UNINTENDED IRONIES
JIHAN EL-TAHRI: How did we become what we are ?
How did we become what we are ? All these premises that oblige you to follow a certain path—if you stray from that path, it’s only because you made a conscious decision to not go down that line. For me, the question was about these rigid blocs in which we find ourselves without ever choosing them—and then we perpetuate them. How do we perpetuate this? Theseformulations of identity that you didn't even choose, didn't even know, and then, suddenly, you become. But you find yourself rejecting because that is not you.
It continues even with all the films I have done, because every one of my films is about How did you get there? With all these givens, with all these hopes, with all these dreams… how did you get there, to mess it up so badly? That is what all my films are about.
How did you get there in the first place?
The first beginning is about How you start disentangling? How you come to the recognition: that's what I am? That's what my constitution is. And then you get a second phase of How do I face this? What bits of it do I integrate as a given? As there is nothing I can do about this and what bits i'm going to reject. The recognition of having been brainwashed and what to do about it and what to replace it with! And once you start replacing it with something you suddenly realise that's another form of brainwashing. So where is it that we find the elements of real things that actually belong to you? The elements of identity that you can call yours. Of course answering any of these questions you can not but start from a colonial, independence and post colonial perspective because the shifts that happened, although you might not even have been born, become the deal handed down to you.
I’m going to make this personal, because that's what it is really about.
My first confrontation with all of this was during the so called first Gulf War in August 1990. That was a concrete moment that disrupted my floating around the world, being an international citizen, a citizen of the world, speaking multiple languages being very good at integrating into this and that. I never really needed to think about identity and all of this, it seemed like a waste of time, I was like Let me do things. Then comes the Gulf War and I'm literally stuck between the fire and the frying pan. The Gulf War made the question of identity impossible to ignore. Here I was writing for an American paper about ‘the Arabs’, a culture and a people that I know and I understand and actually its part of me! I’m watching it being destroyed, wiped out without me really understanding what this is about.
Is it about this one man, Saddam Hussein? I mean, what is this really about? Yet I had to sit down and write. The structures of how to write and what makes a good story and who gets to be sourced and who isn't was forcing me, despite myself, in a direction that was getting me feeling extremely uncomfortable without me really knowing why am I getting more and more depressed by the day? I was sinking into desperation without knowing who to talk to or what to put my finger on.
Let me give you an example: A few days into the Gulf war, I get a message from the magazine I was contributing to US News & World Report saying go to Tarabil, the border between Jordan and Iraq, and write a story about how Jordan is smuggling Scud missiles to Iraq overland. Of course my mouth drops and I ask “How can that be possible? It’s impossible to transport them on trucks! If they are sent in pieces then by the time the Iraqi’s put them together, the war would be over, so what’s the point?” The response was: “We have credible sources here in Washington that have confirmed this information. We need you to go write the story with the colour in situ.”
I was a bit baffled, do these guys know what as Scud looks like? Do they know the size of this thing? Anyway, I checked with my local sources who would have first hand information, but I knew that my ‘Arab sources’ would be dismissed no matter how high up the hierarchy. The newsroom had ‘confirmation from Washington’ then obviously I had to go see. I talked to a friend and colleague from the BBC called Allan Little into coming with me. He too thought it was a crazy story but there was no harm checking, at least it would get us out of Amman. We went to the border and for a couple of days inspected every truck talked to every driver and the people camping in the area. Everyone laughed at us—Smuggling Scuds became almost a joke. While there we did get details, colour, pictures of all sorts of smuggling across the border—from blankets to cement. But no Scud missiles. I write my piece and of course I write about the smuggling and the parallel economy that grew out of the war et cetera, et cetera… . But obviously I did not mention Scud missiles. When the magazine hits the stands the following week, I get a call from the Jordanian authorities accusing me of fabricating stories about smuggling Scuds. I was shocked since I hadn’t written that into my piece. They showed me the magazine and indeed, under the story I had written there was a Bold Bullet Point—which only experts or journalists know that this means it is a separate story—saying exactly what the Washington sources had said. I tried to explain that I had not written this and explaining the significance of the Bold Bullet Point. I will never forget the look on their faces, especially that they knew that they could do nothing to me… . I was writing for a major US publication after all!
