Raoul Peck's Lumumba: The Passion of Remembrance and the Pan-Diasporic Longing for History

Lumumba (film still), Directed by Raoul Peck AMY ABUGO ONGIRI THE PASSION OF REMEMBRANCE AND THE PAN-DIASPORIC LONGING FOR HISTORY R eviewers of Lumumba, Raoul Peck's feature film, who classify it as "breathtaking," "brilliant," "utterly enthralling" and "one of the year's best films" are not just participating in the typical film reviewers' tendencies toward the hyperbolic.1 In fact, the importance of the film's appearance at this historical juncture simply cannot be overstated. For Peck, as for the film's intended audience, Lumumba has been a long time coming. Starting with Maureen Blackwood, Isaac J ulien and the Sankofa Film and Video Collective's Passion of Remembrance (1986) and Home Away From Home (1994), movies from filmmakers in the African diaspora have celebrated the pan-diasporic sense of longing and displacement as a search to locate, reconstruct or articulate the stories that lie outside the parameters of the official histories. Lumumba is the latest participant in diasporic attempts to reckon with the recent African past as the site of an intense historical and cultural wounding. Peck's earlier experimental documentary, Lumumba: Death of a Prophet attempted in 1992 to reclaim and situate Patrice Lumumba's lost 7 0 • N k a J o u r n a l o f C o n t e m p o r a r y A f r i c a n A r t legacy as firmly in contemporary Europe as on the African continent . Gloria Rolando's 1997 documentary, Eyes of the Rainbow, invoked Yoruba mysticism in order to situate the Cuban exile o f one-time Black Panther and Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur in the tradition o f a long line o f warrior w omen extending across the African diaspora. Julie Dash's Daughter of the Dust (1991) struggled thematically with the question o f displacement in an A merican context while visually re-inscribing historically atypical markers o f Africanity. Meanwhile, Haile Gerima's celebrated 1993 film, Sankofa attempted to replace a diasporic sense o f longing and displacement with the certainty o f a call to pan-diasporic, Afrocentric unity. All o f these films struggle with a sense o f longing, regret and displaced memories as the raw materiality o f the diasporic imaginary. Palestinian national poet Mahmo ud Darwish characterized the Palestinian diaspora metaphorically as the "drop o f blood that is searching for its w ound," thus signaling the displaced sorrow , dispossession, ambivalence and loss that characterizes the experience o f diaspora.2 Elsewhere he defiantly reminds his audience, "I come from there and I have memo ries" in a poem that culminates in "a single word: Homeland." Filmmakers o f the African diaspora have long struggled to find a visual language to articulate diasporic memory, often articulated as lost history, into a comfortable vision o f "ho meland ." Peck's Lumumba takes the raw material o f recent African history and refashions it into a clever political parable o f what might be recovered from all that was lost in the early post-colonial mo ment. In doing this, he continues to elevate a tradition that insists on declaring defiantly, though not uncomplicatedly, about African history: "I come from there and I have memories." Lumumba begins with an opening montage that mixes authentic photographic stills documenting Belgium's notorious colonial cruelty with the credits and the opening sequence—a garden party with shots o f Alex Descas in all his regal glory as the late Mumbuto Sese Seko. The film thereby creates a mo ment o f intense anti-nostalgic reflection on the former Belgian Congo's colonial past that links the activities o f the Belgian colonial rulers to the current condition o f Africans at ho me and abroad. This, in and o f itself, is not an earth-shattering linkage, conceptually or ideologically. However, it is Peck's highlighting o f these linkages with the contemporary post-colonial malaise around issues o f loss, displacement and recovery to a final place o f hope that moves this film beyond others like it and makes it so particularly timely. Caught neither in the retrogressive politics...