian Cinema is, in and of itself, a particularly surprising or problematic critical move.

The issue of classifying Ghobadi’s work within a system that privileges nation-state cinemas reflects the complexities of his position vis-à-vis national cinematic taxonomies.

To refer to a quotation from Ghobadi quoted earlier in this chapter: “There are many first-class filmmakers in Iran and I don't want to portray myself as separate from this construct, ‘Iranian Cinema’. But within it, I would like to be a Kurdish filmmaker. I am in and from Iranian cinema. But I am a Kurdish filmmaker making films for the Kurds”

(Marooned in Iraq). In this passage, which exemplifies the difficulty of the non-state cinema, Ghobadi essentially claims to be cinematically and nationally Iranian and

Kurdish – a position that has incredible resonance and cachet within the context of academic or intellectual considerations of the “postcolonial condition,” minority identity, or hybridity. It is less useful, however, when it comes to marketing cultural products to an international market that is woefully unconcerned with the complexities and divisive histories underlying ethnic and national identities in the Middle East (our ignorance of the region’s ethnic, religious, and national diversity has had dire consequences, as the sectarian civil war in Iraq continues to demonstrate). However, this insistence on both

Iranian and Kurdish national identities makes sense if we only return to Huggan’s relevant distinction between postcolonialism and postcoloniality. Due to the politics of

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Ghobadi’s postcolonialism, his Kurdish nationalism, it is crucial that he insist on his position as a filmmaker independent from Iranian national institutions and culture. On the other hand, Ghobadi is completely aware of the conditions of postcoloniality, of the

“assimilative and market driven” global late capitalist culture market, and his affiliation with Iranian national cinema helps him as he negotiates the complexities of establishing a non-state cinema (Huggans 6).

If we accept that Ghobadi’s willingness to be subsumed under the rubric of New

Iranian Cinema is, at least partially, dictated by practical considerations about the market, it then becomes important to consider what leads to the facility of this association in terms of the content and aesthetics of the films and what the potential implications of the classification are for critical understanding of the body of work. Ghobadi’s films share much with the traditional stylistics of Iranian Cinema in their reliance on neorealist aesthetics, their pacing, casting, plotting, and use of landscape (Hamid 49).125 Both

Ghobadi’s films and much Iranian cinema also make extensive use of handheld cameras

and blur the line between fiction films and documentaries. Furthermore, Ghobadi’s

films, like many Iranian films, strive to represent the simultaneous joy and pain, love and

melancholy, that define human existence, though Ghobadi’s films are more bleak and

unrelenting in their outlook, evidence of the particularity of the Kurdish experience.

Perhaps the best argument for characterizing Ghobadi as an Iranian filmmaker is that he

has, like all other Iranian directors, had to negotiate the complicated and restrictive

censorship machine operated by the Islamic Republic that creates a national cinema

defined by the strictures of an oppressive regime.126 As a result of the severe restrictions

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placed on “immoral” and “politically subversive” cinema by the Islamic Republic,

Ghobadi’s films, like all films made in Iran, are often notable for what they don’t say, for the silences that make visible the very social, cultural, and political issues that it is the censors’ job to suppress.

Ghobadi’s films, like many examples from Iranian Cinema, use highly symbolic narrative structures in order to implicitly critique the social structures and political policies of the Islamic Republic. For example, in a seemingly innocuous scene from

Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven, the young protagonist, Ali, and his father take a long spill on their bicycle down a hill from the mountainous wealthy neighborhoods that surround Tehran into the urban center. This scene has no function in advancing the plot and, instead, operates symbolically to demonstrate the rigid class distinctions that still exist in Iran since the Revolution.127 Similarly, in Ghobadi’s second film, Marooned in

Iraq, the final scene, which depicts Mirza carrying the young Sanooreh over the border

between Iran and Iraq, stomping the barbed wire under his feet as he passes, offers

closure only insofar as the moment is read symbolically. This culmination of the film’s

message offers a direct challenge to Iranian nationalism, and a potentially incendiary

challenge at that, as the maintenance and fidelity of the Iran-Iraq border was one of the

primary impetuses for the bloody eight year war between the two countries, a war that

has been used to consolidate the power and restrictive authority of the Islamic regime.

That both of these instances of fairly obvious social or political critique passed muster

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with the Iranian censors indicates that one of the unifying aspects of Iranian cinema is the

narrative negotiation of censorship laws apparent in the films, a practice in which

Ghobadi has been successful in all but his most recent film.128

However, Ghobadi’s films, while they may initially seem to be stylistically and

thematically indebted to an Iranian tradition, differ in important ways, beginning to

establish a Kurdish cinematic aesthetic that indicates a number of things about Kurdish culture and identity. On a most basic level, it is important to emphasize again that the

films are in Kurdish, include Kurdish music and costuming, and represent distinctly

Kurdish cultural practices. As such, most Iranians would view the films with subtitles

and would experience a degree of cultural distance from the films. At the level of style, the most striking differentiation to be made between Ghobadi’s Kurdish films and the tradition of Iranian filmmaking is Ghobadi’s disturbing and, at times, confrontational style, which mixes the tragic and comic in dark and powerful ways, exposing the ironies and absurdities of everyday life in Kurdistan. While some Iranian films have adopted a tragicomic tone (see, for example, Abbas Kiarostami’s classic Taste of Cherry and

Bahman Farmanara’s Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine), these films are the exception rather than the rule. As Hamid Reza Sadr argues in “Contemporary Iranian

Cinema and Its Major Themes”: “Iranian cinema has never been immune to the effects and influences of melodrama. Despite weaknesses in filmmaking technique, the genre was successful in attracting and emotionally satisfying viewers….Telling stories marked by fortune and destiny, they mingled the bitterness of reality with the sweetness of dreams” (26). While Ghobadi’s works have plenty of bitterness, the “sweetness of

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dreams” has absolutely no place in the Kurdistan represented throughout Ghobadi’s body

of work. Ghobadi’s first film, A Time for Drunken Horses, is unrelentingly bitter – there is no humor to replace the “sweetness” evident in Iranian films, particularly those featuring children (the works of Iranian director Majid Majidi come to mind as particularly strong examples of bitter-sweet sagas of childhood). However, in Marooned

in Iraq and Turtles Can Fly, humor and the absurd stand in for the sweetness that a

Kurdish cinema cannot (or will not) represent. In Marooned in Iraq, for example, Mirza,

Barat, and Audeh, along with a number of other travelers they come across on their

journey, are left in their underclothes and penniless after they are attacked by bandits; a

matchmaker in a village that the protagonists pass through has made an unpopular match

and ends up buried up to his neck. Both of these incidents, which indicate the dangerous

living conditions in Kurdistan, are filtered through Ghobadi’s wicked sense of humor,

and the viewer often finds herself disconcerted at her own visceral response to the living conditions being depicted. This is also the case in Turtles Can Fly, where characters like the young Shirkooh, who cries incessantly and idolizes Satellite above all else, provide comic relief while, at the same time, indicating the sorry state of childhood in Iraqi

Kurdistan.

Another stylistic difference between Ghobadi’s Kurdish films and Iranian cinema is that Ghobadi’s films do not demonstrate the stylistic restraint and minimalism associated with Iranian film. Bill Nichols offers a general definition of the aesthetics of

Iranian cinema: Iranian films “exude a certain austerity and render characters with a high degree of restraint” (20) and “[m]ost forms of cinematic expressivity are minimally

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present. We find no magical realism … melodramatic intensities, or excess, are extremely rare….The great majority of scenes unfold in a third-person, long-take, long-

shot, minimally edited style. There is only limited use of music and even dialogue” (21).

Ghobadi’s films do not adhere to these stylistic conventions. His most recent film, Half

Moon, for example, is a magical realist narrative, and music plays a central role in his

second, third, and fourth films (the soundtrack to Marooned in Iraq is, arguably, more

important than the visual elements of the film). While Ghobadi does make extensive use

of the handheld camera work, long-shots, long-takes, and documentary style common to

Iranian cinema, he deviates from this aesthetic in a number of pivotal, highly edited

scenes (especially notable in this regard is the khesht making scene from Marooned in

Iraq and Agrin’s flashbacks in Turtles Can Fly).

Nonetheless, there is no doubt that there are some logically sound reasons for

classifying Ghobadi’s films as Iranian Cinema, and for this reason it is important to

interrogate what the potential effects of such a categorization might be. Most generally,

grouping Ghobadi with the directors of the New Iranian Cinema has the potential to

foreclose on the possibility of viewing Ghobadi as a Kurdish director establishing the

foundation of a new non-state cinema. While Ghobadi does not allow his affiliation with

the established Iranian national cinema to supersede his commitment to Kurdish

filmmaking, this balancing act, as I suggest above, is due to a sophisticated negotiation of

postcoloniality and postcolonialism that is often ignored by viewers and critics as they

consider individual films or a director’s body of work. There are other, more specific, implications that arise from the classification of Ghobadi as a director of and from Iranian

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cinema. For example, while Iran’s strict censorship practices seem to influence Ghobadi

to integrate many symbolic scenes and narrative structures into his films, his relationship

to symbolism is much more complex. For example, while Iranian cinema makes heavy

use of the symbolic potential of children on screen (often using them to indicate

innocence, vulnerability, survivalism, etc.), the children in Ghobadi’s films must carry

the burden of both symbolic and literal meaning. Hengov, the young armless boy from

Turtles Can Fly, offers a perfect example of this simultaneous function. On the one hand,

Hengov (and his sister Agrin) are symbols of the Kurd’s traumatic past and optimistic future, of history and the potential (or lack thereof) for healing. On the other hand, an early close up shot of Hengov, his face just inches from a live mine as he picks the weapon up with the stumps where his arms once were, is clearly meant to be read as a literal indictment of the global politics that support and enable the continuation of this kind of survivalism (the horror of the image is greatly impacted by the obvious fact that

Hengov and the many other limbless children in the film are not actors, and their disabilities are not the result of elaborate costuming or CGI). A similar point could be made about the narrative function of the child characters in A Time For Drunken Horses, but what is important to our consideration here is that viewing the films through the lens of Iranian cinema may obscure the crucial literal level – the level that offers the most thorough critique of the global politics that have led to the wars and policies that have facilitated the devastation of Kurdish lands and people.

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At the heart of the potential problems that arise from the classification of Ghobadi

as part of an Iranian cinematic tradition are the issues of purpose and intention, and to

return to Rahul Hamid’s astute observation, “Ghobadi trained in Iran, even serving as an

assistant to Kiarostami, and works with familiar elements that announce New Iranian

Cinema….His purpose, however, is to give voice to his people [the Kurds] who do not fit within the boundaries of the Iranian nation” (49). This purpose, which is central to understanding Ghobadi’s body of work and his passionate dedication to his medium, is fundamentally at odds with (or, as Hamid might suggest, “do[es] not fit within the boundaries of”) Iranian national cinema. However, I do not want to focus too much attention on the “dangers” of classifying Ghobadi’s films with the New Iranian cinema for two reasons. First, because I believe it to be more constructive to consider what kinds of interpretations, interventions, and communications are enabled when Ghobadi is

viewed as working within an autonomous tradition of Kurdish filmmaking. And, second,

because it seems that there has been a gradual shift, beginning with the release of

Marooned in Iraq in 2002 and intensifying with 2004’s Turtles Can Fly, away from

classifying Ghobadi as an Iranian director and towards an interest in the films as texts

that, as The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane says of Turtles Can Fly, “bleed straight out of

the headlines.”

In order to demonstrate this shift, consider these excerpts from two film reviews

by A.O. Scott from the New York Times; the first is from 2000 and reviews A Time for

Drunken Horses, while the second is from 2004 and treats Turtles Can Fly. On A Time

for Drunken Horses, Scott writes:

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Bahman Ghobadi's "Time for Drunken Horses" is the latest Iranian film to deal with the lives of children. The film takes place in a wintry, mountainous Kurdish area near the Iraqi border…Mr. Ghobadi uses nonprofessional actors and tells his story in a naturalistic style that purposely blurs the distinction between fiction and documentary…..This approach will be familiar if you've seen other recent Iranian movies about childhood, like Jafar Panahi's "White Balloon," Majid Majidi's "Color of Paradise" and a number of movies by Abbas Kiarostami, the eminent Iranian director for whom Mr. Ghobadi worked. (“Flung Into Adulthood”)

The focus of this review is clearly on Ghobadi as an Iranian director, and the word

Kurdish, or any of its derivatives, is only mentioned once throughout the entirety of the piece (see second sentence in excerpt above). Now consider Scott’s 2004 review of

Turtles Can Fly:

“Turtles Can Fly” is the third feature film that Bahman Ghobadi, a Kurdish director from Iran, has made about the suffering and resilience of his people, who have the bad luck to live spread across the often volatile borders of several nation- states, including Turkey and Iraq. While the status of the Kurdish nation remains perilous, Mr. Ghobadi has set out to give the Kurds a national cinema, and to bring their traditions and their language, as well as their troubles, to the attention of global audiences….Like many other Iranian filmmakers, Mr. Ghobadi often uses children in his movies, for their guilelessness and vulnerability, and also because they are scrappy, stubborn and naturally funny….The time is early 2003, and the villagers wait, with a mixture of hope and trepidation, for the Second Gulf War to begin, and try to find news of its arrival….The war-weary Kurds in this film, foreseeing the end of Mr. Hussein's rule, also worry the American invasion will bring a new round of violence….Mr. Ghobadi filmed "Turtles" in Iraqi Kurdistan shortly after the end of major combat was declared, and he appears agnostic about whether the American intervention will improve daily life. (“Depicting Kurds’ Misery”)

This second review represents an almost total shift in perspective on Ghobadi as a national filmmaker; in the first passage, he makes “Iranian film[s]” and is compared with

Iranian filmmakers, while in the second passage he is “a Kurdish director from Iran” who

“has set out to give the Kurds a national cinema.”129 This seems fitting if we consider both the content and the marketing and distribution of Turtles Can Fly. In terms of

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content, Turtles Can Fly represents a crucial shift in setting and characterization, as the

first two films were set on the border between Iran and Iraq and featured Iranian Kurdish

characters, while in Ghobadi’s third film the scene shifts to the Iraq-Turkey border, and

all the characters in the film, save one, are Iraqi Kurds.130 While, as Rahul Hamid points

out in his essay “Panning Out For a Wider View: Iranian Cinema Beyond Its Borders,”

Iranian films such as Makmalbaf’s Kandahar (set in Afghanistan) have demonstrated the

extent to which Iranian cinema is, in fact, a global cinema, the shift in setting, which

indicates a geographical and topical distance from Iran, along with Ghobadi’s own

minority status as a Kurd, seems to have precluded assumptions about the national origin

of his films.