I went to my hotel room feeling like a traitor, but I did not understand whom exactly I was betraying. Once again my head starts spinning with questions… Who on earth am I? This story happens a few days after the beginning of Desert Storm (The war) but I had started asking myself this question after an incident on the first night of the war. I had gone up to the bar of the Amman Intercontinental where all the International Press corps was staying. Most of the foreign correspondents, mostly Americans and Brits, were my friends with whom I had covered many stories in the Middle East over the past years. I was one of them or so I thought. So, I go for a drink and one of the journalists is sitting at the Piano and all the others are making up words of a song to go along with the music. Obviously I don’t remember all the words, but the Chorus was: “Saddam we are going to kick your ass”. I wanted to join in the “fun” and laughter, but I just couldn’t. I felt personally offended. Why? After all, my country had the second largest army poised to bomb Saddam! Was I pro Saddam? Certainly not. However, there was no doubt in my mind that everything happening around me had nothing to do with who I am. The next question was inevitable: Who am I? I guess that is where my journey of questioning my identity starts.
That's act one.
Act two
I leave journalism, completely. I close the door and say that is not what I wanted to do. I need to do something else. Instead of quickly going to get the story, I want to know where all this came from. So I start doing more in depth research, wanting to write, taking time, and the more I was doing that the more I was coming across notions and questions that people either didn't want to answer or before they accepted to answer you needed to show your colours. I had to take sides. And I was faced with this consistent questions of Are you Arab or are you African? And the second question, Are you Muslim or are you Christian? But no, I'm just asking a question about history here, it's not about... And I kept trying to answer, I guess I'm Arab but I'm not just Arab, I'm etc. But I kept feeling I need to take a side, I have to be this or this. THIS or THIS. It’s always about the “or”. Twenty years of my life I was being everything at the same time, I could fit in any context and this question had never even occurred to me. It was the first time in my life I thought about identity, grappling with identity was imposed on me. My whole education was geared towards becoming a citizen of the world— my father was a diplomat—and we fit in everywhere. Then all of a sudden I was becoming the other. But what is that other that I’m supposed to be? It was very delicate, I was at a crossroad.
We are still at the beginning of the 1990s, 1991, 1992. There is Desert Shield, beginning August 1990, that lasted for eleven months; then there was Desert Storm and there was the whole fallout—I had also been covering the PLO and all of this. I started reading, not trying to look for answers as I couldn’t pinpoint the question. There were certain books that for me were saviours, like reading Cheikh Anta Diop. How I came accross Cheikh Anta Diop? I remember I went and picked up a copy at the library. I didn’t buy it. I lived near Beaubourg and I used to spend a lot of time alone in that library. I can't remember who pointed it out but somebody said something about Egypt being black, which made me look for that book. It was a person completely unconnected to what I was doing, because at that point I didn't want to see any journalists, I didn't even want to see my friends. I'm not very good at depression, but that was the closest I ever got to real depression... . I hadn't yet met these African filmmakers and I remember reading this book and thinking why has no one told me about this? It was Nations nègres et culture by Cheikh Anta Diop. And I remember not buying it because I wanted a copy in English. My French was not good enough. It was good enough for me to understand what was going on but I knew instinctively that I needed to understand every subtlety. The book was talking to me personally—so I wanted an English copy to buy and that's why I kept going back to the library. Anyway.
