Mourning and Melancholia at the Harare International Festival of the Arts

111

JAMS 6 (1) pp. 111–130 Intellect Limited 2014

Journal of African Media Studies Volume 6 Number 1

© 2014 Intellect Ltd Visual Essay. English language. doi: 10.1386/jams.6.1.111_1

VISuAL ESSAy

AgnieszkA PiotrowskAuniversity of Bedfordshire

Mourning and melancholia

at the Harare international

Festival of the Arts1

AbstrAct

This article has a twofold purpose: first, I look at the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA) as a site of mourning and melancholia – to use the phrase that was first used by Sigmund Freud in his seminal paper and which was refor-mulated more recently by a postcolonial scholar Ranjana Khanna. I suggest that unconscious mechanisms, which are expressions of loss on the part of both black and white Zimbabweans, are acted out in the festival. In particular, on the part of white Zimbabweans it might be an expression of the so-called ‘white alienation’ experienced after the loss of domination. Second, I also look at assertions of a femi-nist academic, Sara Ahmed, who claims in her book Embodied Strangers that it is difficult, if at all possible, to circumvent the embodied and cultural context of an encounter between a representative of a western culture and the Other. I present a case study of the opening show at HIFA 2011, which seems to confirm this theory. However, I also suggest that it might be possible to subvert this expected narrative through a Winnicottian notion of a space for creativity and play. I look at two differ-ent examples of such encounters and cite the poem by Charmaine Mujeri in which she describes her hybrid identity.

keywords

Zimbabwe(post) and (de)-

colonial discourseembodimentpsychoanalysistrickster

1. With a poem by Charmaine Mujeri, Zimbabwe.

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PreliMinAry reMArks

The Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA) – is arguably the most important sub-Saharan Festival of the arts in Africa. It was conceived by white Zimbabweans in 1999 and has grown from strength to strength ever since, despite the political changes and upheavals in the country. It is contin-uously a subject of discussions in the press and accusations on the part of the Government politicians regarding the role of the festival in the life of the country. Very recently, in February 2014, it was reported that ‘Deputy Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture Tabeth Kanengoni-Malinga torched a storm last week with her remarks towards the Harare International Festival of the Arts (Hifa), which she argued was not entirely indigenous and did not help local artistes significantly’ (Murimbechi.J. 2014).

Here, I suggest that the festival offers an invaluable space for creativity and play, a Winnicotian transitional space (1971) in a country which has suffered unspeakable traumas in the last 50 years. However, I claim also that it is a site of unconscious mourning and melancholia on the part of white and black Zimbabweans. These emotions, precisely because they are unacknowledged, from time to time give rise to expressions of unreasonable anger like the one enunciated above.

In 2011 the festival was called The Engagement Party and I was doing some work there both as a director/creator of a theatrical show I was putting on with local writers and as a documentary film-maker. My presence in Zimbabwe was at the invitation of the British Council. As such, I was also showing my film work and holding training workshops on film-making and story-telling. I visited Zimbabwe in this capacity between 2010 and late 2012 eight times. During that time I also received a research grant from the British Council and gathered material for a documentary film The Engagement Party, in Harare, the editing of which was completed in 2013, as well as for an academic research project which is being turned into a book.

I will present here some sketches from a larger project, which aims to interrogate issues present in the colonial and postcolonial encounter between members of different cultures and races, drawing from my own experience, from psychoanalytical and postcolonial literature and, most importantly, from interviews and writings by the people I have worked with. In this article I will present a poem by Charmaine Mujeri. I will also look at the figure of stranger who arrives at the ‘exotic’ location, not just to ‘be’ there but to share and gather knowledge with a view, in some way, to make it public in due course. My ‘strangeness’ is very particular here, as I am a white European woman, British but not English, and hence not completely perceived as being a part of the (postcolonial) system despite the issues of differences in embodiment. In Zimbabwe I was not just a stranger; I was perhaps also perceived as a ‘trick-ster’, a term I borrow from Jungian psychology, which denotes a humourous person subverting dominant structures, in postcolonial cultures as well (see, e.g., Tannen 2007).

First, I will look at some ideas of two psychoanalytically influenced feminist thinkers – Sara Ahmed (a British scholar) and Ranjana Khanna (an American scholar) – both of non-western origin – who have theorized issues present in the (post)colonial encounter in different ways, the former privileging the body and the latter focusing on the language and its expression or lack thereof of a sense of melancholia as presented by Freud in Mourning and Melancholia (1917−1917) and later reformulated in Abraham and Torok ([1972] 1994).

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A poem written by one of the members of the theatre troupe I led is offered here as an example of a ‘metaphorization’ of the sense of loss.

Sara Ahmed, who privileges the importance of embodiment above language, sees the one who comes to the community in pursuit of knowledge as necessarily always colonizing it. This is not a new notion, particularly inter-rogated by Australian scholars in the context of the post-colonial discourse (see e.g. Sonn in Straker 2013).

I also briefly look at these ideas vis-à-vis the Shona ethics notions of oneness and respect in the community. A stranger is welcome in Shona tradi-tion; he or she will be fed and looked after and listened to in the expecta-tion that this hospitality will be returned, and not abused (see Gelfand 1970; Masaka and Tompson 2013).