The marketing campaign for Turtles Can Fly also downplays Ghobadi’s

affiliation with Iranian cinema and, instead, shifts attention to Ghobadi’s interest in Iraqi

politics and current events. Turtles Can Fly has been proudly advertised as the first ever

“Iran-Iraq joint project” in the history of cinema – a move that allows Ghobadi to

maximize the potential interest of an audience demographic interested in Iranian cinema

and/or in the ongoing war in Iraq while also emphasizing the transnational solidarity that

exists between Kurds living in different nation-states. The trailer for Turtles Can Fly is

also very telling, and while I won’t offer a complete reading of the images, music, onscreen text, and voice over, as I did with the preview for Marooned in Iraq, just the voice over used in order to market the film to an international audience is suggestive:

Imagine yourself in a town on the Iraqi border two weeks before the war. Now imagine you are a child. From acclaimed writer-director Bahman Ghobadi comes a story beyond imagination of a tribe of orphans building their own small nation any way they can. Their fearless leader, who brings the world to its elders by

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satellite dish. His rival, a prophet who can see their future. His inspiration, the girl who awakens his spirit, but will not let him see her heart. One brief glimpse of another place. One small story of immense proportion. Turtles Can Fly. (Turtles Can Fly)

Outside of the perplexing decision to market the film through recourse to a standard love-

triangle plot (with Satellite as hero, Agrin as beloved, and Hengov as rival), there are two

aspects of this preview that warrant further attention. First of all, as in the Marooned in

Iraq trailer, this preview includes several references to vague conflicts and nations: “two weeks before the war” and “their own small nation.” While the war is not named in the above, one can be fairly certain that the setting (“on the Iraqi border”) and the year of the film’s release (2004) would leave little to no doubt in most viewers’ minds that this is the second, and ongoing, U.S. led war in Iraq. The “small nation” referred to by the voice over narrator, which the astute viewer is likely to anticipate serves as a microcosm for some larger national entity within the context of the film, will almost certainly be presumed to metonymically represent a prophetic or, as Benedict Anderson would say, imagined, version of the Iraqi nation (a unified Iraq, a sovereign Iraq, a post-war Iraq, etc.), especially based on the absence of any reference to Kurdistan or Ghobadi’s Kurdish background or nationalism in the trailer. The second relevant part of this preview is the culminating claim that Turtles Can Fly is “[o]ne brief glimpse of another place. One small story of immense proportion.” These two brief phrases, with their promise of both touristic voyeurism and “immense” significance, do a great deal of rhetorical work, persuading a viewership that is concerned with both the ongoing occupation of Iraq and the reliability of media coverage of the war that Turtles Can Fly offers them a vital,

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alternative, and more authentic perspective that “bleed[s] straight out of the headlines”

and is accessible to viewers from the safety of their living rooms or local theatres (Lane).

The marketing campaign for and the inherent timeliness of both Marooned in Iraq

and Turtles Can Fly has had the desired effect of fostering wide circulation and “media

buzz” surrounding Ghobadi’s work, and, predictably, both films have been approached

by film critics as anti-mainstream responses to the current war in Iraq with the potential to offer a different (read “native,” read “exotic,” read “authentic,” read “other”) perspective on the war. The following excerpt from Dave Kehr’s review of Marooned in

Iraq from The New York Times exemplifies this trend:

No matter how much cable news coverage of the war in Iraq you might absorb, television is still no substitute for the movies when it comes to placing you in a particular place at a particular time as lived by particular people. The generalizations and speculations of the television anchors and commentators fade away in the face of a film like Bahman Ghobadi's Marooned in Iraq.

That critics such as Kehr would respond to the film in this way is unexceptional and unsurprising; the content and circulation of Ghobadi’s second and third films certainly suggest this kind of reading. It should also be noted that most, if not all, of the reviews that treat Marooned in Iraq and Turtles Can Fly as fascinating examples of “current events cinema” also make due note of Ghobadi’s position as a Kurdish filmmaker dealing explicitly with the struggles and exploitations of the Kurdish people – a natural extension of some critics’ recognition that the “Kurdish question” is somehow, and this somehow is often fairly vague for people living in the West, bound up in the assumedly more complex and important “Iraqi question.” Clearly, the second part of this claim rests on a speculative assumption on my part regarding the relative knowledge about and interest in

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the Kurds outside the context of the current civil war in Iraq. The point of this

speculation is not to suggest that critics and international film fans, generally or located

in the West, are completely ill-informed about or unsympathetic to the Kurds’ political,

cultural, or humanitarian situation. The point is merely that the current global

“embroilment” in and anxiety about the deteriorating conditions in Iraq has the potential to overshadow concern with the long and complicated multinational history and politics of the Kurdish struggle for freedom, human rights, and autonomy.

Consider the following from Lisa Schwarzbaum’s review of Marooned in Iraq:

“Set at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War…..Nothing I've read about Iraq or seen on

TV in the past few weeks has felt nearly as real and intimate as this commanding fiction”

(“Marooned in Iraq”). Schwarzbaum echoes Kehr from The Times here, as she points to the superiority of film over television news coverage as a medium for the communication of the human realities of war. What is particularly interesting about Schwarzbaum’s take on the film, however, is that her assertion that Marooned in Iraq takes place “at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War” is both factually incorrect and revealing. The exact date of action is never made explicit in Marooned in Iraq, but the Mij Film website states that the film takes place during “Iran and Iraq's postwar years,” and to the careful and informed viewer, this temporal setting should be apparent from the events of the film.

One of the culminating moments in Marooned in Iraq occurs when Mirza finally locates

Hanareh among a community of female chemical bombing survivors who have been

displaced and disfigured by Saddam Hussein’s Anfal Campaign and the massacre at

Halabja. The film clearly situates the action of the plot in a period directly following

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these atrocities; the massacre at Halabja occurred in 1988, and the Anfal Campaign ended in 1989 (which is not to say that Saddam’s violent oppression of the Kurds ended along with this particularly devastating era of Kurdish-Iraqi relations). Based on the comment from Ghobadi’s own Mij Film and on the temporal immediacy of the filmic events to the atrocities of Anfal, it is safe to say that the film takes place sometime between the cessation of the Iran-Iraq conflict in 1988 and the start of the First Gulf War in early

August of 1990. I do not quibble with Schwarzbaum’s dates to suggest that there is something inherently wrong with her review of the film, or that she is ill-equipped to offer insight into Ghobadi’s body of work. Rather, this simple error is indicative of an impulse, initiated not only by a Eurocentric belief that history is the history of Western involvement but by the content and marketing of Ghobadi’s films, to overlook the particularities of the Kurdish nationalism of Ghobadi’s work in order to focus on the relevance of the narrative to current political concerns and anxieties in the West.

Nonetheless, reading Ghobadi’s films as “current events cinema” can also enable provocative responses to the films that more completely engage Ghobadi’s politics of

Kurdish nationalism. The following review by Roger Ebert from The Chicago Sun-Times is worth quoting at length:

I wish everyone who has an opinion on the war in Iraq could see Turtles Can Fly.…The action takes place just before the American invasion begins, and the characters in it look forward to the invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein….The movie [does not] betray an opinion one way or the other about the war. It is about the actual lives of refugees, who lack the luxury of opinions because they are preoccupied with staying alive in a world that has no place for them. The movie takes place in a Kurdish refugee camp somewhere on the border between Turkey and Iraq. That means, in theory, it takes place in "Kurdistan," a homeland that exists in the minds of the Kurds, even though every other government in the area insists the Kurds are stateless…But what will the

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Americans do for them? The plight of the Kurdish people is that no one seems to want to do much for them. Even though a Kurd has recently been elected to high office in Iraq [President Jalal Talabani], we get the sense he was a compromise candidate -- chosen precisely because his people are powerless. For years the Kurds have struggled against Turkey, Iraq and other nations in the region, to define the borders of a homeland the other states refuse to acknowledge. From time to time the aims of the Kurds come into step with the aims of others. When they were fighting Saddam, the first Bush administration supported them. When they were fighting our ally Turkey, we opposed them. The New York Times Magazine recently ran a cover story about Ibrahim Parlak, who for 10 years peacefully ran a Kurdish restaurant in Harbert, Mich., only to be arrested in 2004 by the federal government, which hopes to deport him for Kurdish nationalist activities that at one point we approved. Because I support Ibrahim's case, I can read headlines on right-wing sites such as, "Roger Ebert Gives Thumbs Up to Terrorism." I hope Debbie Schlussel, who wrote that column, sees Turtles Can Fly. The movie does not agree with her politics, or mine. It simply provides faces for people we think of as abstractions. It was written and directed by Bahman Ghobadi, whose A Time for Drunken Horses (2000), was also about Kurds struggling to survive between the lines. Satellite has no politics. Neither does The Boy With No Arms, or his sister, or her child born of rape; they have been trapped outside of history.

Ebert’s analysis of the film, which begins with an assertion of Ghobadi’s relevance in relation to people’s various “opinion[s] about the war in Iraq,” rapidly evolves to offer a nuanced analysis of the ways in which Turtles Can Fly’s treatment of the war exposes a truth that, rather than working to reaffirm the political opinions of Westerners on either side of the aisle, insists upon the distinctness and significance of the Kurdish experience.

Based on Ebert’s declaration of his support for Parlak, it is clear that he has a sustained interest in and commitment to the Kurdish cause, and, as such, he is positioned well to fully appreciate the interplay in Turtles Can Fly between Ghobadi’s critique of the U.S. led war in Iraq and the politics of everyday struggle in Kurdistan.

Nonetheless, Ebert’s final claims in this review – that Ghobadi’s characters have no politics and have been “trapped outside of history” – are problematic. Ghobadi’s

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films in general, and Turtles Can Fly in particular, seem to argue that the problem is not that the Kurds are “trapped outside history,” but, rather, that the everyday lives of Kurds are overdetermined by a devastating and traumatic history that has been happening to

Kurdish people for generations (Agrin and Hengov are testaments to this burden of history). In addition, Ebert’s claim that none of the child characters in the film have politics is misleading – children rarely have politics and fictional characters never do

(though they may represent a particular political ideology, it is erroneous to say that a character has much of anything that registers in our “real world”). More to the point, however, is the fact that it is Ghobadi’s politics that matter, and while artists and filmmakers are often wary of admitting a political agenda for fear of being branded a propagandist, to suggest that Ghobadi’s films are apolitical does not do justice to the sophisticated blend of aesthetics and politics in his body of work. While I may quibble with Ebert’s reading of Turtles Can Fly, his analysis focuses on the central issues of

Kurdish sovereignty and self-determination, and this indicates the extent to which

Ghobadi has been able to lay the groundwork for a rhetorically efficacious non-state cinema within the context of a global culture market predicated on nation state politics and institutions.

Conclusion:

Ghobadi is only one filmmaker. One Kurdish voice speaking on behalf of millions. And the work of one man does not constitute a national cinema. Nonetheless,

Ghobadi’s ability to speak to an international audience by both working within and

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challenging the pre-existing institutions and expectations of world cinema provides a model for the next generation of Kurdish filmmakers living throughout Kurdistan and within the Kurdish diaspora. Just as Ghobadi’s Mij Film continues to offer tutelage and funding for young Kurds interested in establishing their own voices and visions through the cinematic medium, Ghobadi’s global success story offers inspiration and hope that, as

Ghobadi claims, “in the very near future we will have twenty or thirty Kurdish films every year instead of just one” (Marooned in Iraq). Ghobadi’s nuanced negotiations of the national and the international, the specificity of Kurdish struggle and contemporary global cultural and political currents, suggests that this just may be possible.

This is largely due to Ghobadi’s successful recognition and manipulation of the entanglement of postcolonialism and postcoloniality – the terms coined by Graham

Huggan that have constituted one of the primary concerns of this dissertation. In chapter one, we observed that a filmmaker’s complex postcolonialism can be reduced and simplified in the context of a global postcoloniality predicated on the stratification of audience markets. In chapter two, we considered a young, multiracial author whose postcolonialism is constituted by a challenge to postcoloniality and the institutions of postcolonial and Black British literary studies. Ghobadi, then, offers a fitting conclusion to this study, as he has seemingly embraced the hostile terrain of a postcoloniality defined by nation-stateism in order to communicate a Kurdish nationalism that challenges the assumptions and conditions of a nation-state system that has exploited and silenced a non-state people politically as well as culturally. Ghobadi’s success in this endeavor is surely due to a number of factors, but the role of providence and timing – the un-

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deniability of the right time, right place factor – must be acknowledged. Ghobadi’s bid

for international attention to the plight of the Kurds has certainly been aided by the

institutionalization of Iranian cinema and the unfortunate series of international events

that have led people across the globe to turn their eyes and ears to the Middle East in an

attempt to foster cultural and political understanding and sensible policy.

