The Right to African Interiority

Abstract Fidelity to everyday, interior African life is a hallmark feature of Abderrahmane Sissako's celebrated body of work. His films put in relief quotidian African experiences adjacent to the continent's political reality, seamlessly interweaving the vagaries of everyday life with consequential political matters. What amplifies the sense of interior life in Sissako's portrait of the continent and its people is the space he gives to quiet and its radical expressiveness. The essay begins with a brief discussion of Sissako's first film Le Jeu (1988); then, drawing on Kevin Quashie's theory of quiet, it offers a substantive analysis of Bamako (2006), reading Sissako's most explicit political film against the grain. Bamako takes place largely in the courtyard of a house in Mali's capital city, indeed the very house in which Sissako grew up. The film portrays, on the one hand, a couple's fraught relationship and, on the other, the public legal proceeding of a case in which the plaintiff is African Society and the defendant the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. With an aesthetic of quiet, Sissako breaks down the division between interior and exterior, private yard and public court, real and fiction. In Bamako, ultimately, Sissako uses the inner world of his childhood home to plumb an African interiority expansive and expressive enough to represent individual, familial, communal, national, and continental African life—not by erecting a hierarchy among these subject positions or eschewing their contradictions or flattening out their differences, but instead, by inventing a poetic tableau that reveals, and quietly revels in, their overlapping textures and individual seams.