In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Postcolonial Amnesia:The "Vanishing Present" of the Past in Le Cercle des noyés
  • Moustapha Diop (bio)

Le Cercle des noyés/Drowned in Oblivion (BE, 2007) is the third feature on Mauritanian society and culture by Belgian documentarist Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd.1 The film enjoys a wide circulation on the festival circuit and on lowprofile, "underexposed" grassroots networks of film circulation.2 After earning many accolades and drawing a flurry of critical hosannas,3 it is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray. The end result of a decade-long research in Belgium, among Mauritanian expatriates and political refugees, and in Mauritania, Drowned in Oblivion stands as a powerful poetic evocation of the plight of members of the Black minority who were arrested, tortured and sentenced to four years of detention in faraway Oualata for their alleged involvement with FLAM (Forces de Libération Africaines de Mauritanie), a militant organization founded in 1985 to advocate for the political rights of Black Mauritanians.4 In the "Liner Notes" to the DVD set, Birgit Kohler provides a concise summary of the film:

Le Cercle des noyés is a political documentary that is reflective both aesthetically and politically in equal parts, without causing one to suffer at the expense of the other. A text, read calmly and with great dignity, consisting of the testimonies and memories of the prisoners, never rehabilitated, is juxtaposed with stunningly impressive black-and-white images from 2006—"scenes of the crime" that bear no traces of the past, just as if nothing had ever happened. The film is not so much an analysis of the historical and sociopolitical background in Mauritania as it is about the paradigms of political tyranny, misuse of power, injustice, and torture. As such, it can be understood not [End Page 46] only as a gesture against forgetting, but also as a parable that can extend as far as Guantánamo.5

Fusing form and content without lapsing into sloganeering or vitriolic hectoring is no mean feat, yet the claim that Vandeweerd's documentary is a political parable of the age of terror comes across as mere journalistic overstatement, typical of rave reviews—albeit recent developments in the region tend to corroborate Kohler's extrapolation.6 Concretely, in the '80s the fort in Oualata was not so much reminiscent of a detention center where all kinds of inhuman and degrading treatments were meted out, as of a Nazi- or Stalin-era death camp: former detainees remember it as a place where one was simply sent to die a slow, burning death, a fort-mouroir.7 Further, Oualata is better situated within a carceral network stretching across large swaths of continental Africa, a sort of postcolonial gulag archipelago that served, and still serves in autocratic regimes, to muzzle dissent and crush resistance. One is reminded, inter alia, of Camp Boiro in Guinea, creatively re-imagined in Allah Tantou/God's Will (David Achkar, FR, 1991), of Coumba Castel on Gorée Island, where Omar Blondin Diop died in 1973,8 and of the Bakel Fort with its walls carved out of limestone encrusted with skin-corroding salt rocks, where for years erstwhile Senegalese premier Mamadou Dia was held in solitary confinement by Léopold Senghor.9

The other salient point in Kohler's comment bears on the claim that Drowned in Oblivion is "a political documentary," in a sense that both resonates with the issue-oriented Griersonian "tradition of the victim," in Brian Winston's phrase,10 and the "more localized (and sometimes insular) task of retrieving histories and proclaiming identities that myths, or ideologies, of national unity denied," as Bill Nichols contends in his seminal compendium.11 It would be cavalier to rest content with rehearsing this consensual argument. To go further, I will instead argue that Vandeweerd's documentary problematizes the politics of historical representation in postcolonial Francophone Africa, through its aesthetic investment in the fort-city of Oualata as a (Black) site of memory. What sets Drowned in Oblivion apart, as a meditation on state-sanctioned violence, exclusion from the national body politic, and collective amnesia, in comparison with, say, Achkar's Allah Tantou and Raoul Peck's Lumumba: Death...

pdf