However, as this chapter has argued, to consider Ghobadi’s Kurdish cinema

solely within the framework of generalized east-west relations is to overlook the

centrality of Ghobadi’s primary rhetorical purpose – the advocacy of Kurdish

nationalism. In order to contextualize Ghobadi’s engagement with this political and

cinematic intention, it will be helpful to return again to Principle Five of the Declaration

On Principles Of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations And Co-Operation

Among States In Accordance With The Charter Of The United Nations (1970). Again,

the Declaration states:

Paradoxically, the same aspects of this principle that locate the agency for self- determination within the population vying for sovereignty also serve to transfer the onus for real change and national recognition within the international community – the defining principle is both local and global. Insofar as the nebulously defined “all

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peoples” have the right to “freely determine” their status as an independent state, the

principle would allow for the Kurds (or the Palestinians, or indigenous nations, or, for

that matter, second generation Argentines living in the United States) to establish

sovereign nation-states. However, because of the vague nature of the definition, and because there is no provision assuring that a U.N. commission or militia is bound to ensure the recognition of claims for sovereignty, it falls upon the international

community to acknowledge national claims. So a principle that seems designed to

empower marginalized, non-state people to act on their own behalf ultimately reproduces

global orders of dominance that subsumes the “will of the people” under the self-

perpetuating legitimacy of established nation states.

The purpose, then, of the non-state cinema is twofold. First, non-state cinema

must speak on behalf of “the people” and express the local realities of oppression and the

desire for sovereignty; this purpose is inherently local in its scope and intentions.

Second, the non-state cinema must speak to the global community in such a way as to

persuade its audience of the validity of sovereignty claims, which cannot be actualized

without international approval and political pressure. As this chapter has demonstrated,

in the case of Ghobadi’s non-state national cinema this means critiquing the existing

nation-state system, articulating a defiant Kurdish nationalism, and engaging an

international audience through channels of global postcoloniality. This analysis of

Ghobadi’s work, as well as the case studies offered in the preceding chapters, also

illustrates that despite the current ascendancy of the postnational in postcolonial studies,

the nation remains critical to both the postcolonialism of authors and filmmakers and the

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postcoloniality of the global marketplace. As this chapter’s discussion of Ghobadi’s

negotiations of audience and purpose indicate, his continued emphasis on the sovereignty of the non-state nation does not deny the centrality of global and transnational configurations of power and exchange but, rather, demonstrates the ways that he

positions himself both in relation to his “imagined community” and his international

audience. Because one of the primary goals of Ghobadi’s non-state cinema is to

reconfigure the Kurds’ position within a global order, the possibility of inter-national

communication that both articulates and transcends the imagination of the “limited and

sovereign” nation is crucial.

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CONCLUSION

POSTCOLONIAL NARRATIVES AND INTERNATIONAL MARKETS

I began Circulating Stories: Postcolonial Narratives and International Markets

by examining the scandal surrounding the publication of Rigoberta Menchú’s I,

Rigoberta Menchú. I want to begin the concluding section of this dissertation by briefly

returning to Menchú’s text in order to bring the three chapters into common discussion

and comparison, as the testimonío exemplifies a number of trends apparent in my

analysis of Raoul Peck’s Lumumbas, Zadie Smith’s prose fiction, and the films of

Bahman Ghobadi. In Menchú “collaborator” and interlocutor Elisabeth Burgos-Debray’s

introduction to the testimonío, she emphasizes Menchú’s purpose and the high political

and humanitarian stakes of her narrative:

she [Menchú] speaks for all the Indians of the American continent [….] The voice of Rigoberta Menchú allows the defeated to speak. She is a privileged witness: she has survived the genocide that destroyed her family and community and is stubbornly determined to break the silence and to confront the systematic extermination of her people. She refuses to let us forget. Words are her only weapons. (xi)131

Burgos-Debray’s articulation of Menchú’s intent is notable for three primary reasons that shed light on the commonalities in the three chapters that constitute this project. First,

Burgos-Debray suggests that Menchú “speaks for all the Indians of the American

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continent”; she uses a personal story to articulate a communal experience and struggle.

In the three case studies that constitute this dissertation, Menchú shares this distinction only with Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi. While Menchú and Ghobadi speak for indigenous Americans and Kurds respectively, black British novelist Zadie Smith and

Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck produce texts that do not speak on behalf of a particular group or community. Rather, these two artists creatively represent communities to which they do not fully “belong” and express an individual artistic perspective on broad, communal experiences and histories.132

However, each of the three artists addressed in this dissertation, like Menchú, focuses on the representation of some brand of imagined community. This second point articulated by Burgos-Debray’s statement of Menchú’s intentions is evident in the very simple declaration of “her [Menchú’s] people.” The claim of “her people” presupposes an imagined kinship between Menchú and all other Guatemalan Mayans and/or all other indigenous people of the Americas – communities that are based both on a broad reaching inclusion of disparate people and an exclusion of those that fall outside the boundaries of the community (those who are not “her people”). Similarly, each of the artists treated in the three chapters of this dissertation imagine and represent various imagined communities and attempt to articulate certain shared experiences and struggles.

And like Menchú, the artists Raoul Peck, Zadie Smith, and Bahman Ghobadi represent imagined communities that exist in tension with official versions of the nation-state and remain in flux and a process of redefinition.

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In Peck’s two Lumumbas, the filmmaker represents the national experiences of a postcolonial Democratic Republic of Congo through the interrogation and narration of a mythic version of the life of the martyred Prime Minister. And, through certain poetic and symbolic gestures in the films, Peck extends his representation of the Congolese nation to offer hope for a more inclusive, pan-African, postcolonial Africa. Peck’s

Congo is a mythic community at odds with the devastation and pessimism produced by decades of dictatorial rule under Mobutu, and the filmmaker emphasizes the processes of remembering and renarrating that have the potential to call into being a new Congolese nation and people. In Zadie Smith’s diverse body of work, the young author explores a variety of imagined communities: from a postcolonial British nation to a secular Jewish community of faith, and from an academic or aesthetic cosmopolitan community to an all-encompassing humanism. Smith’s interest in the ways that human beings “only connect” in a complicated, globalized world is the epitome of a twenty-first century

Andersonian literary project. Smith’s postcolonial nationalism challenges discourses of multiculturalism and radical difference as well as the purist conceptions of the nation advocated by groups like the National Front; Smith rethinks and challenges traditional understandings of the limits of human community. Bahman Ghobadi’s Kurdish cinema embraces a non-state nationalism and speaks on behalf of a people whose official status as a community remains “imaginary” and is constantly in process, while critiquing the politics of nation stateism that have divided and defined the Kurdish experience. These films provide a paradigmatic example of the ways that creative, artistic endeavor attempt to call a national community into being despite the lack of formal recognition of nation-

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state status by the global community. Ghobadi’s nationalist films and his establishment

of a burgeoning Kurdish national cinema illustrate the power of art to represent and

communicate an imagined community to an international audience.

The third aspect of Burgos-Debray’s articulation of the purposes and stakes of

Menchú’s life narrative with relevance to our discussion is her claim that Menchú

“allows the defeated to speak” and that “[s]he refuses to let us forget. Words are her only

weapons.” Whether speaking for a people (like Menchú and Ghobadi) or speaking of a

people (like Peck and Smith), all of the artists discussed in this dissertation strive to

communicate their visions of imagined communities to an international audience – to the

global, humanitarian “us” inherent in the claim that Menchú “refuses to let us forget”

(emphasis mine). And each of the artists, in their individual ways, uses words and/or

images as a weapon: the purpose of each artist’s attempt at international communication is, in some way, political. I use the term political broadly here: to have political purpose does not only mean to intervene in and reframe global and/or national policy (though I argue that Ghobadi’s national cinema attempts to meet this criteria), but also to challenge and subvert the ways that institutions of culture – from mainstream historiography to literary distribution and classification – maintain ideologies that continue to limit and define people and experiences affected by colonial and imperial configurations of power.

Most texts, and certainly most postcolonial texts, share this interest in the broadly political. One might differentiate between activist texts that seek to change “conditions on the ground” – such as Menchú’s testimonío and Ghobadi’s films – from more broadly political texts that simply seek to represent an artist’s ideological perspective on the

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issues confronting humans in the modern world – such as Peck’s films and Smith’s novels. Such a distinction is useful, but my point in this dissertation is to consider the ways that activist and political texts interact with the market, and to suggest that activist or political purpose can not be understood outside the context of circulation and reception in a world where audiences are almost certainly global instead of local.

In chapter one, “Man, Myth, Nation: Raoul Peck’s two Lumumbas,” I look at how the filmmaker revitalizes a mythic and historic narrative of a foreign leader for an international audience in order both to expose the guilty (the West – especially the U.S. and Belgium – and certain African factions) and to create an alternative historical narrative that is self-conscious of its own myth-making functions. For Peck, the stakes of his historical narratives reflect a commitment both to remembering and broadcasting stories of anti-colonial struggle as well as to examining the processes and narrative reconstructions inherent in such postcolonial historical projects.

Of the three artists addressed in the dissertation, Smith’s politics are the most subtle and the most focused on the world of academia, aesthetics, and literary institutions.

Smith’s audience is necessarily international because only an international audience can affirm her as a global literary celebrity in the tradition of the writers of color, such as

Salman Rushdie and Zora Neale Hurston, and the white writers, like E.M. Forster and

Dave Eggers, that she casts in her extensive web of literary influence. In “’Only

Connect’: Zadie Smith’s Twenty-First Century Optimism and the Global Culture

Market,” I argue that Smith does not seek to change the world; she only seeks to

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represent a fresh, optimistic vision of the twenty-first century and, simultaneously, to

challenge the way that writers of color have traditionally been marketed and categorized according to exotification and difference.

In “Communicating Kurdistan: Non-State Cinema and the International Market,”

I argue that Bahman Ghobadi’s engagement with an international audience and his

overtly political purpose are evident throughout his body of work. Because nation state

status must be affirmed by international accord, Ghobadi’s non-state nationalist cinema

circulates a political, rhetorical vision of a unified Kurdistan struggling against stated

nations and global imperialism. The stakes and purposes of Ghobadi’s body of work

clearly share the most with Menchú’s testimonío, and as both artists represent and speak

on behalf of populations that have been historically silenced and that are engaged in

continued anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle, this similarity is unsurprising.

But what is at the heart of this analysis of these diverse works is a fundamental

tension between the continued investment in localized communities of human beings

“only connecting” and a contemporary world defined by the obvious influence of global,

transnational flows of culture, ideas, and cash on the international market. To frame this

claim in the terms of this dissertation project, each of the texts discussed in “Circulating

Stories: Postcolonial Narratives and International Markets” negotiates this tension

between imagined communities and the global flow of culture at the level of what the text

does and what is done with the text. The continued emphasis on the national and on

establishing localized, specific communal identities does not deny the centrality of global

and transnational configurations of power and exchange but, rather, allows for an

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understanding of the ways that postcolonial artists continue to position themselves both in

relation to their respective “imagined communities” and their increasingly international

audiences. As the case studies that constitute this dissertation indicate, what is often at

stake for both the creators and consumers of postcolonial texts is the possibility of inter-

national communication that both articulates and transcends the imagination of the

“limited and sovereign” nation-state and/or other limited and limiting communities.

In the case of Raoul Peck’s two Lumumbas, the films are focused on the

interrogation and circulation of the nationalist, Congolese myth of the anti-colonial leader

whose revitalization and re-narration offers hope for current generations. This myth,

which is used to articulate a resilient and resistant imagined community, also has political implications when its relevance is extended to a pan-African narrative of continental struggle against colonization and ongoing imperialism. However, Peck, a director who identifies more with Haiti than with the Congo in most of his films and in interviews, also seriously engages international discussions about the viability of historiography, the objectivity of memory, and the project of constructing counter-narratives. His purpose is national, continental, and global, and the two film unit shuttles back and forth between presentation and deconstruction of the imagined community. Furthermore, even if we isolate the coherent, mythic story of Lumumba in the two films and consider it solely based on its nationalist or Pan-African intentions, it is clear that the story of Patrice

Lumumba and the establishment of an independent Democratic Republic of Congo is global in its far reaching implications and indictments; the story of the nation is indelibly

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bound up in the stories of Third World decolonization, Cold War politics, and the

establishment of a postcolonial economic imperialism that has been central to

contemporary global politics.

Zadie Smith’s work is at times overwhelming in its representation of a vast range

of imagined communities – from pubs lost in time to the nation to faith groups to global

fan culture to literary-aesthetic traditions to common humanity (and this list is far from

complete). Smith’s twenty-first century fiction deals with the struggle of human beings

to “only connect” in a world where the globalization of culture and the mainstreaming of difference redefine the cultural landscape. The world in Smith’s work is increasingly

random and mixed up – as her own personal history and the history of her characters

attest to; but with this new mixed-up reality comes the potential for the imagination of

new communities that defy national borders, identity categories, and diverse experiences.

This is not to say, however, that the traditional markers of communal identification –

nation, faith, race, gender – cease to be influential or important; it is merely to say that

with a new global reality such identifications are shifting, fluid, and subject to creative

reimagination and reconfiguration. Smith, apparently one to practice what she preaches,

has established a literary reputation and career that shirks the old literary “communities”

and categories that have traditionally been used to classify and define writers of color,

and she has turned increasingly to various literary and cultural histories and movements

to self-market herself as a writer whose interests and concerns negotiate the local, the

national, the transnational, and the universal.

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Bahman Ghobadi’s Kurdish national cinema balances a critique of the nation state

with a platform of international advocacy on behalf of the non-state nation. This

nationalism/anti-nationalism is predicated on Ghobadi’s resistance to the nation-state

borders that divide Kurdistan and his simultaneous insistence on the importance of the

boundaries around Kurdish cultural and national identity. This precarious

critique/embrace of the very concept of the imagined community of the nation is then

presented to an international audience through a strategic affiliation with an established

nation-state and its critically acclaimed film industry (Iran) and through the films’

relevance to contemporary current events (the war in Iraq, the ongoing tension with Iran,

and even Turkey’s attempts at integration into the European Union). Despite Ghobadi’s

resistance to Iranian, Iraqi, and Turkish imaginations of the nation-state, which inherently

rely on the incorporation and dissolution of Kurdish national sovereignty, his courtship

with an international audience interested in humanitarian intervention and international

law ala the U.N. necessitates these affiliations. One of the ironies of today’s global

politics is that national recognition is predicated on international consensus; while the

U.N. Charter clearly states that a people have a right to self-define as a nation, only the

international community can confer the kinds of legal rights and protections afforded to

nation-states on a self-identified national people (this process can happen either through

diplomacy and outreach or through war and armed resistance; it usually happens through both). Ghobadi’s struggle and the struggle of the Kurds more generally offers a perfect

example of the ways that the national and the international are inexorably intertwined in

today’s global order.