That's when I kept saying—How come?—this book is talking about Egypt, about Egyptology, about Africa. Out of my country where I did an important part of my schooling, at the American University where I studied African politics, but I studied mainly South Africa. South Africa was going fighting against Apartheid and Nelson Mandela incarnated the battle for freedom, not just in his country but for all of us. So you suddenly start asking all these questions about your actual schooling. I remember, next time I went to Egypt I looked up my curriculum and tried to find out if there had been courses that were offering this, but that I didn't choose and didn't see because I wasn't in that frame of mind. But no. So here my interest in history starts, I was interested in politics but not really connecting that to an interest in history. At the university I was reading the revolutionary stuff, or issues of the Cold War. My studies never really had much to do with Egypt.
... for me that's what university was
So I started questioning my education without knowing that I'm questioning “education” with a capital E. I graduated in 1983, I then wrote my master thesis about the impact of water shortage on the Arab Israeli conflict—at the time no one was talking about it, it was seventeen articles and two books and that was it. Shortly after that I started working at Reuters first as a Photographer then as a journalist. So I was in and out of university from 1980 to 1985. Practically every one of my friends was in a national struggle. Who are my friends? They are either Palestinians, South Africans and Ugandans some of them said they were Ugandans then but later it turned out they're Rwandas—and all this comes to help me later. So I'm sitting among a pool of people who are deep in the heart of liberation struggles. I had one friend who had walked from Ethiopia all the way to Cairo, another friend who then became the editor in chief of a newspaper in Uganda. They were my group, they were all in Cairo. I never sort of questioned it because at the American University in Cairo [AUC] there were a lot of Africans—if you don't go to America or England you go to Cairo. Why? Because 1980 the war in Lebanon had already started so the AUB [American University of Beirut] is already dead, everything happens at AUC. When I am between classes and I am having a coffee I am sitting with a Sudanese person, a Ugandan person, a South African and a Palestinian. What are we talking about? We are revolutionaries, we are leftists I mean all these stupid appellations that you don't quite formulate yet and for me that's what university was.
These were people who were on bursaries—that's how I discover Cairo. I'm the rich kid from Cairo whose Cairo was limited to the island and the beautiful houses and suddenly I meet all these much more interesting people that I've ever met who live in these dingy little flats in downtown. I discover downtown and the history of my downtown through the eyes of these people. I discover buildings, I discover histories of architecture, I discover all this through the eyes of people who see Egypt as a hub of helping them. The offices of the ANC were still open. There were still the offices of the PAC [Pan African Congress]. One of my friends, Samir Dollie, it was funny how this all comes to play much later, his father was at the PAC office. So I knew there was a distinction between the PAC and the ANC just because one guy wouldn't go to that office and the other guy wouldn't go to that office.
Another friend from South Africa who later became South Africa's ambassador to Iran, Ebrahim Saley, the guy who was the intermediator for Pan Am 103, was my school friend. The first minister of information of Rwanda after the genocide was sitting next to me and we were going out for parties—it was a time and it is funny when I say it like this, I feel like I'm a hundred years old. But this is happening in the 1980s, this isn't that long ago. When all this is happening in the 1980s it is a continuum from just a few years ago. 1974 [the independence of Lusophone Africa] was just a few years ago, so we were at the tail end of all these consequences, or the immediate after effect of independence.
We're still receiving it, we're not even questioning it yet, that's where Ayi Kwei Armah's book was really interesting because The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, is that for me: sitting around the table with these guys, the immediate post-independence and you're questioning with them what happened. Why is it not happening? So I'm part of something, but technically I shouldn't be part of it because as an Egyptian we were the first, we were helping everyone else. I should have had a different attitude to all this, but I'm an Egyptian from the diaspora—I grew up abroad, mainly in England—who has never been accepted as a real Egyptian.
I'm part of this outcast group and my questions were actually not very dissimilar. When we take classes, we were the ones looking for the good professors. Everyone else was looking for the good graders. In Gail Gerhart'si class we were always three or four maximum because she was a tough grader no one was going to take her class, they'd flunk it. But we wanted to know what this very knowledgable women has to say. No one would dream of judging her, even if , her husband was with the Ford Foundation and at the time, any foreigner was first presumed to be a spy. But with her, it didn’t matter, after all she had just written the book Black Power in South Africa [1979] that was based on all these first hand encounters. Her meetings with Steve Biko, Robert Sobukwe and other outlawed leaders of the Pan African Congress (PAC) and the Black Consiousness Mouvement.
