A Cine Nomad in Paris: Interview with Abderrahmane Sissako

MT7 1 IN PARIS MTERVIEW WITH ABDERRAHM ANE SISSAKO Emile Fallaux T he sense of displacement took hold of him in Bamako when he was still a kid. It grew and traveled with him to Nouakchott and Moscow. Now he is in his early forties and an award-winning cineaste living in Paris, making films with displacement as a theme. It's been ten years since his arrival from Moscow and Abderrahmane Sissako is not prepared to return to Mali or to Mauritania, the two countries of his youth. "I lack courage," he says, "I admire filmmakers who go back and work in difficult circumstances. But I don't feel strong enough." So here he is, an elegant African intellectual at work in wintry Paris. He opens the door of his office in a dead-end alley off Boulevard Clichy. Inside it is clean and orderly. In a week he'll be in Mauritania to prepare his next film. "I can't tell you anything. I should not invent things here in France." It will be his third feature shot in the Africa of his youth, after his Moscow-produced debut October. 56 • Nka Journal of Cont em porary Af rican Art At the Rotterdam Film Festival, we viewed the rough cut of October in winter 1992, on a VHS copy that Sissako had submitted . Though it still needed some work, its strength was apparent. A few months later, it was screened for an appreciative audience in Cannes. The film explores the impossible love between a Russian girl and an African boy, and stood out because it avoids standard characterizations. The Russians in the movie are people that Sissako was trying to understand, not just the cardboard whites that you find in the average African film. The setting, a heinous apartment building with spying neighbors, betrays a strong sense of place. Far from home, the young black director discovered the paradox that would haunt his future films: he created an intensely felt place that renders the notion of displacement all the more painful. He realized that from then on he would have to set his films in surroundings whose people, rhythms, rituals, colors, and smells he knows. And what he knows is Bamako, or Sokolo and Nouakchott. And what about Paris? Paris still is a place from which to organize departure, to finance films, to return to for postproduction . It's too alien to offer locations and characters for Sissako's films. For that, after twenty years abroad, he still goes to Mauritania and Mali. As a kid in Mali's capital Bamako, Abderrahmane (or Dramane as he is called by his kin) was considered an ethnic outsider . His mother was born into a full-blown nomad group in Mauritania, while his father's family hailed from a border area in that region. Dramane's great-grandparents had dropped their Mauritanian family name of Ould Hamid and adopted the name of a powerful Malinese businessman, Sissako. But no one was fooled. Among the Bamako blacks, their physiques stood out. Today a lean, light skinned man with Arabic features meets me. His graying hair and thoughtful demeanor lend him something aristocratic and wise. He pours a cup of tea. Dramane grew up in a well-to-do communal ambience, with brothers and sisters and wives from his father's two marriages. Later he became a student leader, a passionate public speaker against the undemocratic Mali Government. At eighteen he had to flee the country and found refuge at the home of his mother, who by then had separated from his father and returned to Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania. But once more Dramane was an outsider; he did not speak Hassaniyya and his name did not sound Mauritanian. (Le f t p a g e ) Heremakono (Waiting for Happiness), 2 0 0 3 , f ilm still Lonesome, he turned to reading, frequenting the libraries of the French and Russian consulates. In postcolonial Africa the Russians were active and popular; they offered an education abroad to many ambitious young people as a welcome alternative to studies in France, the former oppressor. Dramane felt an irrepressible urge to leave and applied for Cinema...