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Before concluding “Circulating Stories: Postcolonial Narratives and International

Markets” with a discussion of the tension between and entanglement of the national and

the international – the imagined community and a “postnational” world – I want to return

very briefly to Graham Huggan’s distinction between postcolonialism and postcoloniality that has been so central to this project. The above discussion about the negotiation between the imagined community and the global market suggests that both postcolonialism and postcoloniality are implicit in the working out of this tension. Each of the artists discussed has a political and aesthetic purpose (a postcolonialism) that is both bound by the imagined community and tied to the international market and/or new globalized communities (postcoloniality). And each of the artists discussed also mobilizes both limited, national identities and communities and global, international markets in their attempts to reconcile their postcolonialism with the postcoloniality of the

contemporary world.

These complex negotiations between the national and the international are elided

if the critical conversation in postcolonial studies becomes two-sided, pitting advocates of

the continued importance of anti-colonial nationalism against the “post-nationalists.”

Instead, critical attention must be paid to the ways in which these two geo-political trends

interact and even support one another. Postcolonial theorist Neil Lazarus articulates the

continued importance of nationalism in his critique of Hobsbawn: “Hobsbawn clearly

assumes that ‘globalization’ (i.e. capitalist internationalization) and nation-stateism are contradictory tendencies. However, both the historical and the sociological records seem to suggest that, if anything, the reverse is the case – the two tendencies are typically

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twinned, mutually supportive and entailing” (70). Lazarus goes further to offer a defense of the continued importance of the nation by attempting to distinguish between progressive nationalisms (that an international, humanitarian audience can support) and anti-progressive nationalisms (that are indicative of old, retrograde nationalist practices of sexism, racism, etc.). Lazarus argues that “it would be a mistake to abandon Lenin’s commitment to distinguishing between different nationalisms or national movements….there can be no retreating from the view that some claims to nationhood are legitimate and emancipatory” (75). For Lazarus, then, the nation, especially given its status as a locus of emancipatory politics and resistance, retains its usefulness as a geopolitical category despite the increasing influence of globalization and capitalist internationalization.

Discussing the ascendancy of the postnationalist camp in the late nineties, Leela

Gandhi argues in her overview of the field Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction that

[t]he vast majority of postcolonial critics and theorists seem to agree that the discourse surrounding ‘postnationalism’ offers a more satisfactory reading of the colonial experience and, simultaneously, the most visionary blueprint for a postcolonial future. It is often argued that the perspective offered by anti-colonial nationalism restricts the colonial encounter to a tired impasse or opposition between repression, on the one hand, and retaliation, on the other. (124)

In this passage, nationalism (especially anti-colonial nationalism) and “postnationalism” are two distinct theoretical formulations; one allows for the imagination of human connection across borders and the other relies on combative, divisive colonial history.

Gandhi’s overview of the field is dated (from 1998), but it is symptomatic of a continued trend in the field of postcolonial studies, particularly regarding the potential for

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progressive nationalisms that challenge imperial power and operate without corruption and repression. This pessimistic view of the potential for a sustainable anti-colonial or anti-imperial nationalism is understandable in the context of a global history that has seen the rise, for instance, of postcolonial African states that continue the exploitation and political violence evident under colonial rule. The perceived failure of the Iranian

Revolution in 1979 to establish a progressive, leftist nation-state that would both challenge western interests and imperialism and offer a more liberating and egalitarian society to its citizens may have been the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back in terms of the left’s disenchantment with nationalist movements. Yet the texts examined in this dissertation suggest that this simple formulation does not hold true when considered in the context of the complex negotiations of the national and the international undertaken for specific postcolonial purposes by a range of writers and filmmakers. In other words, this distinction between the goals and effects of nationalism and postnationalism is faulty in its absoluteness.

In a more nuanced version of the “postnationalist” claim published in 2004,

Richard Kearney, in “Postnationalist Identities: A New Configuration,” argues that

[a]s we move into the third millennium, people are becoming increasingly aware that nationality is a necessity but by no means a sufficient source of identity. In addition to the national identity afforded by one’s belonging to a nation-state (or a nation in search of a state, viz. the Kurds, Palestinians, and Basques), it is now commonplace for people to lay claim to a model of multiple identity, extending from subnational categories of region, province, or county to transnational categories such as the EU or UN. (Aretxaga 29)

Kearney’s definition of the relationship between national, subnational, and transnational sources of identification in the contemporary world is useful in its acknowledgement of

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the diverse communities and categories that people are confronted with, and instead of placing the national and the trans- or sub-national in competition, Kearney acknowledges the continued relevance of all these classifications. The interrelation between these different levels of community and belonging has been borne out by this dissertation, as we have seen that postcolonial artists continue to attempt to negotiate both within and without the boundaries of their “limited and sovereign” nations and communities.

Kearney’s modification of postcolonial studies’ early fascination with postnationalism indicates that there is an evolution underway in the field toward a more complex understanding of the relationship between the national and the postnational.

To conclude, I want to turn to a text that, along with White Teeth¸ debuted to great critical and popular acclaim in 2000 – with the dawning of a new millennium and the recognition of the need for new paradigms of community and belonging in a postmodern world: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire. Empire attempts to articulate where power and influence is located in the new global order and to reconcile an awareness of the continued relevance of the nation-state and other local and limited paradigms of being and belonging with the obvious realities of a world in which transnational, global empire dictates the ways in which people can define themselves and their relationships to the world around them. Hardt and Negri argue that:

[a]long with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new global logic and structure of rule – in short, a new form of sovereignty.[…] Our basic hypothesis is that sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire. (xi-xii)

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According to Hardt and Negri, the nation, and other localized, limited forms of belonging, continue to be relevant only insofar as they support and facilitate the supranational loci of Empire and control (the U.N., the G8, the World Bank), which are the arbiters of real power. In Empire, all is subsumed under the ever present reality of the globalization of hegemony.

If this is the case, does all postcolonial literature, art, and film distributed to a global audience inevitably get caught in the pernicious trap of Empire – or of postcoloniality? If both national and supranational (and, then, assumedly sub-national?) imagined communities are subject to “a single logic of rule,” how do postcolonial artists reflect on the struggles and pleasures of connecting with other human beings in the contemporary world without falling into the traps laid by Empire and its attendant institutions? In “Circulating Stories: Postcolonial Narratives and International Markets,”

I argue that postcolonial artists’ politics (their postcolonialism) and the field of exchange and circulation that these artists operate within (postcoloniality, or Empire, as Hardt and

Negri would call it) are intertwined and also negotiable. I suggest that artists can use the market and global exchange to further their national (or sub-national or supra-national) agendas. This suggests something other than hegemony, or the complete dominance of postcoloniality. But perhaps this is too optimistic. Perhaps my attempt to consider the artistic intentions and interpretive consequences of texts that engage both the national or sub-national and the global – my interest in texts that establish imagined communities

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and engage global markets – is naïve in its insistence on the potential functionality of the market and the possibility that international circulation can enable as well as impede a range of postcolonial projects.

Or, perhaps, rather than naïve, such an attempt to parse the ways texts manage (or don’t manage) to do what they intend to do despite what may be done with them in the context of circulation is one important way that we can acknowledge the realities of an increasingly globalized world and, at the same time, resist the fetishization of global capitalism’s power over cultural exchange; such a fetishization disables communication, understanding, and action. When I began this project, I fully intended to conclude with a discussion of the nefarious “machine” of postcoloniality and global circulation. I imagined a system of international cultural exchange that inevitably exoticized, compromised, and perverted postcolonialism and artistic intention. But, thankfully, the case studies have proven otherwise. In the context of this project, chapter one on Peck’s two Lumumbas is the exception that does not prove a rule. Peck, a filmmaker who seems less aware of or concerned with the ways in which he engages his international audience, does, to an extent, fall victim to the “machine” of postcoloniality, as the common misreadings of his work and the critical simplification of his cinematic, historical politics indicate. But while Peck’s Lumumbas imply the dangers of the market and of postcoloniality, Smith and Ghobadi provide examples of postcolonial artists who are able to negotiate global circulation – to use their knowledge of the market and of the institutions of global cultural exchange in order to challenge postcoloniality and advocate for their own imaginations of community.

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It would seem that postcolonial artists, from the cosmopolitan black British to the non-state nationalist Kurdish Iranian, are increasingly savvy about challenging and manipulating the “machine” of postcoloniality and the global market. Where Peck failed,

Smith and Ghobadi are making inroads and finding ways to use the global market both to advance and to epitomize their aesthetic and political platforms. Artists like Smith and

Ghobadi not only advocate a twenty-first century politics of alternative imagined communities through the execution of their craft, they demonstrate an acute ability to use the channels of global circulation and the expectations of international marketing to supplement their literary and cinematic goals – whether that means manipulating standard literary and cinematic classification and/or establishing new frameworks for understanding and categorizing postcolonial texts. There is no doubt that the “machine” of the international market continues to churn. But it is also certain that postcolonial artists will continue to discover the multitude of ways that they can throw the proverbial wrench in that global culture “machine.”

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1 The controversy over Shakespeare’s authorship is largely ignored by academics, but it continues to have currency with members of the reading public who postulate that historical figures – from Sir Francis Bacon to Christopher Marlowe to Mary Sidney Herbert – may be responsible for the body of work attributed to “the bard.” James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, a memoir that details the author’s struggle to overcome addiction, was famously discredited when it was revealed that many of the details in the text were embellished and/or invented. The book was an “Oprah’s Book Club” selection, and Oprah notoriously berated Frey on her television program.

2 In Islamic law (Sharia), fatwa refers to any religious decree or opinion by an Islamic scholar (in Sunni Islam, such a decree is not binding, in Shi’ite Islam it is). Within the west, fatwa is understood more specifically to refer to the pronouncement of a death sentence by an Islamic figure on an individual believed to be an “infidel” or blasphemer, though the true meaning of the word is clearly broader.

3 For more on the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses and the fatwa, see Daniel Pipes’ The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, The Ayatollah, and the West.

4 A testimonío is a form of life writing that stresses communal identification and political purpose. It is typically associated with Latin American literary traditions. More on this below.

5Pratt’s essay is included in Arturo Arias’ The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, a remarkably useful text for students and scholars of the Menchú controversy that provides the basis for much of my discussion. It includes useful introductory materials, numerous interviews from Menchú detractors and defenders published in popular papers, primarily from the Spanish speaking world (all in translation), as well as critical essays. My overview and analysis of the controversy in this introduction is meant to illustrate certain points about literary or political intent, circulation, and interpretation, not to be exhaustive. For an in depth account, see Arias.

6 The Larry Rohter article is available in Arias.

7 See Stoll’s Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans and/or, for both Stoll’s accusations and Menchú’s rebuttals, see Arias’ The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy.

8 In an interview published in December of 1998, Stoll further explains the impetus for his intellectual project: “Rigoberta said that her story was the story of all poor Guatemalans, but the story of a single individual cannot be the story of everybody else, except in a literary sense….I wanted to challenge preconceived and romantic ideas about indigenous peoples and guerilla warfare” (Arias 68).

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9 For an in-depth discussion of the dangers of intellectuals speaking of/for the subaltern, see the foundational postcolonial essay by Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak.”

10 In a 1999 interview, Menchú articulates claims similar to those from the Menchú Foundation press release: “I Rigoberta Menchú was a testimonial, not an autobiography…I have my truth of what I lived for twenty years. The history of the community is my own history” (Arias 110). Also in 1999, Arturo Taracena, one of the key players in the assembling the book along with Menchú and Burgos-Debray, spoke out about the process of composing the testimonío. A Menchú defender, he further downplayed the significance of Burgos-Debray’s role in creating the text stating: “the book is narration only by Rigoberta, wither her own rhythm, with her own inventions, if there are any, with her own emotions, with her own truths. What we [himself and Burgos-Debray] did afterward was the work of editing” (Arias 85). This runs counter to Burgos-Debray’s descriptions of shaping and narrativizing hours and hours of taped interviews, turning the oral testimony into a coherent narrative. The exact details of the collaboration between Menchú, Burgos-Debray, and Taracena has been contested, and the relationship between Menchú and Burgos-Debray has been strained at best. For various accounts of the details of the relationship, see Arias.

11 I don’t discuss the ways that Stoll is positioned in the international cultural market at any length in what follows, as this introduction and dissertation are concerned with the circulation of postcolonial narratives in the international arena, not with the production and circulation of academic studies focused on postcolonial texts and issues. Nonetheless, it is worth briefly mentioning two points. First, it is unlikely that Stoll’s dry, academic study would have had nearly the impact that it did had The New York Times not run a cover story on it. That is to say that the audience and circulation of academic texts is inherently limited and, therefore, unlikely to initiate such a “stir” unless it is picked up by a popular source that can disseminate the academic argument to an audience outside the university walls. Second, just as Menchú’s identity has led to an essentialization of her authentic indigeneity, Stoll’s identity as an outsider and his background in anthropology (a field that has not always had a particularly positive relationship with native communities globally) structures the likely responses of indigenous and postcolonial people to a political and historical critique such as that presented in Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans.