Mourning And MelAncHoliA

Ranjana Khanna in her influential book Dark Continents uses the psychoan-alytical term ‘melancholia’ to describe ‘colonial melancholy’ (2003: 21). She evokes Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia and Abraham and Torok’s rework-ing of it as two different ‘responses to a loss’: a mourning constitutes a state of ‘natural’ sadness over the loss of a loved object, which will abate with time. Melancholia, on the other hand, can be a paralysing state that lasts. Khanna stresses that ‘what distinguishes melancholia is a state of dejection, and a form of critical agency that is directed toward the self’ (2003: 21). She also reminds us of the difference between mourning as ‘assimilating [of the lost object] – and melancholia – swallowing the lost object as whole’ (Khanna 2003: 21, my emphasis).

Khanna borrows the concept of the critical agency in melancholia and uses the term in particular to denote ‘critical nationalism that emerge as melancholic remainders’. She says, ‘And if Freud would eventually transfer the critical agency found in melancholia into the normalizing function of the superego, I would salvage it, putting the melancholic’s manic critical agency into the unworking of conformity, and into the critique of status quo’ (Khanna 2003: 21, 22, my emphasis).

This is a highly specific use of both the concept of melancholia and the critical agency as engendered by it. Khanna acknowledges that she also draws her definitions of melancholia – as a critical agency with some poten-tial for change but also for violence – from the work of the colonial psychia-trist Antoine Porot (2003: 22) ‘who worked in Algiers and who determined that Algerian Muslim men suffered from what he called “pseudomelancholy”, stating that melancholy gave rise to “violent behaviour’.

Before I proceed, it is worth stating that Khanna appropriates another notion – that of ‘an organic intellectual’ from Gramsci and in particular from a reformulation of the notion in the famous essay on Hamlet by C. L. R. James. James identifies the split in Hamlet’s mind as one that characterizes all intel-lectuals caught between ‘the communal change from the medieval world to the world of free individualisation’ (1953: 17) The communal change mani-fests itself in Hamlet’s mind as a ghost – as a haunting. Khanna also reminds us of a notion of ‘an organic intellectual’ who in Karl Marx is a figure emerg-ing ‘from the people’ rather than from the system. Here she begins to use the concept freely to denote a person who has been subjected to colonial subjuga-tion and melancholia (i.e. the inexpressible haunting) but can use it creatively to sublimate violent impulses. I read her attempt as connecting the two ideas

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in order to create a possibility of a conscious creative non-violent develop-ment that can help de-colonize the context.

Khanna further advances that, drawing from the work of Abraham and Torok, ‘demetaphorization’ is often a symptom of melancholia. In essence, I understand this ‘demetaphorization’ as an inability to symbolize trauma through language. Khanna ventures that this kind of demetaphorization can be a particular problem in postcolonial encounters that can lead to violence – in her work she focuses on those who have been colonized but the sense of loss and alienation might also be present in those who have inherited both guilt on the one hand and a sense of loss of their power on the other. Khanna stresses the notion of a secret loss, which is in some way ‘un-representable’: ‘For Abraham and Torok the cause of melancholia is an underlying secret carried by the analysand from previous generations’ (2003: 25). Khanna’s crucial move here is to consider the critical agency of melancholia as engen-dering actions and not just passivity.

I believe that in a way the HIFA is an example of just such a critical agency and that the difficulty on the part of white Zimbabweans to enunciate their state of alienation is one of the driving forces behind the event. This state of alienation is not unique to racial relations in Zimbabwe. Gillian Straker in her contribution to a recent (2013) collection Race, Memory and The Apartheid Archive says,

I am convinced about the importance of acknowledging white aliena-tion, not least because this experience is in contrast to a delusion of phallic fullness and omnipotence, a delusion historically associated with whiteness. This delusion, which implies a refusal to accept one’s own vulnerability and limitation, is one of the factors that drives the exploita-tion and oppression of others.

(Straker in Sevens et al. 2013)

Straker writes about a sense of shame. I argue that the festival in some way too deals with that shame. It is also an expression of a sense of loss of the loss of dominance of the white power. In a way, it is an unacknowledged

Figure 1: Bret Bailey’s The Treasure – the ‘forbidden’ show during HIFA 2011.

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display of Western supremacy too in terms of organization and efficiency. It is that display which from time to time causes fury on the part of some Black politicians, as quoted above, despite the festival being a nourishing space of creativity. The very point I am making is that it is both – a display of mourn-ing and melancholia but also a place encouraging a dialogue and ‘working through’through play.

Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1971) in his seminal work suggests that a space of play, a transitional space, can be an important place for the devel-opment of identity and creativity. Play can heal wounds. A festival of the arts could be just such a place in any culture, and certainly there are elements of it at the HIFA. It is quite an extraordinary occurrence given the sociopolitical situation of the country and its historical background which I will touch upon later. The whole festival could also be theorized in the first instance as having a role of a ‘trickster’ in the contemporary Zimbabwean culture and society for its continuous political comments and satirical shows.

In anthropology, and in Jungian psychoanalysis in particular, laughter and creativity are represented by the figure of a trickster. A trickster is traditionally male but by definition he or she is androgynous (e.g., in Nordic mythology, Loki who appears male becomes pregnant and gives birth to a non-human creature). A trickster is always irreverent. He creates laughter, people laugh at him and with him and he laughs at authority. He is unreliable and can be dangerous because he is also a shape shifter. Stefanie Ricki Tannen in her book on tricksters places gender as one of the important elements of the trickster notion. Tannen (2007) observes, ‘When humour is shared through play among boys the action becomes more boisterous than when humour is enjoyed alone or in the company of a female child. The traditional Trickster tales, whether European or indigenous in original, seem more like children’s cartoons than stories’ (2007: 136). Women who culturally have been more compliant can assume an important role in subverting dominant narratives.

eMbodied encounters

The words ‘embodied’ and ‘embodiment’ are loaded in the postcolonial discourse; it has been an accepted stance since Frantz Fanon ([1952] 1975) that one begins any discussion of a postcolonial discourse with the bodily differ-ence (see also the recent book by Derek Hook 2012). Fanon evokes psycho-analyst Jacques Lacan’s Mirror Stage in his controversial attempt at theorizing the core of the issue.