I took 3 classes with her, and I remember my term paper for the class I took in 1983 was about the introcution of a Tricameral Parliament that would include Coloureds and Indians. That move by the Apartheid government was a last attempt to divide the non-white South Africans in order to obstruct the black population from claiming any rights. All this was happening the same year I was taking that class. The creation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) had just been created bringing together all non-white movements in order to make South Africa ungovernable for the Apartheid regime. Of course we now know that this was the begining of the end of Apartheid and we were studying it as it was happening.
I didn't actually recognise the importance of university until three, four years ago when I turned fifty—which is a bit ironic. I started university really early, I had just turned seventeen. Seventeen is young, so these are my formative years. I was trying to choose stuff that I found fascinating, so I studied things like Russian history, we were only a handful taking that class. I went on a trip to Russia which was like a three month trip. Now that I'm thinking back—and I never thought of this—but I really was one of the outcasts, although nothing in my profile should make me one of the outcasts. There was for example Paul, he was American, gay and with a ponytail down to here, in Cairo of the early 1980s, with flip-flops, and who was a Russia buff slam bang in the middle of the Cold War. An American obsessed with Russia and his main thing was about the love affairs of the Russian aristocracy and how they reflected into politics within czarist Russia and how despite communism it filtered through. I remember the first time that we went with him to Russia he took us down these little streets and said Baroness God-Knows-Who was living here and she was going out with the husband of et cetera. It was fascinating! It was all these things from other worlds that gave layering to history and meaning to things I knew were relevant to what was happening in our part of the world. I was questioning but I wasn't head on.
There's one guy who is really important in my life who was a friend of my fathers. His name was Sayed Al Jawhary. I'm talking very early years, in high school. I was a bookworm since I was young. My mother was constantly shouting at me that I was going to ruin my eyes, sit up straight while you're reading, switch on the light.... This friend of my fathers was a very powerful, very rich, very important man who would always look at me with a smile. And every time he came back to Cairo, he would bring me back a hardcover political or history book. I'm fourteen, fifteen. For me these were my treasures. You know the hardbacks that you could never buy because they were so expensive! Like when the transcripts of the Watergate tapes came out he bought me the leather-bound copy of the book—and I spentages with it. I was fascinated by the Cold War, so any book about the Cold War that came out he bought for me. I was reading them alongside novels, mainly the European classics, Hermann Hesse, Albert Camus, Andre Gide .... , and of course everything about the KGB and the CIA, about what the Cold War was doing as a world phenomenon. Only with Gail Gerhart Africa appeared on my horizon. I wasn’t much of a Magazine and Journal reader although political journals I would devour like Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy when my Dad’s friend would give me copies. Surprisingly I found an issue of Lotus between my books in Cairo when I was going through them recently, but I really can’t remember reading it.
No one was proposing alternative books, or let me say non-western books. The only African writer that was anywhere near our curriculum was Chinua Achebe and that was during my last year, Things Fall Apart and Man of the People...that’s it. And with a name like Chinua Achebe no one really gave us his background. I don't even know if I asked where this man was from. So I'm telling you, that it's actually ignorance, total ignorance, despite me hanging out with all these friends from the south of the continent. I knew what the NRA [National Resistance Army, led by Museveni] was because all my Ugandan friends (a number of whom then turned out to be Rwandan refugees) were talking about either fleeing the NRA...— but this was about battles in the bush. So these imaginaries. Zimbabwe's process of independence—Nkomo, Muzorewa, all these names—there were still battles in the bush. This was second chimurenga, first chimurenga even. So words like chimurenga, all these things I knew but I couldn't connect them to structures, nothing was taught.