12 To briefly clarify about the authors listed and their scandals or controversies: Menchú and Rushdie, see above; Sally Morgan is an Australian aboriginal author who was attacked by historian Bain Attwood for supposedly co-opting an authentic aboriginal identity in her life narrative of indigenous self-discovery, My Place; V.S. Naipaul is a Trinidadian born Indian British Nobel prize winner who is considered an imperial collaborator by many postcolonial writers and critics for his harsh and arguably racist, eurocentric critiques of the postcolonial world; Mira Nair is an Indian director whose popular films (especially Salaam Bombay! (1988) and Monsoon Wedding (2001)) have been dismissed by many postcolonial critics as exotic spectacles produced to

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accommodate western cultural tourism; and the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) was tremendously controversial when it was released for its heroic depictions of militant anti-colonial violence and produced a bit of a public scandal in 2003 when the WashingtonPost.com broke the story that the Pentagon was holding screenings of the film in order to educate officers and civilian experts about guerilla warfare (Ignatius).

13 Of course I recognize that I, too, am subject to the assumptions and purposes indicated by my own position in relation to Menchú’s text and to the scandal surrounding the work. That said, I have attempted to approach the subject objectively and propose a balanced critique that considers the strengths and weaknesses of a range of arguments about the testimonío, while at the same time recognizing that complete objectivity is impossible.

14 All narrative texts, of course, are rhetorical; they all attempt to communicate a meaning to an audience for a specific purpose. But the texts under consideration here are “highly rhetorical,” I argue, because the production of significant political, aesthetic, or literary critique constitutes one of the central purposes of the text.

15 The Battle of Algiers provides a symbolic and creative interpretation of historical records and the accounts of FLN members to depict the events that took place during the Algerian war for independence during the crucial years from 1954 to 1960. Stylistically, the film draws upon Italian Neorealist and traditional documentary or newsreel styles. Much has been written about the film’s innovative narrative strategies and continued political relevance. The Motorcycle Diaries tells the story of the road trip that Latin American anti-imperialist radical militant Ernesto “Che” Guevara took from his home in Argentina to Venezuela – a trip that is widely credited with developing the political consciousness of the young Che. The film follows the conventions of biographical narrative filmmaking much more faithfully than The Battle of Algiers, though Salles includes some striking moments where black and white still frames that break through the narrative deconstruct the spectatorial gaze in interesting and provocative ways.

16 These films include the following: Young Winston (1972), a biographical film about Winston Churchill’s formative years; A Bridge Too Far (1977), a historical film about World War II; Gandhi (1982), discussed in this chapter; Cry Freedom (1987), which examines South African journalist Donald Woods’ investigation into the death of murdered activist Steve Biko; Chaplin (1992), a biopic on comedic genius Charlie Chaplin; Shadowlands(1993), about author and critic C.S. Lewis; In Love and War (1996), which details Ernest Hemingway’s days as a war reporter; and Grey Owl (1999), a film about a Canadian fur trapper who “passes” as a Native American. Attenborough’s historical and biographical tastes are truly diverse and indicate the increasingly globalized world we live in today.

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17 This reified Mahatma has little in common with the often shockingly human Gandhi in An Autobiography: Or the Story of My Experiments With Truth who catalogs in detail his eating and bathroom habits and confesses to violent confrontations with his wife.

18 Peck’s two most famous feature films are Haitian Corner (1988) and The Man by the Shore (1993); both are about Haiti under the rule of the Duvalier regime. Peck has also directed a number of short films.

19 More specifically, the 1991 Lumumba works to do five primary things: first, it situates Peck’s directorial or authorial subjectivity in relation to the history of the DROC; second, it interrogates the processes of narrativizing history; third, it explores the relationship between filmmaker, viewer, and biographical subject; fourth, it exposes the ways in which the myth of Lumumba has been created out of contesting narratives circulated through the media, politicians, and time; and, fifth, it provides a meditation on the value of Lumumba as man and as myth and considers the implications of resurrecting Lumumba from the threat of historical erasure. I discuss many of these five purposes in what follows.

20 In Phelan’s terms, by arguing that I am “more right” than other members of the implied Peck’s audience, I am suggesting that I am closer to entering the authorial audience, or “the hypothetical, ideal audience for whom the author constructs the text and who understands it perfectly” (Phelan 215). Since I argue that each of the texts under consideration in this dissertation is intended for a international audience, and because I am a “trained” interpreter of texts, I can claim to be positioned by the implied Peck as a potential member of the authorial audience. However, more than reader subjectivity is involved in the process of entering an authorial audience, and much of my argument in this chapter and in the dissertation suggests that the context of global marketing and circulation of texts initiates processes of underreading and overreading that prevent entrance into authorial audiences.

21 I expect and invite refutations of my specific intentional interpretations, and I hope that any resulting dialogue will enrich our ability to critically engage with the complex interplay of aesthetic and political purpose, global circulation, and critical reception. As a culturally located interpreter of these narrative texts, I am as likely as the next critic to misread textual cues and/or to be swayed by the contexts of circulation and consumption, but what is central to my argument is that if we wish, as postcolonial scholars, as people committed to international communication and understanding, and as “good readers,” to engage these narrative texts in a meaningful way, we cannot overlook any of the central loci of analysis indicated by the methodology proposed in this dissertation.

22 The story/discourse distinction is also commonly referred to with the terms story and plot. While some narrative theorists debate the subtle differences between using plot and discourse, I follow Dorrit Cohn in using of discourse throughout this chapter, though I believe plot works just as well for my purposes.

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23 Throughout this discussion, I will refer to Peck as the author/director of these two films, though I acknowledge that in all cinema the relationship between a single author/director and a filmic product is complicated and multi-faceted. I do this primarily for ease and clarity of prose, though it is also true that Peck has been able, as an independent filmmaker of international renown and an acknowledged auteur, to exercise greater autonomy and creative control over his films than many other directors who work within established systems. In addition, it is often the case that when I am referring to Peck as author/director, I am really referring to the implied Peck, the Peck available through the cinematic discourse. This implied Peck, as an interpretive narrative construct, will be perceived by most viewers as a unified creative entity, despite general acceptance of the collaborative nature of filmmaking.

24 This is likely also a reference to the conditions under which Peck made the documentary. As Peck’s voice-over narration suggests in another scene, Mobutu’s regime, which was still in power in the DROC at the time of the filming, made it difficult or impossible for Peck to shoot in the Congo. Like Lumumba the prophet that Peck searches for in the streets of Brussels, Peck’s 1991 Lumumba was exiled from the nation that inspired it. Although Mobutu was no longer in power in the DROC by the time Peck’s 2000 Lumumba was filmed, the political situation in the country still made it too dangerous to shoot there, and most of the filming took place in Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

25 While Phelan’s definition of authorial audience posits a reader or viewer who “understands it [the text] perfectly,” some postcolonial writers, in an attempt to challenge the epistemological mastery of western educated intellectuals and critics, work to purposefully occlude the possibility of perfect textual communication and understanding. Gayatri Spivak’s seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak” enacts this epistemological challenge, and this phenomena is explored in greater detail in Doris Sommer’s “Resistant Texts and Incompetent Readers.” In addition, Rigoberta Menchú’s famous (and infamous) testimonío I, Rigoberta Menchú demonstrates this narrative resistance and is discussed in both the introduction and conclusion to this dissertation.

26 Attenborough, on the other hand, chose to circulate his In Search of Gandhi concurrent with the biopic’s release, perhaps hoping to capitalize on the “buzz” surrounding the film.

27 The relationship between postcolonial studies’ ostensibly subversive politics and reliance on global capitalism for its perpetuation and circulation is further discussed in Huggan’s study as the distinction between postcolonialism and postcoloniality.

28 The Internet Movie Database, or IMDb, is a public, online database with information about films, television shows, actors, directors, etc. IMDb was established in 1990 and has been owned and operated by Amazon.com since 1998. Users can access the site and, without paying a fee, rate and review movies or participate in discussion boards.

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29 In the case of the 2000 Lumumba, enough academic and popular reviews exist to allow me to indicate patterns and trends. Unfortunately, the 1991 film has not been extensively treated, and so what I have tried to do is to isolate moments and issues that seem indicative of possible trends. The work is necessarily more speculative. It is worth noting that if my hypothesis is correct, and the film is being received as interesting primarily in the context of theoretical discussions that take place within a rarefied academic market, this could account for the dearth of responses to the film. This fact is extremely significant, as, with the current speed of technological advancement, the 1991 film is likely to be lost in obscurity if it is not released on DVD soon. Insomuch as critical responses structure assumptions about the limited audience for the film, such a release is unlikely.

30 On the California Newsreel official website note, for example, the links to “Diversity Training and Multiculturalism,” “Recommended for High School Use,” and “Facilitator Guides” as well as their stated goal to “inform, educate, and organize.”

31 It is difficult to provide a matrix to evaluate wide popular recognition. However, including “big names” such as Todd Haynes – who has two Academy Award nominated films under his belt, Velvet Goldmine (starring Ewan McGregor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and Christian Bale) and I’m Not There (starring Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, and Heath Ledger) – and Christopher Nolan, whose success with Memento has been greatly outdone with the recent release of the latest installment of the Batman series, The Dark Knight, indicates that Zeitgeist is clearly courting a popular audience for their films.

32 Mustapha claims, for instance, that after watching the film he was “lost in space, disoriented, unable to identify with my own world in the way it demands,” and also refers to feeling “disembodied” (80). Mustapha’s observations are astute, but they only attend to part of the picture. Numerous narrative strategies and important moments in the poetic voice-over, discussed above, function to pull the viewer back from her disorientation through the possibility of reorientation through narrative and the existence of a referential level.

33 While it is outside the scope of this chapter to take up Reddy’s claim that Peck’s storytelling techniques draw on the narrative traditions of African griots, the idea is suggestive and would constitute an interesting project. It might be particularly productive to consider the interplay between the indigenous narrative strategies identified by Reddy and the fact that Peck was trained as a filmmaker in Germany and has often referred to the European or avant-garde influence in his films.

34 It is worth stating the obvious here and acknowledging that one of the many wonderful benefits of the internet for critics and scholars is the sudden accessibility of, for example,

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popular responses to a film from a viewer in Cameroon as I sit in my living room in the United States.

35 I recognize, of course, that one reason for the disparity between reviews of the film written for academic journals and IMDb.com is that the intended audiences and purposes of these two sites are entirely different. However, this only goes to validate my larger point that the perceived circulation and market for texts and ideas to a great extent structures their reception and interpretation.

36 For a similar perspective, see also Deborah Young’s review of the film in Variety.

37 I am hesitant to acquiesce to Zook’s claim that Peck discovers in Lumumba a Congolese “everyman” both because Peck must be acutely aware of Lumumba’s pre- independence status as an extremely privileged African subject within the colonial order and because it seems that Lumumba’s exceptionalism, his visionary powers, and his symbolic weight are all central to Peck’s representation and preclude his “everyman” status.

38 I use the term multiculturalism throughout this chapter to denote a political philosophy and administrative program that emphasizes the range of cultures that constitute modern society at both the local and the global levels. Multiculturalism, in its simplest form, can be summed up by slogans such as “tolerate difference” and “celebrate diversity.” I offer a more complete discussion of multiculturalism below.

39 Clare Squires’ Zadie Smith’s White Teeth: A Reader’s Guide usefully summarizes popular responses to the novel, and includes a section on multiculturalism. Squires notes that multiculturalism “is one of the abiding themes of White Teeth, a theme that incorporates the legacy of empire, the assemblage of immigrants in the old imperial centers, and the multicultural societies that are thus produced” (23). Similarly, Peter Childs’s chapter on Smith in Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction Since 1970 includes a section on “Themes: Ethnicity, Nationality, and Multiculturalism,” and he argues that “White Teeth focuses on three families [….] Each of which embody or express a different experience of multicultural Britain” (206). In “Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Multiculturalism for the Millennium,” Dominic Head claims that Smith has given “convincing shape to her presentation of an evolving and genuinely multicultural Britain” (107).

40 It is, perhaps, unsurprising that Smith would be picked up by MTV’s advertising department. She is young, attractive, and hip, and her novels, especially White Teeth, make extensive references to popular cultural ala the MTV generation.

41 The Chicago Cultural Studies Group calls this the “Benetton effect,” and they argue that “Multiculturalism may therefore prove a poor slogan. Those who use it as a slogan seem to think that it intrinsically challenges cultural norms. But multiculturalism is

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proving to be fluid enough to describe very different styles of cultural relations, and corporate multiculturalism is proving that the concept need not have any critical content” (532)

42 See pages 96 and 97 of this chapter for excerpts from interviews with Smith in which she addresses the issue of her classification as a multicultural author.

43 In the final chapter on Bahman Ghobadi’s Kurdish national cinema, we turn to a director who strategically negotiates the forces of postcoloniality in order to advance his own nationalist postcolonialism.

44 Smith is clearly punning on a number of grammatical terms in this refrain: “past tense,” “future perfect,” and “mood” all describe verbs. Significantly, the verb tense missing in this formulation is present tense – emphasizing again the novel’s focus on looking backward and looking forwards.

45 My contention here is that the emphasis on Smith’s multicultural otherness has structured responses to her work. I am not, however, arguing that we erase any idea of a subjectivity behind the text. The individual author’s emergence from behind the text can be important in an aesthetic that values the ethical project of the public intellectual—a project that “death of the author” perspectives do not allow. In Smith’s case, this means, among other things, considering the ways in which she has resisted the easy, dominant marketing and circulation strategies evident in postcolonial studies and articulated by Huggan’s concept of the postcolonial exotic.