Lacan, as we may recall, provides a model of embodiment in his theoriza-tion of the Mirror Stage as a key stage in a child’s development. The child’s access to the realm of subjectivity is through the process of assuming a body image. Lacan famously describes the toddler’s jubilation at seeing his or her image in the mirror – this is a moment of misrecognition of her bodily beauty and strength.

Fanon takes up the Lacanian model in a footnote – there is a racialized dynamic to the assumption of the body image. Fanon says: ‘When one has grasped the mechanism described by Lacan, one can have no further doubt that the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man’ (Fanon [1952] 1975): 114).

As analysis of strange encounters as bodily encounters suggests that the marking out of the boundary lines between bodies, through the assumption of a bodily image, involves practices and techniques of differentiation. Sara

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Ahmed (2000) in her book Strange Encounters presents Fanon’s approach to embodiment and reflects that the issue of emobodiment is always present. She then turns her attention to examples of actual realtionships when, for example, white scholars work with black communities. She cites the accom-plished Australian white anthropologist, Diane Bell, who is benevolent but, according to Ahmed, still a colonizer in her attempts to study black Aboriginal women. Ahmed ventures that what Diane Bells does in her work is to blur the bodily boundary in order to gain access to knoweldge that she then shares to her own advantage – and for the benefit of the epistemic advancement of us all. This is a success but it disempowers the Other. Ahmed says, ‘Bell lives with her subjects. She adopts their lives styles in an attempt to vanquish the bodily differences’ (2000: 71, emphasis added).

According to Ahmed, Bell is determined to get as close as possible to the women she studies in order to ‘see the world through their eyes’ (2000: 71). She creates a ‘narrative of learning to be them’ (2000: 71). As the women cannot write, Bell writes a book based on her knowledge of them. Ahmed is deeply critical of Diane Bells’ project:

Her knowledge and learning enables her access to their being. She gets close enough: she gets inside their skin. But the position of learning to be is very different from simply being. Her knowledge (learning) sets herself apart from those that simply are.

[…] Learning to be here is a narrative of becoming which gets closer to strangers, but at the same time she reconfirms the bodily difference.

(2000: 71, 72)

Ahmed pronounces that encounter as a repetition of the colonial experience. In her fundamental distrust of knowledge of any kind, particularly in the post-colonial embodied encounter in which a white person presents knowledge gained from a black person, Ahmed questions the raison d’être of any epis-temological project, which would indeed include a documentary film or any project in which knowledge is either offered or gained. I question here this assumption as necessarily reductive and hope that this is an area that can at least be opened for a dialogue.

strAngers in HArAre

To reiterate, Ahmed sees a Western stranger as necessarily appropriating the other and then presenting the knowledge gained through a near bodily fusion as a kind of pretext or a simulacrum of an ethical speech act (i.e. the women did not have a voice before and now have). There are some issues with this interpretation – the fact is that the women, it appears, could not have written their own account without Diane Bell and we would not have learnt about them without her work. The blurring of the bodily boundary may or may not have taken place – she did live as one of them but she was also always quite separate – a stranger.

The notion of stranger who might not necessarily colonize but instead engenders a creative change is not a new idea, and that idea does exist in African culture as much as in other traditions – for example, in the Bible (Ruth is a stranger who arrives and changes the way in which things are done). In Shona culture as I understand it is accepted that a ‘stranger’ is a guest and must be treated respectfully, and a reciprocal hospitality is expected back. It

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is also believed that a stranger, through the sharing of experiences, will take away with them some of the knowledge of the host, thus becoming a slightly different person themselves. Lastly, it is also believed that the most impor-tant spirit media are often ‘strangers’ in their community (ref). Consciously or otherwise therefore I venture that a ‘stranger’ can be perceived as a power-ful force in Shona culture. There are two additional things that must be said: in traditional Shona culture the role of women corresponds to traditional female roles in Western culture: they often suffer from the dominant patri-archal systems. However, historically there is a powerful female spirit, Mbuya Nehanda, who is believed to have guided the rebellion against white coloniz-ers in 1897 (Bulawayo History 2013). Second, there is no concept of a subver-sive if creative trickster in traditional Shona culture but there is great belief in the healing powers of laughter, play and happiness. It is also believed that a foreign spirit can inspire creativity (see, e.g., Gelfand 1970).

The concept of a productive rupture inspired by a stranger is very well known in Western culture. It is beyond the scope of this paper to review different figures of strangers, but I would like to quote here psychoanalyst Dany Nobus:

The stranger speaks from ignorance and thus forces his interlocutors to break the silence that governs mutual understanding and to explain at length what they think they know. Combining within his presence […] physical proximity and social remoteness, geographical nearness and mental distance, the person of alien origin occupies a privileged position, which gives him an opportunity to cross boundaries and some-how be exonerated by reason of ignorance, and which can make him privy to secrets that will never be revealed to any regular inhabitant of the community.