Voilà, so I come out of university, and Gail Gerhart is absolutely instrumental because I don't take ONE class in South African politics, I then proceed to take EVERY class. I actually had a minor, just because of how the credits are counted, I had a minor in South African politics and I was like Hallelujah! I'm going to go to South Africa now. But no you can't—with an Egyptian passport, you can't. Of course I knew there's racial segregation and that there was a boycott but I didn't know that Egypt prohibited its citizens from even going there.
I wanted to go do a Phd and I'd applied for a scholarship and I got accepted at Oxford and my father says no. What do you mean no? I got a full scholarship for Oxford, but my father wouldn't pay for lodging, because he didn't want me “an unmarried girl”, to go alone. Although I had full freedom in Egypt. Full freedom, but with a curfew. I had a curfew until I was twenty-something. I had to be home before 11-o'clock at night. I had a car, I could go to Alexandria, whatever. Never a single question asked. But 11pm, you are home. Which of course I rebelled against, but not until much later.
In a way I got into journalism through opposition and trying to collect money for what I wanted to do but I ended up in the heart and centre of what I wanted to study.
Palestine, the backbone of what we grow up on
The only job I found was to be a photographer at Reutersii. Soon after I also began to write. I happened to speak languages and it was always really ironic—of everything I know, it's just the ability to speak a language that is considered my asset which for me was the only thing that was just a tool. So I start working with Reuters and I'm sent to Lebanon, but I'm coming out of Gail Gerhart's Black Power in South Africa, so I'm walking around Lebanon with a pin saying “Free Nelson Mandela”. For me, freeing Nelson Mandela was no longer about South Africa or about Africa, it was about the consciousness of human dignity. Nelson Mandela could have been from Mars for all I cared, but he was the face of what we conscious people should be defending. And of course I knew who Mandela was because Gail Gerhart told us everything about him. Then the Achille Lauro [hijacking] happens [October 1985] and I'm covering it and I'm standing right in front of Abu Abbas who was then head of the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF) one of the factions that constitute the PLO. I would have been studying him but there I was talking to him—that fascination of first hand encounters opened another door.
Of course, Palestine is the backbone of what we grow up on. I don't think I initially thought that was the route I was going—I went that way because I couldn't pursue the South Africa thing, which had become the centre of my interest, but I couldn't go. And the other thing there was effervescence around was the Palestinians, which was easier, which I knew better. And then as one of my very first international trips as a young correspondent, I was sent to Yemen, Arafat was in Yemen, and I get to meet Arafat—and of course, meeting Yasser Arafat in 1986, it's a big deal! This guy who some are calling a terrorist, some are calling a hero—and I barge into his space and he shouted at me and then invites me to dinner and there's this fascination that drags me in. I had been covering the war in Lebanon, they'd just left Lebanon, so there were a million and five questions I needed to ask.
In November of 1987, I remember we were all covering a Palestinian National Conference that was held in Algiers when we heard the news that Zein Al Abdedine Ben Ali had overthrown President Habib Bourguiba who had ruled Tunisia since its independence. I was writing for the Sunday Times then, but a week or so later The Washington PostRegional Correspondent, Patrick Tyler, asked me if I wanted to work for the Post covering North Africa. I would be based in Tunisia, mainly covering the PLO (that had it’s headquarters there since they were expelled from Lebanon) and the Islamic Movement that was becoming a hot story.