46 See Clare Squires’ Zadie Smith’s White Teeth: A Reader’s Guide, page 16 and following for a discussion of the comparisons made between Smith and Rushdie and Kureishi. Also, in order to clarify the claim above that the new generation of multicultural British subjects were only “marginally represented” in the works of these previous authors, I refer, for example, to the relatively peripheral characters the daughters of Hind from The Satanic Verses. When the two young women, aged 15 and 17, first appear in the novel they are described as “one spike-haired, the other pony-tailed […] in fighting gear, Bruce Lee pajamas worn loosely over T-shirts bearing the image of the new Madonna [….] ’Radical,’ said Mishal, approvingly. And her sister nodded assent: ‘Crucial. Fucking A’” (253). The daughters of Hind, and Rushdie’s description of them, sound like something straight out of Smith’s White Teeth. The contemporary pop culture references and slang used to define the characters are also undeniably Smithian. These two characters, however, are marginal to the action of the novel and are represented as examples of the new, somewhat strange kind of urban Indian British youth. And assuming that the contemporary action in the novel takes place in 1985 (which we can deduce based on fact that the two plane crashes that inspired the opening plane crash in the novel both occurred in 1985), the two young women would have been born in 1970 and 1968 – just 5-7 years before Smith and her characters (Irie, Millat, Magid) were born, making them relative contemporaries.

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47 The assertion of a relative abatement in explicit racism and xenophobia in the post- Thatcher era must be reconsidered, unfortunately, in light of the politics and discourses of post-9/11 Britain. It seems possible that the late century London of White Teeth represents a moment of relative racial harmony bracketed between the conservative policies of Cold War and post-9/11 racism and xenophobia.

48 See, for example, Salman Rushdie’s representation of “Ellowen Deeowen” in The Satanic Verses (1988) or the novels and screenplays of a multicultural England by Hanif Kureishi, such as The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), The Black Album (1995), My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987).

49 Issac Leung shares all three of these identity categories with the protagonist of Smith’s second novel, The Autograph Man (2003), Alex Li Tandem. Alex’s name is indicative of Smith’s sense of humor, as readers are invited to imagine Alex’s multiple identities in “tandem,” one behind the other.

50 It is interesting in this regard that even the Chalfens, the family most associated with conventional definitions of white Britishness in the novel, whom Irie believes to be “more English than the English,” are Jewish and “after a fashion, immigrants too (third generation, by way of Germany and Poland, né Chalfenovsky” (273). It seems that in Smith’s literary world, every Englishman is a “funny kind of Englishman.”

51 The immigrant’s fears of the nationalist threat identified in the passage – “what the immigrant fears – dissolution, disappearance” – should not be trivialized either. However, these fears of dissolution, disappearance, and the erasure of culture are primarily associated throughout the novel with characters from the older generation (Samad) or with ideologically inconsistent and politically problematic positions (Millat and KEVIN). I discuss this at greater length later in this chapter when I take up the question of roots.

52 Throughout this chapter I refer to the “genrification” of race and difference, and in doing so I follow Smith’s sarcastic assertion that “I have brown people in my book, and so does Salman, and so does Hanif Kureishi. So it's a genre, don't you see that?”. In other words, the “genrification” of race and difference refers to the tendency to categorize postcolonial authors according to a fetishized fascination with their representations of race and difference instead of their literary techniques, plot structures, adherence to various genre conventions, etc.

53 The Guardian’s author page on Smith notes that “[o]f the classics, Smith admires Nabokov, EM Forster, Zora Neale Hurston; in contemporary writing, she has allied herself with young Americans such as Dave Eggers” (“Zadie Smith”). The influence of E.M. Forster on Smith’s work is especially evident as her third novel, On Beauty, which is a contemporary rewriting of Forster’s classic Howard’s End. I return to these points later in this chapter.

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54 It is possible to read the exchange between Millat and Joyce as emphasizing the ways in which, despite Millat’s own self-identification as a “typical” British subject, he remains outside the mainstream and normalized definitions of national identity. And, to an extent, this is the case. Smith remains aware throughout the novel that barriers remain in place that impede the complete integration into the mainstream by black British subjects such as Millat. However, as Millat grows older and becomes involved with the radical Islamist KEVIN, it becomes glaringly apparent that the young man is nothing if not a product of and full participant in British popular and national culture. While he attempts to connect with some kind of essential South Asian, Muslim identity, such attempts are futile, and the young man’s motives for joining KEVIN have more to do with an infatuation with the hyper-masculinity of gangster movies and hip-hop than the politics of hybrid identity (in this regard, compare Millat to Hanif Kureishi’s Ali from “My Son the Fanatic” – whose decision to join a radical group is prompted by experiences of racism and alienation).

55 Williams states: “there is then a much earlier attempt to incorporate them [emergent discourses], just because they are part – and yet not a defined part – of effective contemporary practice. Indeed it is very significant in our own period how very early this attempt is, how alert the dominant culture now is to anything that can be seen as emergent”(8).

56 The distinction made here between multiculturalism as a superficial philosophy where young people are taught to engage symbols of “other” cultural traditions and multiculturalism as a philosophy that reifies difference is addressed by Stanley Fish, who in his insightful article “Boutique Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals are Incapable of Thinking About Hate Speech” argues for a distinction between boutique multiculturalism and strong multiculturalism. Fish argues that both philosophical versions of multiculturalism are inherently and logically flawed. The former is defined by “its superficial or cosmetic relationship to the objects of its affection….[boutique multiculturalists] ‘recognize the legitimacy of’ the traditions of cultures other than their own”(378). Strong multiculturalism, on the other hand, holds that “the first principle is not rationality or some other supracultural universal, but tolerance” (382). In order to illustrate this distinction, Fish takes up the example of the fatwa against author Salman Rushdie, and he argues that while the boutique multiculturalist will be appalled by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s declaration, he or she will continue to enjoy the superficial symbols of Persian and Islamic cultures (food, observation of religious holidays, etc). The strong multiculturalist, on the other hand, will have to condone the fatwa in order to maintain his or her complete belief in “tolerance” for cultural difference.

57 Here, again, Smith makes reference to the genrification of race and difference.

58 The non-realist, imaginative elements of Smith’s fiction are perhaps most evident in the numerous improbable coincidences that drive the plot of the novel. The incident of the

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twins’ broken noses and the return of Dr. Sick at the end of the novel are commonly noted in this respect. Marcus Chalfen’s genetically engineered Future Mouse also seems to position the novel within non-realist genres. It is significant, then, that Smith’s work has been variously categorized according to hyphenated realist genres such as magical realism or hysterical realism. James Woods’ concept of hysterical realism will be discussed in greater detail below.

59 Not surprisingly, the Channel Four Television White Teeth miniseries, released in 2002 and directed by Julian Jarrold, only superficially references these historical reminders of Britain’s colonial legacy. Instead of focusing on the postcolonial “ripping teeth,” the television adaptation focuses on the novel’s multicultural representations. In-depth critical considerations of the relationship between the novel and Jarrold’s adaptation are needed.

60 Mangal Pande, sometimes spelled Mangal Pandey, was a member of the Bengal Native Infantry of the British East India Company. He is widely known for firing the shot that began the 1857 Indian Mutiny. There has been some dispute as to Pande’s motivations for firing the infamous shot, and while some historians maintain that Pande was a hero and martyr for Indian independence, others believe that Pande may have simply been drunk and fired the shot accidentally. In contrast to the story of Mangal Pande, the story of Ambrosia Bowden’s education and the Kingston Earthquake of 1907 is only loosely based in verifiable history. While a devastating earthquake did strike Kingston in 1907, the primary characters in this narrative strand, Clara’s grandmother Ambrosia, her white grandfather Captain Charlie Durham, and the tobacco plantationist and “philanthropist” Sir Edmund Flecker Glenard, do not appear to correspond to historical figures. Captain Charlie Durham may have been superficially inspired by the British Naval officer Admiral Sir Philip Charles Durham who served in the early portion of the nineteenth century and spent a brief period in the Caribbean, but such a historical connection does little to enlighten Smith’s characterization of Captain Charlie in White Teeth. It is important to note that while Ambrosia’s story is not based in a concrete historical narrative like Pande’s, her story, detailing the sexual abuse and “education” of a black Jamaican woman by a white, British officer, is much more common than Pande’s story of historic martyrdom. Therefore, while the story may not be equally grounded in historical fact, it can be said to carry significant historical weight.

61 According to the narrative put forth in White Teeth, and adhered to by Samad, Pande revolted after discovering that the new bullets supplied to the sepoys, which had a casing that had to be bitten in order to fit into the barrels of guns, were greased in the fat of cows and pigs – offending both Hindus and Muslims alike.

62 Just as Samad’s resistance to cultural imperialism is compromised by his unwitting immersion in western culture and values, Mangal Pande’s complicity with colonial

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practices is apparent in his position as a sepoy. Samad, of course, does not recognize this.

63 For a particularly influential critical study of the gendering of the colonial project see Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest.

64 Irie’s quest to uncover her hidden family history is almost entirely centered around her matrilineal line. Archie’s past is also a mystery; he knows little other than that his mother worked in an ale house.

65 The notion, expressed by Smith’s narrator in this passage, that it is a “wicked lie” to assume that the past is tense and the future is perfect can be read as ironic. The narrator’s tone fluctuates throughout the novel among un-intrusive reporting, didactic commentary, and sarcasm and irony. Because the “past tense, future perfect” refrain is so oft repeated throughout the novel, it seems strange for the narrator to critique this central concept only on the final page of the text. Furthermore, the passage is followed by the final paragraph of the novel, which narrates the character of Archie, who has repeated the “crimes” of his past in the present by saving the life of the former Nazi scientist Dr. Sick for a second time, watching the aptly named Future Mouse escape to freedom and thinking “Go on my son!” (448). This paragraph aptly expresses the “past-tense, future-perfect kind of mood” that readers find Archie in at the beginning of the novel and that I argue indicates the skeptical optimism of White Teeth.

66 See, for example, Homi Bhabha’s seminal collection of essays Nation and Narration, especially Timothy Brennan’s essay “The National Longing for Form.” See also Jonathan Culler’s “Anderson and the Novel,” Brennan’s Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation, and Frederic Jameson’s controversial “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.”

67 Anderson borrows the concept of homogenous, empty time from theorist Walter Benjamin and argues that this specific kind of experience of temporality replaced previous mediaeval notions of simultaneity-along-time and was central to the imagination of nations. Homogenous, empty time is time “in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar”(25).

68 For a detailed discussion of the international enthusiasm about and uncritical support for postcolonial nationalisms in the post-independence era see the chapter “Literature Among the Signs of Our Times” in Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures.

69 According to Ahmad, the exploitative and violent potential of anti-imperial or postcolonial nationalisms became undeniable after the success of the 1979 Iranian

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Revolution and the ascension of the Ayatollah Khomeini and his oppressive Islamic regime.

70 I will return to a discussion of anti-nationalism and postnationalism in the conclusion to this dissertation. It is, however, important to note that in places like Palestine, Kurdistan, Puerto Rico, or Hawaii where there is a continuing struggle for independence and nationhood, anti-colonial nationalism still has considerable ideological currency.

71 Anderson departs from scholar Ernest Gellner, however, in his assertion that though the nation is imagined and, in a sense, illusory, it’s status as a “fiction” is not the point: “With a certain ferocity Gellner makes a comparable point when he rules that ‘Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.’ The drawback to this formulation, however, is that Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false pretenses that he assimilates ‘invention’ to ‘fabrication’ and ‘falsity’, rather than to ‘imagining’ and ‘creation’. In this way he implies that true communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations….Communities are to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (6).

72 In Chapter 1 and Raoul Peck’s Lumumbas, the myth of the martyred Prime Minister, who serves as a symbol of the Congolese (and postcolonial African) people narratively binds the nation. In Chapter 3 I discuss how Ghobadi mobilizes tropes, such as the woman as nation formulation, to narratively represent a unified nation. I also argue that the establishment of a Kurdish cinematic tradition manifest the Kurdish nation in the global market.

73 The character of Kitty Alexander is fictional and not based on an actual Hollywood starlet. Her claim to fame, and to Alex’s heart, is her breakthrough role in The Girl from Peking – a film in which the Russian émigré plays a Chinese woman whose search for love and success results in a fitting and predictable Hollywood happy ending.

74 The character of Honey Richardson is loosely based on the infamous Divine Brown, the Los Angeles prostitute who was arrested for performing fellatio on British heartthrob Hugh Grant in a BMW in 1995. This pop culture reference, and the many others in The Autograph Man, highlight the novels obsession with “low,” trendy, Hollywood culture. Smith’s first two novels are littered with such pop culture references. Her third novel – On Beauty – is more restrained in this respect, with few references made to American pop culture despite the fact that three main characters in the novel are young African American teenagers who would, presumably, offer Smith ample opportunity to revel in her extensive pop culture knowledge. Tellingly, Levi, the Belsley’s youngest son and an aspiring hip-hop artist – doesn’t lead Smith to include the proliferation of pop culture references that Millat does in White Teeth (gangster movies, American and British pop music, etc). For example, despite On Beauty’s preoccupation with hip-hop music, the only actual rapper mentioned in the text is Tupac – the most “high culture” of rap

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artists. This move may be the result of Smith’s explicit intertextual engagement with Forster in the novel and her consequent privileging of literary references over pop culture.

75 Significantly, Alex’s misled project would seem to be indicative of his fascination with “the other.” As Smith’s narrator states, “For a while now, his book had been in crisis. It was lopsided. Goyishness, in all its forms, had become an obsession” (78).

76 While the first half of the novel focuses on the “Kabbalah of Alex-Li Tandem,” the second half is titled “The Zen of Alex-Li Tandem,” in a clear reference to the other half of Alex’s religious legacy. Buddhism, however, is never as fully integrated into the novel as Judaism and Kabbalah. And while a quote from a twelfth century Buddhist master pertaining to Zen and the “bull [which] is the eternal principle of life” starts the section, which is composed of chapters with the word “bull” in the title, this move to Buddhism seems superficial and does very little to illuminate the novel’s central concerns. As many critics have noted, Smith seems to have packed The Autograph Man so full of references and competing discourses that she is ultimately unable to follow each thread through to a satisfying conclusion (see, for example, Michiko Kakutani’s review from the New York Times, “An Elusive, Whimsical, Autograph,” or “Signs and Wanders,” by Alex Clark writing for The Guardian). I will come back to this point later in this section.