(Nobus and Quinn 2005: 67, emphasis added)

What is interesting about the HIFA is that it is a place where strangers meet and exchange ideas. This is indeed its stated purpose and raison d’être. I now proceed to give two different examples of the strange encounters at HIFA: that of the controversy of the opening night of 2011 and a case drawn from my own experience. The latter I offer here in the spirit of ‘autoethnography’ in which the personal experience offers ‘a missing story’ as theorized by Tessa Muncey (2010).

HiFA As A site oF MelAncHoliA

In an interview given for The Guardian before the HIFA in 2010 the festi-val’s organizer and creator, Manuel Bagorro, said: ‘In some small ways, HIFA represents what Zimbabwe could be, […]’ ‘The festival offers an opportunity to recognise shared experience’, said Bagorro. ‘Audiences are able to acknowl-edge that life may be hard, but we can still express our sadness, laughter, fears and hopes’ (Aloysius 2010, emphasis added).

Bagorro probably quite knowingly evokes in the interview the notion of oneness and shared communal being that is essential to southern African culture, ubuntu – or uhuntu (see, e.g., Chimuka 2001 or Gelfand 1981). The sharing does taking place but something else occurs too: the festival is a site of loss. That sense of mourning and melancholia runs parallel to the creativity and play as mentioned by Winnicott.

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I suggest further that, broadly speaking, the white organizers and audi-ences and the black Zimbabweans unconsciously mourn different things; the white Zimbabweans unconsciously attempt to hold on to their lost object, i.e. not only the Western value of organization and art but also quite obvi-ously their dominant position in society. The black local population mourns their pre-colonial past, which here is a classic Lacanian l’object petit a, an object of desire that denotes Lack (Lacan [1981] 1998). Here the presenta-tion of idealized pretty Africalia during the festival creates a mythologized controllable fetishistic notion of an utopian historical heritage that has very little if anything to do with the actuality of that historical past or contem-porary life in Zimbabwe. Its false gaiety might engender a sense of loss instead.

A sense of melancholia in its manic representations is an all-embracing atmosphere of the carnivalesque festival: the six days during which people dance together and enjoy the arts is accompanied by a curious rising sense of anger on both sides. In my documentary, the repeated voices of the local artists and activists convey that the HIFA ought to be mainly a meeting place for the local (meaning black Zimbabwean) artists. It was felt that the festival was somehow hijacked by Westerners– one could take issue with that notion as it is not confirmed by what actually occurs. I re-interviewed my participants as well as other artists in December 2013 and the sentiment is that HIFA feels foreign and alienating but at the same time is a desired and longed for event, a welcome disruption of the mundane life in Harare, an imaginary space in which everything works perfectly and everybody is united through art. An up and coming Zimbabwean writer/director, who asked to remain anonymous, expressed his conflicted feelings about it:

This is so silly. We do treasure HIFA. We wait for it for the whole year. We think of the work we might be able to present there. But when it comes I also feel angry: angry at its elitism and its ephemeral nature. I know this feeling and I know it is crazy: no festival can last forever. But somehow that makes me angry too. Actually, a lot of the time I am angry for no reason – but I also do love it and it has been very good for me and my career.

Figure 2: Manuel Bagorro and Brett Bailey during the press conference in 2011.

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The notion of the festival NOT offering a space to showcase the work of local black Zimbabwean artists bears no relationship whatever to what actually takes place: the actual numbers are overwhelmingly in favour of the black local population; in 2011 the ratio was 4 to 1 (four local artists to one European one) and this number has gone up substantially in the last two years. However, the point is different. The festival feels foreign to the local people on the one hand, and on the other it evokes anger that its sense of abundance and efficiency cannot be sustained. It is also an unrealisatic desire which is repeatedly enun-ciated, in the recent statement by the government minister too (as quoted at the outset) that somehow HIFA ought to be responsible for the development of the arts a la long. In fact, since its inception 34 festivals have sprung to life in the country. Stephen Chifunyise, an accomplished Black Zimbabwean writer, in an interview with me in January 2014 maintains that the inspiration of HIFA has been very helpful in this taking place.

tHe HistoricAl bAckground

The Harare Festival of the Arts was originally set up in the late 1990s by Manuel Bagorro and his sister Maria Wilson, and was supported by a number of other white and indeed black Zimbabweans, in particular by the playwright Stephen Chifunyise who, at the time was President Mugabe’s personal secre-tary . The rationale for its coming into being is complex. The stated aim was to introduce an idea of an international dialogue in the Zimbabwean scene. It is interesting, however, that it was set up at around the time when the issue of the distribution of land owned by the white farmers became acutely contro-versial both in Zimbabwe and in the international arena. The HIFA took place first in 1999 – and continued to run through the worst events of the controversial Land Reform of 2000–2003. My contention is that the festival is aggressively European, not just in its content, which is continuously adjusted as a result of the complaints stated above, but in the way it heralds Western efficiency and organization as a symptom of the white community’s acute unconscious sense of loss. It is a representation of the community’s melan-cholia, which does not abate despite the passing of decades since the coun-try’s independence. If we can evoke Khanna’s notion of ‘critical agency’, one could venture that the energy with which the festival is organized every year is testimony to the critical agency of melancholia of the white Zimbabweans who organize it.