So I was sucked into the Palestinian story. I became a bit of an expert at the time because I was getting confused with all the different factions and all the Abu this and the Abu that so I drew up a full organogram of the PLO. There are eight different movements within the PLO, I needed to understand how does that work? Who is who? And how one leader becomes important internally while the rest of the world thinks the opposite to what's actually happening. So the Palestinian issue at that point—for the kind of people I wanted to associate with—was the platform for all kinds of debates. Arafat was talking about Mandela—it was like we are all talking that same language. For lack of a better word, that was the global left. But all these things are loose, I'm collecting baggage from here and there and I'm not really questioning any of it, i'm sucking it in
Then the Gulf War happens...
and I'm like what what what? Who am I? Everyone asked me are you Arab, are you African? But I'm getting to the point where I say—and that's where I got into Cheick Anta Diop, he was the only person who allowed me to say—I'm both. Actually, you stupid people, how can you not see that I'm both? How can you not see that all the problems of colonialism start with us? Start with a conscious decision to separate us from you. So if you're going to talk about liberation that's the first hurdle that everyone should be working towards. So that's sort of like the background reflection.
Fast forward—so I leave this whole journalism thing. But what journalism did and what the American university did, which is really important, it gave me the tools to question, to define the parameters of questioning and to take them forward and to make a separation between form and content. These were tools that I'm not sure they realised to what extent they transmit because it is the first time you go to the library and you research your own term paper. You come from a school system that says learn this. So suddenly you are given the tools that no, don't learn this, go find out about this and come tell me what you know.
So maybe there was encadrement, maybe there was a kind of steering you toward the right direction by questioning, but as a rebel at heart I was learning how to play ball with my tutors as much as I was learning how to play ball with the library, with the books—you think you're gonna hide this from me? I'm going to find it. Trace, who took out these books and to be able to maybe not read six hundred pages, find the three people who took it out first and just ask each one. Then decide which ones I will read from cover to cover. It's about methodology of dodging as well as accumulating—so all these are tools that maybe I didn't realise I was acquiring but these are the tools that became the most handy at questioning. It's like when the student turns against the master. If that's what you want me to know, if I'm going to apply the tools you taught me, I'm questioning you about that, and they wanna say yes but it doesn't apply—but no, for me it does apply. That's how I ended up being friends with most of my professors. Gail Gerhart until today when I go to New York I stay at her house. Walid Kazziha we're still in touch, Dan Tshirgi all these people. Our relationship moved on to the next level maybe when I became a master student I was no longer an undergraduate so we would sit and have coffee together and talk as equals. Voilà.
So, after the Gulf War the question of Who am I? Am I Arab or am I African? Am I supposed to think this or am I supposed to think that? And I felt that everything was going towards one direction, but my heart and my space and what I felt was right was going in the other direction. Suddenly America was the only Super Power and it was “saving the world”. So, 1990, get rid of Saddam Hussein, impose democracy, we're fighting for the good of men, things like that. But inherently for me this Pax Americana that was taking shape where Peace would be imposed under the hegemony of the US and with US conditions and by force if they deemed it necessary, was not where I wanted to be. So I was fleeing from that but going towards what?
All this is happening. All these accumulations and next thing I know I'm in Paris because I've been kicked out of Tunisia. I’ll never really know for sure why I was expelled, but Operation Desert Storm had started and the tension was very high. I initially thought because I was so versed in what was happening within the PLO and they were starting to clearly side with Saddam Hussein. However, years later I was told that my explusion had to do with my contacts and documents I had managed to obtain from the Islamic movement Ennahda. You see, I was the North Africa correspondent for Washington Post and US News & World Report, so yes, 85% of what I was covering was the Palestinians—as the PLO headquarter was in Tunis—but I was also doing Algeria. I covered the riots in 1988, which then led to the municipal elections that the FIS [Islamic Salvation Front] won, followed by the general elections of 1992 which were interrupted thus sparking off a civil war, now called “The dark decade”. The Islamic movement is now the big thing. I had to leave Tunis within a few hours and the first flight leaving was to Paris. So, I ended up in the last place I'd ever thought of living!