77 McSweeney’s is an American publishing house founded by Dave Eggers that is most famous for the quarterly literary journal Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. McSweeney’s regularly features the work of young, up and coming writers as well as contributions from established authors from Michael Chabon to Stephen King. Ruth Franklin defines the McSweeney’s aesthetic in a review for Slate.com as “a hipster writer’s dream zine” and goes on to define the genre: “[the] McSweeney's story may share certain things with the sub-genre Chabon identified as ‘the New Yorker short story’—it's contemporary, it's often quotidian, it's certainly plotless—but it substitutes nihilism for epiphany. In an early issue, a set of facetious manuscript guidelines warned that ‘material possessing beginnings, middles, or ends will be read with suspicion’—which isn't a bad description of the work of the young writers the magazine has consistently championed. These are writers…who reject conventional notions of structure, character, or coherence. They owe a lot to Barthelme's surrealism and Barth's parody. But their work replaces the joyful playfulness that characterized the experimentalists of the 1960s and '70s with a lugubrious fictional haze in which ideas and images float unbound by anything resembling form or insight.” Franklin’s definition of the “genre” oversimplifies the matter and is far from objective (the title of her review is “The 98 Pound Gorilla in the Room: How the Spindly McSweeney’s Short Story Became a Menace”), but in its oversimplification and generalization it offers a useful caricature of the form that is sufficient for our purposes in this chapter.

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78 It should be noted that in using the term black to refer to Smith (biracial, Jamaican and British), Kureishi (Pakistani British), and Rushdie (Indian British with connections of Pakistan), I am following a prevalent British conception of race that considers all members of the former colonies, whether from South Asia, Africa, or the Caribbean, “black.”

79 The following synopsis and analysis of On Beauty only superficially addresses Smith’s adaptation of her source material. A more complete study is needed but outside the purview of this chapter. I will, however, discuss the motives for and implications of Smith borrowing from Forster later in this section.

80 Briefly, while in Howard’s End the emphasis is on the connection and unification of various classes in the context of a turn of the century Britain where class boundaries were breaking down and people were finding themselves living in proximity to an increasingly diverse demographic, On Beauty shifts its attention to the unification of various classes, nationalities, races, and ethnicities living together in a turn of the century (the other turn of the century) increasingly globalized world.

81 There is evidence in the text that Howard works hard to suppress his affective response to beauty and aesthetic power – to force his human reaction to the beautiful into line with his theory of anti-aestheticism and the manipulative politics of beauty. After the death of Carlene Kipps, and at the behest of Kiki and Jerome, the Belsleys all attend the funeral in London. Howard, sitting amidst the simple, rustic beauty of the funeral ceremony, has such a visceral response to the tragic beauty of the scene that he gets up and walks out. The visceral reaction initiates a moral response, as Howard leaves the church and walks to the home of his estranged father. Once in his father’s home, away from the influence of the beautiful scene, Howard’s desire for human connection – in this case with this father – dissipates, and Howard is confronted with the mundane details of his former working class life. Shortly after this, Howard shows up at the Kipps’ residence, where the rest of his family is visiting with friends. It is at this moment, made vulnerable by his aesthetic experience and the consequent shattering of the beauty he saw and felt around him in the church, that Howard sinks to his ultimate low, sleeping with Victoria Kipps at her own mother’s funeral.

82 Watman also argues that Forster’s call to “only connect” should be read ironically, as in Howard’s End to “only connect” is “dangerous stuff” (59). While I acknowledge that the destruction of the Basts does indicate the danger of human connection, the ending of the novel, with Henry, Margaret, Helen, and Helen’s child from her sexual encounter with Bast all living together in peace at Howard’s End, provides a hopeful and optimistic vision of human connection.

83 It is not my intention to homogenize all people (or even all young people) here. I refer to the increasingly global consciousness of youth in the “developed world” in order to recognize that there are large segments of the world population who do not have access to

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the technologies of globalization (from television to Netflix and especially the internet) that produce the conditions under which racial and cultural difference ceases to be strange and becomes commonplace. We needn’t do more than look back to the previous chapter and ahead to the following chapter for proof of this fact; young people in Lumumba’s Democratic Republic of Congo, Peck’s Haiti, and Ghobadi’s Kurdistan do not necessarily have the same privileged access to the youth cosmopolitanism that Smith does. Nonetheless, it is worth pointing out that globalization would seem to be in such advanced stages that even in the so called “Third World” evidence of this globalization of culture is obvious (see my discussion of Turtles Can Fly in Chapter 3 Kurdish cinema for one example). That said, Smith’s literary interest in the politics of the metropole and in literary postcolonialism is obviously very different from the more anti-colonial or imperial Third World politics of artists like Raoul Peck or Bahman Ghobadi.

84 If Smith ever comes close to representing this kind of commodified postmodern difference, it is in The Autograph Man. However, the novel’s structural and thematic insistence on human connection complicates such a reading. See my discussion of the novel above.

85 It has become commonplace to assume that postcolonial studies is primarily concerned with the art, history, and politics of formerly colonized nation-states in Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean. This regionalization of the field is increasingly being challenged as scholars use postcolonial theoretical frameworks to address neo- imperialism in South and Central America and the Middle East, legacies of Soviet and non-European colonialism in the Middle and Far East, the marginalization and radicalization of diasporic postcolonial communities living within the former seats of colonial power, and ongoing struggles for sovereignty carried on by indigenous communities in Australia, New Zealand, and the Americas, to name just a few sites of critical expansion of the postcolonial.

86 In the 1991 revised edition of Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson states that “the ‘end of the era of nationalism,’ so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time” (3). While Anderson’s argument is now more than fifteen years old, current events, such as those occurring in Africa and the Middle East, indicate the continued relevance of the nation as a site of political legitimacy as well as conflict. The continued relevance of the nation in the supposed post-national era will be taken up at greater length in the conclusion to this dissertation.

87 Africa, too, is a site of many struggles for sovereignty within and across the borders of existing nation-states (see, for example, my discussion of Katangan secession in the Democratic Republic of Congo in chapter one of this dissertation). Often, however, collective identity within these struggles is formulated on the basis of tribal rather than national identification. For a more extensive discussion of the history and implications of

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the continued conflicts over nationality and borders in Africa, see Basil Davidson’s Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation State (1992).

88 According to McClintock, direct colonization involves “direct territorial appropriation of another geopolitical entity, combined with forthright exploitation of its resources and labor, and systematic interference in the capacity of the appropriated culture…to organize its dispensations of power,” and deep settler colonization, such as occurred in Algeria or Vietnam, indicates a system where a significant number of subjects from the colonial center of power migrate to the colony and, in doing so, establish entirely new relations of power within the colonized region. Decolonization, in the case of deep settler colonization, is often particularly brutal. Internal colonization, on the other hand, “occurs where the dominant part of a country treats a group or region as it might a foreign colony” (295).

89 Due to the complexities of transliteration, Ghobadi is sometimes referenced as Qobadi in criticism and reviews. I will use the more common Ghobadi throughout this chapter.

90 The distinctness of each of the Kurdish dialects is largely due to two primary factors. First, depending on the nation state in which a particular Kurdish linguistic community is located, there will be traces of the infiltration of an official national language. In Iran, Kurdish language is inflected by Persian. In Syria and Iraq, there will be traces of Arabic, and in Turkey, where language suppression has been particularly violent, Turkish language will have an influence on local dialects. Second, because Kurdistan is so vast and the geography is so rugged (the region is extremely mountainous), various linguistic communities exist in relative isolation and there is often no extensive communication or interaction between Kurdish groups.

91 For a more detailed account of the early history of Kurdish nationalism see Jwaideh, The Kurdish National Movement: Its Origins and Development.

92 Mullahs are Islamic clergymen. Ahmadi Khani was a seventeenth century writer and philosopher born in modern day Turkey who taught the Kurdish language (Kurmanji) and was among the first Kurds to advocate for independence. He is the author of Mem û Zîn, a classic of Kurdish literature. Haji Qadir was a poet and Kurdish language advocate who carried Khani’s nationalist message into the nineteenth century. In the 1880’s he called on the Kurds to establish their own independent state.

93 Since undergoing several political facelifts in the early 2000s, the PKK is also known as KADEK or Kongra-Gel.

94 I refer to Ghobadi as a non-state filmmaker here and throughout, but I also acknowledge that his dual position as both a Kurd and an Iranian is more complex than that ascription suggests. Ghobadi’s status as an Iranian director is taken up at greater

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length later in this essay, but it is crucial to my argument that Ghobadi’s Kurdishness is central to his cinematic project and artistic identity.

95 As Huggan suggests, two major postcolonial scholars who have seemingly succumbed to the tendency to condemn postcolonial studies wholesale based on the influence of global-capitalist markets and postcoloniality are Arif Dirlik and Aijaz Ahmad. Huggan argues that both theorists have provided an invaluable skepticism in a field too ready to extol the virtues of emancipatory art and politics, but, he suggests, the two go too far, tossing out the proverbial baby with the bath water. See Huggans’ The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, pages 8-10, for further discussion.

96 In the interest of accuracy, it is worth noting here that Ghobadi may be overstating the case just a bit. While this evidence is merely anecdotal, in Sanandaj, the capital of Iranian Kurdistan where Ghobadi spent his teenage years, there are currently three movie houses that play Iranian and international films (primarily Indian). In fact, both of Ghobadi’s first two films were shown in Sanandaj. The price of a ticket in U.S. currency is about $0.75, and it is within the means of many of the Kurdish families living in the city to go to the movies fairly regularly (Dadras). It is certainly the case that in the rural, mountainous areas of Kurdistan, movie houses are scarce to non-existent, but it is important to qualify Ghobadi’s assertion by acknowledging that there is, at least, a nominal native audience for Kurdish film.

97 It is also significant that the highly ethnographic nature of a film like Ghobadi’s Marooned in Iraq may have more appeal to an audience viewing through the lens of exoticist fascination than to a Kurdish audience rooted in the community that is the object of study. In addition, Ghobadi’s films tend to have a pedagogical element that seems particularly intended for an international audience.

98 The Persian translation of Avazhaye Sarzamine Madariyam is The Songs of My Mother’s Land, but the film was circulated in the English speaking world as Marooned in Iraq. This name change, and its apparent motivation, will be addressed later in this chapter. I use the English language title throughout.

99 The actual translation of Lakposhtha Hâm Parvaz Mikonand is Turtles Can Also Fly. The film has circulated internationally as Turtles Can Fly. I will use the shorter Turtles Can Fly throughout.

100 Ghobadi’s shorts are not available in the English speaking world and will not be addressed in this chapter.

101 Mij means fog in Kurdish, and the title of the film company can be interpreted as referring to Ghobadi’s goal of making the Kurdish experience visible – of clearing the fog that has shrouded the Kurdish nation and its people from international view.

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102 In an interview with Felix Koch for Kurdishcinema.com, Ghobadi states, “I have never had external monetary support. I make my films from my personal or family wealth. Either they get screened and I get my money back, or I don’t” (“The Poetics of Politics”)

103 The titles of Ghobadi’s first three films are all in Persian, while Niwemang is Kurdish, indicating progression towards a fully Kurdish cinema. It is also important to note that while A Time for Drunken Horses, Marooned in Iraq, and Half Moon all contain limited Persian dialogue, they are primarily in Kurdish. In each of the films, Persian language is used as a marker of outsider, foreign status and, it is often spoken by characters who in one way or another represent the authority of the Iranian nation state (in Marooned in Iraq the bumbling gendarmes speak Persian, while in Half Moon, the evil border guard not only speaks Persian, he attempts to get the band of traveling Kurds to do likewise).

104 An important part of Anderson’s thesis in Imagined Communities rests on the supposition that, in the absence of faith based communities and dynastic realms, popular culture - for Anderson, especially the newspaper - consolidated and facilitated national imaginings: “[t]he significance of this mass ceremony [reading the newspaper] – Hegel observed that newspapers served modern man as a substitute for morning prayers – is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion” (35). The paradox of this simultaneous connection to and alienation from the imagined reading community, argues Anderson, is a perfect model and integral part of national imaginings. Similar arguments have been made about the role of film in facilitating national imaginings (sitting in a dark theatre alone – but not alone – watching a film or, more recently, watching a film or television show in one’s own living room with thousands of others ostensibly doing the same).

105 My intention here is not at all to suggest that Ghobadi is somehow more authentically Kurdish than Güney. Rather, my interest is to draw out the ways in which their different experiences of Kurdish identity and culture have shaped their outlook on Kurdish nationalism and Kurdistan.

106 Briefly, New Iranian Cinema is characterized by “neorealist technique (stories of the working class, nonprofessional actors, location shooting), extensive casting of children, minimal plotting, and eloquent use of the landscape” (Hamid, “Panning Out for A Wider View” 49). New Iranian Cinema, and Ghobadi’s relationship to the purposes, values, and aesthetics of the category, will be discussed at greater length later in this chapter.

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107 Turkey, on the other hand, has put forth a new national face in their bid for EU membership, and this may make an international audience less ready to accept either Ghobadi’s scathing critiques of the conditions Kurds live under or his call for a politics of self-determination that undermines the continuation of a seemingly functional and “modern” nation state.

108 After the fall of Saddam Hussein and the American occupation of Iraq, the Kurdish border between the two nations was opened and some legal trade resumed. Unfortunately, the very recent detention of an Iranian, Mahmudi Farhadi, by U.S. forces in Iraqi Kurdistan has prompted Iran to close the border in the northern Kurdish region once again in protest of the U.S. action and as a way to ferment unrest between the Iraqi government (who are advocating for Farhadi’s release) and U.S. forces. It is likely that if this incident is not swiftly resolved and the borders re-opened, it will be the Kurds who will pay most directly and dearly for the continued inter-national squabbling taking place in the region.