The festival’s physical site, a park, is at the heart of Harare. For six days a handful of white Zimbabweans are the force behind the event, and the event could compete with the Swiss in terms of punctuality and cleanliness. The HIFA is arguably the only thing in Zimbabwe that runs like clockwork, metic-ulously on time. The streets of Harare are notoriously dirty, with refuse being left on the sides of the roads as collections often fail. However, at the site of HIFA the refuse and dirt problems are nowhere to be seen. All the venues are cleaned and re-cleaned by the HIFA team before they are taken over for rehearsals and re-cleaned again before the start of the performances during the HIFA week. The festival has also large number of delightful eateries cater-ing for the needs of all who attend, and it is possible to attend the event with just one dollar. Another local artist said,

It feels like a completely foreign land in which there are seemingly no worries and all is possible and colourful. It is wonderful but then it ends

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and there is nothing left – its site after the end of the festival really feels so empty, so ghostly.

There is also a fancier hospitality venue, the Green Room, set up in a tent, with two bars. That venue, just like any Green Room in the West, is designed for guests with special passes, which include the performers, NGO officials and other VIPs. ‘The special passes’ are represented in the form of different coloured handbands – a particular colour can give you access into the Green room, whereas others will not. In a country where colour historically has been a huge issue, and still is, this is an unfortunate choice for denoting belonging – again perhaps an unconscious gesture on the part of the organizers.

In 2011 the HIFA opening party was held in an Italian restaurant, Das Eros, which is a well-loved spot in Harare – a cheap and cheerful Italian restaurant well attended by all races and cultures. However, for the needs of the festival the venue was turned into an astonishing high-quality party spot with speciality food, including sea food, which must have been flown in espe-cially if not from Europe then from South Africa. There was copious amount of champagne to start with, followed by very good wine, not to mention high-quality entertainment. The abundant display of cold meat, vegetable dishes and salads would not embarrass a good London restaurant. In the context of a country suffering from serious food shortage and welfare issues in the countryside and towns, this display of wealth might have been considered disconcerting. On the other hand, this display of wealthy Europenness is also expected by the attendees and the sponsors alike. The festival’s presentation is aggressively neo-liberal and capitalist, dominated by the local business spon-sors (colourful electronic and actual boards). It has to feel perfect for the festi-val to work – its very perfection is both desired, revereed and despised – all at the same time as the unconscious demetaphorised feelings of mourning and melancholia clash with a sense of celebration during the few days of the festival.

Traditionally, the opening show is highly critical of the regime in power – unconsciously utilizing of course the carnivalesque quality of the event, that pushes the boundaries of the acceptable. Bakhtin ([1984] 2009) famously writes about medieval carnival festivities, which offered the population a chance to vent some of their frustrations without actually affecting change. The carnival moment of anarchy was:

‘sharply distinct from the serious official, ecclesiastical, feudal and political cult forms and ceremonials. […] They built a second world and a second life outside officialdom, a world in which all medieval people participated more or less, in which they lived during a given time of the year.

(Bakhtin [1984] 2009: 5−6)

Participants of these festivals sought temporary releases from restrictive state system through pushing boundaries, without really challenging either the system or the economic circumstances. One could argue that some of the Zimbabwean authorities’ willingness to tolerate the HIFA festival comes from that same notion.

In 2011 at HIFA these boundaries were pushed too far for the government: the opening show devised and directed by a white South African theatre direc-tor Brett Bailey accused the authorities of corruption and misappropriation of public funds and demanded that Mugabe should go. The show was also a

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display of a dazzling Hollywood-like musical, exhibiting choreographic profi-ciency, with a large company singing and dancing to 6000 people.

Following the show, the management of HIFA was detained at the central police station for questioning. They were told to curtail their political/artis-tic creations during the festival or else it would be taken down (see my film Piotrowska 2013). All the footage of the show was declared as ‘prohibited’ and was ‘banned’ from being seen. The footage we were gathering for the film was confiscated too but for a few shots, which I filmed as ‘a safety’ on a little hand-held camera on the night and managed to take out of the coun-try – these are in my documentary film. Because of this controversy in 2012 and 2013 the opening show was stripped of any political elements. Bagorro resigned as the creative director after the 2012 HIFA but is back in the driving seat again in 2014: the festival was faltering without him.

The story of the highly controversial opening show in 2011 is not a simple one. Its reception by the local black audiences was far from uniform, despite a strong political wave against the government. Interestingly, many black Zimbabweans felt taken aback by the tone of the performance, which they thought disrespectful at best and highly disparaging at worst. Also the figure of the director of the show, South African Brett Bailey, was also perceived as problematic at best and highly racially adversarial (Bailey is a white South African) at worst. He was a foreigner daring to comment on the internal matters of Zimbabwe. He perhaps would fit in readily into Ahmed’s contro-versial models of postcolonial encounters. Psychoanalytically, one might be tempted to interpret the show as a classic Oedipal story – and it was presented as such with new and young characters in the show demanding change. However, because of the authorship of the piece – namely, that it was created by a white male foreigner – its message and overall vision was rejected by the crowds.

Bailey, a highly talented and controversial figure, had something to say through his show, and said it, without any great research or consultations with his fellow Zimbabwean artists. In part, Bailey does embody the trick-ster figure mentioned earlier. With a breathtaking arrogance during the press conference, which we feature in my documentary film, he announced that ‘there are pot holes in the streets in Zimbabwe and there are pot holes in people’s minds’. It was his view that the people of Zimbabwe had somehow lost their critical faculties and were ready to accept Mugabe and his regime for what his propaganda machine would present. Althusser would say that they have been ‘interpellated’ to the system’s ideology lock, stock and barrel and were incapable of asking difficult questions. It was therefore up to a foreigner like Bailey to ask these questions for them. It was that assumption, more than the actual message of the show, that local people objected to quite robustly.