Every carpet has been pulled from under my feet and the only thing left for me is to go back to daddy. Which was the one thing I was not going to do. I've just spent an entire lifetime battling for the space, for the freedom, for I don't want your name, I don't want your money etc etc. I'm not now going to leave this aside and go say daddy, I’ve failed. It would have been the end of me. I lived in an eleven square meter room, luckily I'm not too tall, but like I'm fat so you could barely fit into that room. I didn't have money, I didn't have friends, I was smoking heavily, but I didn't have the money to buy the cigarettes. I'd collect all the yellow pieces and go and ask What is the cheapest thing you have? and of course Gauloises was the cheapest thing. So I lived on Gauloises for a long time. I'd broken all relations with all the different—the press—I didn't care who it was, I'm not writing for anyone, I'm not doing anything, because I don't know what that deal is... . All I know is I don't want to be part of this. And I remember the covers—when you're walking on the streets in Paris, you have these poles that have the covers of the magazines and sentences like, Islam is the menace. Suddenly this Islam thing was a big deal and of course I knew about the growing Islamism because I had covered all of this in Egypt—the Musilm Brotherhood— and Algeria, so all this was part of my world, but seeing it encroach onto my new space as the menace... . For the western world made you feel that being Arab was problematic, now being Moslem had also become problematic. All this combines to put me in a space of okay, you gotta sit down and define what you want to be and how you're going to do this. Because none of these lineages, these blood things, all these criteria that everybody is using is not working for me because I've not lived in any country long enough. My parents are the typical kind of secular elite that has blood from everywhere. So none of this was going to work for me and that's where I decided, I decided, that my identity is primarily as an Egyptian, my context is that of Africa. So I'm primarily an African, then an Egyptian and then you can call me Arab and then you can call me Muslim and then all the tributaries of all of that.
U-Turn towards Africa
So that decision to shift my space, in many ways, was primarily Cheikh Anta Diop's book because it allowed me to combine the two. I found an articulation of how to reintegrate myself into that broken narrative. Because there was an intention to take me out of this narrative, out of the space called Africa, by taking Egypt out from Africa, intellectually and politically—Diop’s argument that the colonial powers intentionally detached Egypt from the Continent in order to have the argument of civilising the barbarian. The argument made sense to me and once I understood its implications I was not gonna let that happen. Besides, destiny kept pushing me down that road. In January 1994 a friend invited me to go to the Louvre for the openning of an exhibition titled Egyptomania, every painting, every piece of furniture and every statue seemed to be screaming out to me you see Cheikh Anta Diop is right! The paintings from the Empire period inserted French Kings into Pharaonic settings, the Pharaonic statues had European features and even the arm chairs had the Sphinx as hand rests. It felt soo weird and I was angry at first but then I started laughing...something in that exhibition combined with what I had been reading suddenly gave me a kind of difinitive clariy.
I was not gonna be the tool of that colonial desire to divide and rule, to accept that Egypt be severed from its natural context in order to serve the colonial design. So, I did a determined U-turn and moved all my attention towards discovering ‘Africa’.
My first encounter with ‘Africa’ south of the Sahara was in 1997 and ironically it started with a confrontation which should have repulsed me but instead it made me more determined. So, I go to my first FESPACO in 1997 and I am like a pig in mud. Happy, it's like I feel I am back at university around that coffee table with me and my buddies, the rebels, the outcasts, you are not talking anybody else's language. You are doing your own thing. I felt that space was mine. I found home.
I was still working on the Kabila film, L'Afrique en Morceaux which I finnish in 1999/2000. Serge Adda, a Tunisian Jewish guy who was quite influential and later became the head of TV5, was a close friend of Hervé Chabalier head of CAPA that is producing my film for Canal+. I didn't know all of this at the time but he convinces Chabalier to send me to Fespaco. You see, I had been researching and working on that film for more than a year already and everybody was worried since normally at CAPA films are done in a year maximum. Here I was on my second year and I hadn't finished it and everyone was on my case but I refused to go quicker. I had just come out of journalism doing things too quick. So I was standing my ground, I have to do this the way I need to do it. And I think Serge Adda said that she should come meet people at FESPACO. It is a space where there will be people who have different connections that will help. So I went to FESPACO.
