Onscreen Narratives, Offscreen Lives: African Women Inscribing the Self

The journeys of onscreen characters, while most do not reflect the offscreen trajectories of the real-life women, provide glimpses that parallel the paths that these women have voyaged in their own lives—perhaps influenced by their characters, or more brutally, because of them. Their travels, imaginary and real, have some relationship to their roles as actor and/or the choices they later made as a result of their encounter with and within the world of cinema. It is their onscreen legacy, especially in the case of iconic films, that has been the most enduring; as these women, far removed from their fame in these early films, live quiet offscreen lives a long way from the experiences of their cinematic characters.

Moreover, filmmakers who navigate frontiers, negotiate relocations and displacements to extra-African environments inscribe an autobiographical journeying, problematizing these itinerant identities in their films. Likewise, traveling, sojourning and relocating across the globe involve shifting or ultimately expanding the identity of their cinema. Hence, an exploration of onscreen representations offers a larger picture of their experiences in front of and behind the camera.

Reel Imaginaries, Real Herstories

In our 1997 interview, Djibril Diop Mambéty narrated to me—in true storytelling fashion—his own cinematic voyage, during which he conflated two characters from his two feature films as if in a departure-return scenario: the iconoclast Anta in his masterpiece Touki Bouki (1973) and the unforgettable Linguère Ramatou in his equally magnificent work, Hyenas (1992).

Touki Bouki is about . . . those days when we dreamed of going abroad. . . .when I made the film Hyenas . . . I returned to the people who went on the journey in Touki Bouki. One travelled, one stayed behind. She said she was going, he said he couldn’t leave . . . [In Hyenas] she went to Japan, she went to New York, she went to Paris. She collected a lot of wealth. Then one day she decided to come home . . . The woman has returned from her journey.¹

This tale by Mambéty, of the journeys of two women—one going away, one coming back—triggered my desire to explore more deeply the theme of peripatetic onscreen narratives and offscreen realities. Have their lives been influenced by the experiences of their onscreen characters? Have their roles as actors in the film in which they traveled, during which they encountered different cultures and locations, impacted their offscreen lives? These questions are not in search of answers, but rather an exploration of a few women from iconic films in the context of nomadic identities both onscreen and offscreen. It also has echoes from my article “Traveling Gazes,”² which inspired the development of this piece. So in some ways it is an offshoot of those reflections. Moreover, this article is influenced particularly by Hamid Naficy’s discussions around the journeying, border crossing and identity crossing of accented filmmakers.³ I wanted to include, as well, those journeys made by the character, but also to continue following the actress off screen. In addition, the choice of subjects coincides with the nascent period of sub-Saharan African cinema of the 1950s and 1960s during which the mobility of African women was not as common (especially long distance travel) and the public reception of women actors was sometimes problematic.

And yet, the actual seed of my interest in exploring the screen travels and real movements of women whose own lives reflect a similar trajectory of voyaging, exploration and discovery was sown during my encounter with Mbissine Thérèse Diop, who embodied the role of Diouana in La Noire de . . . / Black Girl (1966) by Ousmane Sembène, a film that has become symbolic of both the hope and the disillusionment of African immigration to the West.⁴ I met Diop in Paris in 1998 at the Racine Noire Festival, where she was profiled as a pioneer actress of African cinema. I was in the middle of the interviewing phase of my project on African women in cinema and asked her if she would be part of it. We had an extensive filmed interview in her home; she related...