Some of their voices are in my documentary; others, too numerous to be included in the film, have informed my practice and theoretical work. One of the artists, a most measured actor and writer, Tonderay Munyebvu, called Brett Bailey’s show ‘inappropriate’ precisely because Bailey was a foreigner looking in, and also because the show was too political ‘and why should we care about his views’. Another collaborator who was in our HIFA performance said that the opening show was ‘quite well made of course but really very badly researched’. The word ‘researched’ matters – as it taps into the Western epistemological pursuit which has informed at least some of the colonial prac-tices– that that epistemic drive, that Western certainty and knowledge, were being questioned by my interviewees.

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The most striking statement recorded for my film was that of a woman saying that Bailey’s show failed to understand how the black Zimbabweans respected the time-honoured traditions of their ancestors. One of the key elements of that tradition is to ‘respect the elders’ – and Mugabe is still seen as the nation’s symbolic Father. Bret Bailey’s show disregarded that notion. A recent paper on the traditional ethics of Shona points to the importance of hierarchy which possibly transcends ephemeral political notions: ‘Respecting hierarchy of authority in society is at the centre of Shona religion’ (Masaka and Tompson 2013: 139, also see Gelfand 1981) One of the artists in my film said that ‘the Western media make people feel they are coming to a dicta-torship when they come to Zimbabwe. This is not how we see it but fine. The visitors had better learn to show a respect for the regime – these are our elders. Otherwise indeed the police might beat them up’.

There is perhaps a disjuncture here between what people would choose to say formally and what appears when discussions take place over a period of time, in less formal surroundings. The reflection was that foreigners must not pass judgments on the incidents and events taking place in the land; in the same vein, the media in Zimbabwe itself were careful in their reporting of the show and the authorities’ and public’s reactions to it: the Zimbabwean, for example, called it ‘an extraordinary extravaganza’ that ‘was pushing bound-aries’. ‘Like all his HIFA opening shows, it is bound to be the talk of the town, as festival goers analyse both the show itself, and their own reactions to it’ (Anon. 2011c). The Herald also appeared cautious in its reporting of the show, with no mention of the detention of the management at the central police station: ‘Basically, Treasure [the title of the show] was reflective of the Zimbabwean social and geo-political spheres’. But on the whole, Treasure was a ‘party, a joyful celebration of an extraordinary programme encompass-ing more diversity and innovation than any of the previous festivals […]’ (Anon. 2011b).

It is important to recall again that there is a large group of people work-ing with the management of HIFA who are indeed black Zimbabweans. It is also important to say that without the overwhelming support of the black business community there would be no HIFA: large sums of money

Figure 3: Trevor Chidzodzo, writer/performer, protesting against Charmaine Mujeri’s poem.

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are being passed on to the management of the festival in sponsorship deals. Perhaps in some contrast to European artistic initiatives in Europe that mainly rely on governmental funding, here the festival is supported by Western Embassies and NGOs who bring artists from abroad, and by the business community in Zimbabwe. Tickets are expensive (between 3 and 20 dollars a ticket) and HIFA is very well attended. With the average salary being $250 a month, these are considerable amounts. The morbid fantasy among the crowds is that the white HIFA management become rich because of the festival. This is highly unlikely. The festival is continuously fighting to survive – due to high costs of renting venues and some unofficial high expenditure – i.e. bribes – which keeps the festival afloat (according to reli-able but anonymous sources me in January 2014) The point is that wealth is both resented and desired by the crowds and HIFA. The white organ-izers begin to symbolize both the anger and some sense of confusion that many Zimbabweans feel towards their own heritage, which is complicated because of the colonial past.

tHe PoeMs

In 2011 I too worked at HIFA as an artist, putting up a poetry performance in HIFA’s Poet’s Corner as well as in First Street. It is worth stating that my involvement compared to that of Brett Bailey was on the very peripher-ies of the festival: our show was poorly funded and was not even planned; I managed to squeeze it into the programme at the last minute.

As I mentioned I held a British Council workshop whose declared aim was story-telling and film-making. My initial workshop held about twenty people and lasted for five (!) working days. Prior to that, and around that week too, I screened some of my film work. I mention it here because that appears very important in the context of how the work of the workshops progressed. On Day 2 of the workshop I said to the attendees that in order to tell a story about another person, for example, in a documentary film, it is helpful to be able to narrate a story about oneself. I asked them to write a few words – not more than 500 – for the following morning as an exercise to describe who they are. It is a standard exercise that I carry out often during my classes at my univer-sity and in others in the United Kingdom. Usually, students produce circum-spect material that is too cautious to be meaningful. What happened here was exceptional.

In response to this call the participants of my workshops wrote poems, which I found both unexpected and impressive. These poems were then part of the performance at HIFA in 2011, which we put on as a direct result of the writing produced by the participants of the workshop.

I interviewed some of the members of the workshop after the event in 2011, 2012 and 2013. Charmaine Mujeri, whose poem I cite below, said the following,

You arrived in a short dress, you laughed and we thought you were funny. You then screened your films, particularly Married to the Eiffel Tower and then the film about the Dutch twins. We had never seen anything like it. We thought they were just so bizarre and amazing because they were so… irreverent! And I said to myself: ‘if she can do this strange work and be successful, I can do something more outra-geous too. And when you said to write something from the heart about

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who we were, I just thought – yes, I will go for it. And I did then – and have ever since. Or at least I try to keep going’.