109 There seem to be two other feasible reasons that Half Moon did not make it past the censors. First, by insisting on a Kurdish language title for his most recent film, Ghobadi has stepped up his claim for a sovereign Kurdish cinematic tradition. Second, early in the film there is a scene where Kako, the bus driver, and his wife disappear behind the bus after an argument. The camera pans down and the viewer sees the couple’s feet interlaced and playfully moving in a way that is clearly sexually suggestive. While this scene may not seem particularly risqué by western standards, it pushes the boundaries of decency in the Iranian context. Still, this scene could easily have been cut from the film without compromising the filmmaker’s overall vision, and, therefore, it seems unlikely that this was the primary reason for the film’s rejection.

110 Half Moon also represents the border as a place of both comedy and tragedy. When Mamo and his sons reach the border, which is no more than a short stone wall reaching across the mountainous landscape. The musicians all take seats atop this supposedly impermeable structure, dangling their feet into Iraq with their backsides still in Iran. When one of the sons is called to bring something to Mamo, he leaps off the border into Iraq. When he is warned by his father not to enter Iraq, he takes a small step to one side and walks on the deteriorating stone wall. Despite the absurdity of this scene, the violence associated with crossing the border is made all too clear moments later when a number of Iraqi Kurds run in front of the brothers carrying the corpses of loved ones and comrades shot and killed by American forces policing the region. Mamo and his sons, sensing that this border region has become anything but comically absurd, pick up and run back into the relative safety of Iran.

111 A Time for Drunken Horses won the Golden Camera Award, a juried award given to the best first film from the official festival selection, and the FIPRESCI Prize from the International Federation of Film Critics. For Blackboards, Makhmalbaf took home the

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Jury Prize for best official selection. The film was also nominated for the pretigious Golden Palm Award.

112 Makmalbaf’s Blackboards portrays the Kurds as an essentially nomadic people – all the characters in the film are constantly wandering, none of them have homes, there are no villages or located, permanent spaces. In addition, in Blackboards one of the primary narrative strands involves an attempt to get the female protagonist Halaleh (Behnaz Jafari)’s aged and ill father back to Iraq so that he can die on his own national soil. When this strand is resolved and Halaleh and the band of Iraqi Kurds cross the border into Iraq from Iran where they have sought refuge after the al-Anfal Campaign decimated the population of Halabja, Iraq, they fall to their knees kissing the ground and praising God for delivering them “home.” Furthermore, the marriage between Said (Said Mohamadi), one of the Kurdish teachers, and Halaleh ends in divorce precisely because neither is willing to leave their respective national homes (Iran and Iraq) in order to continue the arrangement. In Makmalbaf’s film, the border between Iran and Iraq functions as a tangible force dividing the Kurdish population, and a unified Kurdish identity is trumped by nation state identification despite the oppression and violence perpetrated against Kurds by both Iran and Iraq.

113 The kamancheh is actually a Persian string instrument that resembles the violin. Because of the proximity of Kurdish and Persian cultural traditions, and because of the long history of cultural suppression by the Iranian nation, Kurdish culture has “indigenized” or appropriated some Persian cultural traditions and artifacts and made them their own. It is also noteworthy that Mirza, the kamancheh player, is the character who is least often involved in the many musical performances captured in the film. The sorna is a reed instrument with a look and sound similar to the western oboe. The daff is a large, handheld percussion instrument that is played by beating it with the sides and fronts of the hands as well as other parts of the body.

114 For two particularly illustrative case studies of the ways in which gender has been manipulated and mobilized in the service of national struggle and definition, see Tanika Sarkar’s Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism and Leila Ahmed’s chapter “The Discourse of the Veil” from Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate.

115 The nationalist message of the scene should be clear to any attentive viewer, but there is a second level of gendered signification that would only be accessible to audiences with intimate, insider knowledge of Kurdish cultural practices. Non-Kurdish and/or outsider viewers who would not be aware that khesht making has traditionally been men’s work would miss out on another instance of Ghobadi’s anti-patriarchal, feminist nationalist intervention. The women and children in the scene are represented as having taken control of the means of national generation and creation.

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116 Satellite’s classification of Zinedine Zidane as an American icon is especially interesting, as the soccer star is of Algerian descent and one of the most famous Arabs in the western world.

117 The claim that the U.S. sold mines to Iraq is contentious, but does have its supporters. The popular U.S. based progressive online newspaper Common Dreams News Center published an article in 2004 that claimed “Iraq did not make any of the landmines Saddam used in his wars. They were all sold to him by Italy, China, the United States, and the former Soviet Union. In Northern Iraq the Italian built mine Valmara is the most plentiful and the most dangerous. But the U.S. built landmine, the M-14 sold to Saddam by the administration of then president Ronald Reagan is also lethal” (“The West May Go On Trial”). Multinational Monitor, a bimonthly magazine founded by Ralph Nader in 1980 to “monitor” and critique the U.S. corporate economy, printed an article in 1998 arguing that “From 1969 to 1992, the United States exported 4.4 million AP mines to at least 34 different countries. U.S. mines have been sown in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Cuba, Iraq, Kuwait, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Korea, Sudan and Vietnam” (“Fields of Nightmares”).

118 Shortly before the outbreak of the current Iraq War, previously classified documents from the early 1980s were released that detailed the Reagan administrations negotiations with and support of Saddam Hussein and Iraq during the eight year war with Iran. During that period, the United States provided intelligence and military assistance to Iraq. The administration also had knowledge that the Iraqis were using chemical weapons against both Iranian and Iraqi Kurdish civilian populations. According to international law, it was incumbent on the United States to use their influence and the influence of international organizations like the U.N. to put a stop to the gassings. Instead, the administration kept their knowledge of the chemical weapons use a secret, and continued to support Saddam’s Iraq financially and militarily. Some critics of the current war in Iraq have suggested that the United States may have supplied Saddam Hussein with arms (see, for example, Tariq Ali in Bush in Babylon, where he argues that the U.S. “armed and supported [Hussein] during the war with Iran” [176]). In January of 1991, about six months into the First Gulf War, 60 Minutes ran a story featuring an interview with international arms dealer Sarkis Soghanalian who claimed “I did it [sold weapons to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War] with the knowledge of U.S. authorities, policy makers--and also they have delivered weapons that are equally weapons as I did” (“The Man Who Armed Iraq”). 60 Minutes ran the story to emphasize that U.S. soldiers in Iraq were likely facing weapons supplied to the Iraqi dictator by their own government. The claims made by Ali and Soghanalian are much more contentious than the widely acknowledged “intelligence and military support” revealed in the declassified documents mentioned above. What seems clear from all of this is that Ghobadi’s apprehension about American interventionism in Iraq, which is manifest in Satellite’s “turn away” from the United States military after Agrin’s death, is partially the result of an acknowledgement of the role the United States played in bolstering the political career of

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a vicious, genocidal dictator. In the end, Satellite realizes that the United States cannot “save” Agrin, and the thousands of traumatized Iraqi Kurds like her, from the brutal policies once supported by the great superpower.

119 After the shooting was over, Ghobadi and his team at Mij Film provided assistance to all the children involved. The blind toddler who played Riga underwent an eye operation and can now see. The armless boy who played Hengov and the one-legged child who played Pashow were sent to school. Hengov also was sent to Italy where he was fitted with state of the art prosthetic arms. The 14-year-old Avaz Latif, who played Agrin, has been hired by Kurdistan TV to be the host in a children’s program and will be receiving a salary. Soran Ebrahim, who played Satellite, wants to be a filmmaker and will work with Ghobadi on his upcoming projects. All the children in the film were provided with life long health insurance.

120 In Islamic communities, hijab is the name given to the cloth head scarf used to cover women’s hair and neck, in accordance with the Hadith of Sahih Bukhari (a text that reveals the teachings of the prophet Mohammed to believers). The Persian chador is more like a cloak that covers both the head, shoulders, and upper body, leaving just an opening for the face (in contrast to the burqa, where a large potion of the face is also covered). In Iran, more religious, conservative women wear chador, while many young, secular, liberal women opt to wear hijab.

121 Marooned in Iraq was awarded the François Chalais Award for the best documentary or feature film that “captures life.” This emphasizes the ethnographic aspects of the film and of its reception.

122 With the ongoing Iraq War and occupation and the increasing Western hostility towards Iran since the ascendancy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the film’s political affiliations and relevance to current events are likely to continue to structure audience response to the marketing of the film.

123 Neither of these two most probable interpretations hit the mark. The film is set in the year between the end of the Iran-Iraq War (1988) and the beginning of the First Gulf War (1990). During this time, Saddam’s Baathist party, in an attempt to weaken the momentum gained by Kurdish nationalist groups during the eight year war with Iran and to punish the minority group for supposed collaboration with the Iranian regime, bombed the Kurdish region relentlessly.

124 I attribute the strategic marketing of the film to Ghobadi while at the same time recognizing that no filmmaker is solely responsible for the distribution and circulation of his work. Nonetheless, as Chris Kutshera notes in the preface to his interview with Ghobadi for the journal Middle East: “as a film director in a country where his industry is still suffering, he must take responsibility for the entire process of every aspect of

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filmmaking. He must find funding and take responsibility for casting, while also working as a producer. But before any of these tasks are undertaken, he must first write the screenplay and obtain permission from Iranian authorities to shoot the film. He directs the actors – almost all of them amateurs. And he organises and orchestrates distribution of the film. ‘All this takes up 95% of my time. It is a big headache. I have only 5% left for creation’, complains Ghobadi” (“The Pain of Giving Birth to Kurdish Cinema” 56).

125 See note 106.

126 For in depth discussions on the role of the government policy and censorship in Iranian Cinema see Hamid Naficy’s “Islamizing Film Culture in Iran: A Post-Khatami Update,” Agnés Devictor’s “Classic Tools, Original Goals: Cinema and Public Policy in the Islamic Republic of Iran (1979-1997),” and “Hossein Ghazian’s “The Crisis in the Iranian Film Industry and the Role of Government,” all in Richard Tapper’s The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation, and Identity.

127 The unrest that led to the 1979 Iranian Revolution was largely predicated on widespread dissatisfaction with the increasing disparity between the rich and the poor under the Shah. The Islamic revolutionary bloc, led to power by the Ayatollah Khomeini after a period of struggle between disparate factions vying for power, advocated a platform of economic and social reform that would alleviate such class divisions. In contemporary Iranian politics, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the son of a blacksmith from Tehran, has built a reputation for his anti-imperial, anti-capitalist, and anti-poverty Third Worldist rhetoric. However, as Majidi’s film points out, in the more than quarter of a century since the Revolution, the regime has done little to end the poverty and social hierarchy that has plagued the country since its pre-revolution period.

128 As stated earlier, Half Moon has been banned in Iran due to claims that the film is “separatist,” despite Ghobadi’s attempts to work with the censors to modify the film. It is possible that Ghobadi’s unrelenting Kurdish nationalism has simply become too much for the Iranian censors to bear, and as the filmmaker’s reputation as an international auteur flourishes, it seems entirely possible that Ghobadi will seek out other national affiliations that allow him to circumvent the strict regulations in place in Iran. This trend already seems to be in process, as Ghobadi’s third film, Turtles Can Fly, was proudly advertised as an Iran-Iraq joint project, and his fourth film Half Moon was selected as Iraq’s submission for Academy Award consideration.

129 I say an almost total shift in perspective in order to acknowledge the importance of the clause “[l]ike many other Iranian filmmakers,” which indicates the residual impact of Scott’s earlier characterization.

130 The one non-Iraqi character in the film is a traveling Iranian doctor who is searching for Hengov, having learned of his prophetic gifts. The doctor is played by the same actor

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who played a traveling doctor in Marooned in Iraq. This intertextual continuity between Marooned in Iraq and Turtles Can Fly establishes Ghobadi’s films as a continuous and autonomous body of work. By creating these connections between films, Ghobadi begins to articulate a coherent tradition of Kurdish film, and this is not the only instance where actors are used to create bridges between the diegetic worlds of Ghobadi’s cinematic Kurdistan. The actor who plays the teacher in the orphan’s camp in Marooned in Iraq reappears as the teacher Satellite confronts in Turtles Can Fly, and the actor who plays Audeh, one of the traveling musicians in Marooned in Iraq returns as the musicians bus- driver in Half Moon. In addition to characters crossing diegetic boundaries, a scene from A Time for Drunken Horses was re-shot in Marooned in Iraq. In the original scene, Ayoub and the gang of smugglers are attacked by Iraqi bombers as they attempt to cross the mountainous border terrain. In an interview included in the DVD extras for Marooned in Iraq, Ghobadi discusses his decision to re-shoot the pivotal scene: “I did it intentionally. My crew members tried to dissuade me, but I insisted. I felt that I had to make the point that the problems I had exposed in A Time for Drunken Horses were still there, and my film had failed to make the society do something about the smugglers. I wanted to say the story goes on.” Ghobadi’s interest in indicating that “the story goes on” initiates the possibility for other voices or cameras to take up that story and interject their own take, their own installment of an ongoing saga of Kurdish life and struggle. The intertextuality evident in these cinematic moments serves both to condense the vast space of Kurdistan by creating cinematic consistencies between characters and scenes ostensibly distanced from one another by time, space, and the boundaries of the individual narratives, and it also underscores the extent to which the films constitute a body of work that supersedes the individual films. Insofar as each film draws on the prior film/s in order to create its narrative, the seeds of a cinematic tradition become evident.

131 For more on the complicated relationship between Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, Menchú, and the testimonío, see the introduction to this dissertation and/or Arturo Arias’ useful The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy.

132 Zadie Smith, whose mother is Jamaican British and father is white British, writes about the lives of Bangladeshi British (in White Teeth), Jewish British (in The Autograph Man), and white and African Americans (in On Beauty). Raoul Peck was born in Haiti, his family moved to the Democratic Republic of Congo when he was just eight, and as a young man he divided his time between study in DROC, France, The United States, and Germany. Today he has homes in The U.S., France, and Haiti. Despite his cosmopolitan, somewhat rootless life, the story he tells in his Lumumbas is a story of place, history, and nationalism.

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