It is difficult to theorize one’s own position in any encounter, perhaps impossible, and certainly anybody with any interest in psychoanalysis will be suspicious of auto-narratives. However, as Muncey (2010) points out, on occasions an auto-narrative does have something to contribute. Here I would venture that my position was indeed that of a female trickster and that I was perceived as such. Tannen introduces the idea of a female trick-ster as someone who is simultaneously more reliable (than the male trick-ster) vis-à-vis her friends but is also more interested in gently subverting patriarchal dominant structures.

Tannen claims further:

The essence of energy I call the postmodern female Trickster must ques-tion the very essence of patriarchal symbolic order through humour.

Where the traditional Trickster lets off steam by playing at the margins, the female Trickster in postmodernity deconstructs the margins. Through laughter she enters new terrain- the terrain of transformation of the order itself.

(Tannen 2007: 137, emphasis added)

Tanner claims that the figure of a traditional male trickster, through testing boundaries, leaves the basic configuration, the existence of the social order, very much untouched. This, one could argue, was what happened with Brett Bailey’s opening show: it created a sense of discomfort, also because of his white maleness, which in the context of southern Africa and Zimbabwe is very difficult to circumvent; his embodiment was controversial. In addition, he did not ask people to offer him their voice; rather, he focused on his own voice and created a show of what was his vision of what went on in the country.

Conversely, I was a Polish woman who showed the workshop participants my controversial film Married to the Eiffel Tower (2008) about women loving large objects, instead of people. The film unexpectedly resonated with some of the traditional Zimbabwean notions of animist objects. I will admit gladly that

Figure 4: Charmaine Mujeri, writer/performer.

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this connection was forged more by chance than design. Through it perhaps an opening was created by which the participants of the workshops felt they could look for their own voices without being either judged or exploited.

Charmaine Mujeri scribbled her offering in a few minutes on a scrap of paper on the morning of the workshop because she said she had forgotten ‘to do the homework’. It has been suggested since (at conferences at which I have presented an earlier version of the paper) that she somehow made up this story in order to impress me. I have since re-asked her and she said that the poem was the very first thing she had ever written. I choose to believe her – perhaps it is my narcissistic fantasy of course. This is what she has said recently:

Since that performance in the First Street, I have embarked on a performing career. I thought that whole event was great fun. But I am writing too. What I wrote about then was and is a taboo: the issue of the mixed (colonial/Zimbabwean) identity which is a fact of life.

Her poem cited below speaks of her fluid hybrid identity, her melancholia – in the sense of a loss but also in the sense that Khanna uses it, that is, of critical agency that engenders change, here a non-violent change as Charmaine is speaking/writing in her voice – as an organic intellectual.

This is the poem that has caused a lot of consternation in our theatre group. In my film you can see another one of the participants, Trevor Chidzidzo, who asks Charmaine to remove the phrases ‘I am Rhodesian, I am British’ – supposedly for our own safety as a group, but also perhaps because he too felt very uncomfortable with the stated hybridity that Charmaine presents in the poem. There is a sense in which her own ‘belonging’ to any category that she lists is unstable and in question. Her sense of loss, perhaps indeed melancholia, is palpable and made clear with her words ‘I am the pall bearer’, acknowledging the violence present in the history of the country. She is full of fundamental contradictions that perhaps also resonate with the Shona notion of oneness, and needing to connect all the elements. Charmaine does meta-phorize them in her poem and in her arguments with fellow troupe members as recorded for the film. Her identity is fluid, hybrid, a little lost but still powerful – ‘a warrior princess’.

The whole poem states Charmaine’s holding of different polarities in her subjecthood. The notion of choice is important in the poem, as is the notion of being a combination of everything, and the mystery surrounding it. There is also an interesting androgynous quality about this work that was present in the writing of other poets. In this work the notion of communality and difference appears to be crucial: I am Woman, I am man. She is expected to hold together enormous extremes – and somehow she succeeds in doing so. Charmaine perhaps further alludes to the southern African notion of ubuntu – unhu in Shona – a notion of interconnectedness sometimes symbolized by an open palm, contrasted with a close fist – more common in South Africa as a symbol of the ANC, but also in Zimbabwe.

‘I know you – you are a stranger’. It is clear that this is a rhetorical ‘you’ – an impersonal ‘one’. On the other hand, they write the poems because I ask them, so it is also to me personally to begin with. Also, as mentioned, ‘a stranger’ is an important notion in the Shona culture.

As a new ‘organic intellectual’, Mujeri begins to metaphorize that sense of loss and anger. She is also the one who is carrying the corpse – it could be

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the corpse of colonialism or it might be the corpse of the uniform identity, the pure African sense of being. Or could it be a loss of the uncomplicated sense of belonging? That sense which is so unstable for us all in contemporary world but perhaps more so for those of us whose histories carry with them a trauma of being colonized.

The phrase ‘I am a pall bearer’ – made almost in passing – denotes that loss, the writer’s mourning and melancholia, transformed by her critical agency onto something that is neither despair nor violence but a beginning of a truly creative activity. As the notion of the voice of the Other has been such an issue in the academy and culture, I propose Charmaine Mujeri’s poem here in it entirety, also wanting to state that I have never treated her or the group ‘as the Other’, despite our differences of embodiment. I saw them – and still do – as fellow travellers, creative people struggling to find a place in the world and learning from each other. As a scholar I maintain that what Mujeri is doing in the poem is impressive: she holds the notions of hybridity, in terms of race and gender, and she emerges triumphant and powerful.

(not really a poem)by Charmaine Mujeri

I am light, I am darkI am black, I am whiteSilence and noiseAllow me to raise my voiceTo be silent by choiceI am a student of life’s university All and none are my teacherI am you,You are me,We are not each other!I know you,You are a stranger.I am WOMAN, I am manSo mother is fatherI cry through a smileSmile through a cry How can I not accept and refuse all that surrounds me??Sprawling mansions,Dilapidated ghettosOpen palmsClosed fistsExtremes of my country Extremes of my mind I love color, I am a peacockI love black,I could be, I can be, I will …I AM the pall bearer!I am hateI am love ‘For love is as strong as deathIts jealousy unyielding as the grave …’Rasta because of my hair, heart, & mind

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Or is it because of my bloodshot eye??I am a Christian I believe in that higher powerRadically conservativeI have been judged, so I do not judgeI am Rhodesian I am BritishI am ZIMBABWEANI am a combination of all I am a combination of noneSo as I stand before you Bearing, EMBRACING the gifts my …Ancestors, forefathers, colonial masters,Teachers, preachers, mother,Leaders, father, students, children gaveEmancipated African Empress …A warrior princessNo longer a slave.

Final remarks

In this paper I have looked at the HIFA as a site of mourning and melan-cholia. I have ventured that the festival that was founded in 1999 by white Zimbabweans is an expression of an unconscious sense of loss of the domi-nant position on the part of the organizers. The event gives expression to a sense of alienation on the part of the organizers and the white visitors and assists in the issues of ‘demataphorization’, as these sentiments are almost impossible to express openly. The festival aggressively demonstrates the actual and perceived values of the Western culture and is also a site of morbid fantasies on the part of the attending public as regards the financial benefits that the HIFA management might or might not be receiving. Staging of elab-orate and pretty visions of both Western and African objects may contribute to imaginary representations that can deepen temporarily a sense of separate-ness, greed and envy.

However, it is important to stress that the festival is a site for extraordi-nary creative exchanges, disruptions and ruptures, which are often significant and productive. The long term value of these disruptions, even when they cause an offence in the first instance, is hard to define. It is also perhaps an obvious point to make but clearly voicing dissent on any side is a form of ‘metaphorisation’. It is definitely more constructive to argue about an arts festival than to resort to violence or prohibitions (which would constitute a form of violence too).

Brett Bailey has not returned to Zimbabwe since May 2011, but follow-ing the 2011 HIFA there has seen an increase in the number of politically fuelled comedy and cabaret shows in Zimbabwe, featuring members of different cultures working together. These two occurrences may or may not be connected but it is very clear that HIFA is an inspirational space in Zimbabwe and southern Africa, its ‘hidden’ unconscious mechanisms notwithstanding.

The members of the theatrical troupe that I led appear to be doing very well in the so-called ‘real world’. In December 2013 I saw Charmaine Mujeri in Harare in a play entitled The Convert written by Danai Gurira, a part of

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Almasi Collaborative Arts that is a Zimbabwean American Dramatic Arts Collaboration; her performance was very powerful. She played Miss Prudence, a late nineteenth-century Zimbabwean who is both completely ‘colonized’ by the westerners but, in contrast to some other characters in the play, is also able to hold her local identity, beliefs and language intact.

I am back as a theatre director at the Harare International Festival of the Arts in 2014, directing a play written by a black Zimbabwean Blessing Hungwe about the spirit medium Mbuya Nehanda. Charaine Mujeri plays Kaguvi in it, Nehanda’s (male) revolutionary partner. The play is a surreal comedy in which we re-write the history: the iconic 19th century national figure does not get hanged by the white executioners – she persuades them to collaborate with her instead.

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Figure 5: A group shot of the company preparing for HIFA 2014: Blessing Hungwe, the writer/co-producer on far left, Charmaine Mujeri on far right and myself, Agnieszka Piotrowska second from the right.

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SuggeSted citation

Piotrowska, A. (2014), ‘Mourning and melancholia at the Harare International Festival of the Arts’, Journal of African Media Studies, 6: 1, pp. 111–130, doi: 10.1386/jams.6.1.111_1

contributor detailS

Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska is an award winning documentary film-maker and a theorist. Her latest film The Engagement Party in Harare (2013) was nomi-nated for the Best Documentary in an international film festival in Zimbabwe in 2012 as the only non-African film-maker who has been granted the distinc-tion. She is the author of Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film (2014) published by Routledge. Her edited collection entitled Embodied Encounters: New Approaches to Film and Psychoanalysis will be published later this year with Routledge. Piotrowska is currently working on a new book on the psycho-analytical aspects of the de-colonial discourse in Zimbabwe through the arts. She is Reader in Film Practice and Theory at the Department of Media Arts, the University of Bedfordshire.

Contact: University of Bedfordshire, Park Square, R A105, Luton LU1 3JU, UK.E-mail: [email protected]

Agnieszka Piotrowska has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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Mourning and Melancholia at the Harare International Festival of the Arts

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Transcript of Mourning and Melancholia at the Harare International Festival of the Arts