And there's this new guild of African filmmakers being organised and I'm hallelujah and I go and I attend. And they're talking about all these ideas that really for me is that effervescence of that moment of university where we could change the world. And i'll never forget putting up my hand because when I have something I want to say I say it. I put up my hand and I'll never forget the lineup. There was Jean-Marie Teno, Fanta Nacro, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda and somebody was standing here, I think it must have been Serge Coelo. And I put up my hand and I asked something and Jean-Marie says in French (my French isn't perfect yet) I'm not sure I caught what he said but there was a kind of "sigh...who is she?" And then Haroun says something like we're only taking questions from Africans, this is a conversation between Africans in the room. There couldn't be a worse point in my life to tell me a sentence like this. So I stood there like...uhuh. And I said but I am African. And he says, Yes I understand but we're talking about sub-Saharan Africa and I'm like...Hold on, what do you mean sub-Saharan Africa? But you're from Chad, so why can you talk? Because Chad is above the Sahara, so why can you talk? And anyway, I felt like I was creating a massive disruption. This was my first FESPACO and even Jihan knows when to shut up when it’s necessary, so I shut up and I sit down.
That word sub-Saharan Africa was the biggest dagger that anyone could have stabbed me with, because it was a criteria that I had not encountered in all this mess I had been trying to grapple with. This word sub-Saharan I needed to know, to understand where are its parameters since I certaily can’t see them on any map—so what are you actually talking about? Who are the Africans who can be Africans and who are the Africans who can't be Africans? Suddenly this line called the Sahara became this thing that divides us and them. Well what about the people who are on that line? Are they part of this or are they part of that? So it opened this can of worms that I couldn’t wrap my head around so I decided he's just an asshole. Put it aside and move on. Which I did.
Until you come now—fast-forward—I don't even know how to call it, a recognised film-maker—it's not even the right word. An acclaimed film-maker—all these words are stupid because they don't mean anything. Because it didn't give me more space, it didn't give me more anything. Every time I start a new project I start from zero. Every time it was about a different African country, I'd have to justify why I, now I’m seen as the “white girl”, can legitimately question “our” issues and then I'll pull out my Cheikh Anta Diop, and I pull out this and that to claim that space. It was an eternal struggle. I didn't have a place at the table, but they didn't mind me sitting in the back row, where I could whisper something into someone's ear something that they could say. That was allowed.
And for a while I was happy with that because I was still not understanding the lay of the land. And then you get to the stage where I make a film that like everyone can't sort of, but she's that girl we all know—why did we not pay attention, why did we not see that? Just like, oh that little thing knows how to do something and suddenly the space on the table was opened up but when it came to serving food you weren't served at the same time. I'm just giving an illustration. Let us eat first then you will eat. Alongside us, but not with us.
So all this, I guess I'm just easing into this making of space. And as a female, and I think that's important, my years as a photojournalist when I was very young and completely unseen, I mean I would be standing there, I've always been round and fat so I take space. But why is it that people don't see me and can just talk over my head? Of course it's a boys club and of course some would say it's more pronounced in the African context, but that's bullshit. All these male foreign correspondents and photographers, 99.9% white WASPS, were doing the exact same thing, I'd be sitting at the table and they'd come take over that table I'm sitting at, not even see my existence and start talking about the most intimate private details as if I had no ears or eyes. The biggest lesson I learned from being the fly on the wall in the early years is that men in professional situations can pretend that the females that are doing the same job are “equal colleagues” but they don’t truely believe that. They consistently use their ultimate weapon—which is sleeping with them—to justify dismissing their professionalism and claim that they only got to where they are at in their career by sleeping around with influential men. I was horrified by the way these foreign correspondants openly spoke about their female colleagues as though they are objects and I vowed to my self there and then that I would never ever put myself in that situation.
Fast forward again to the African context, here I was now going to every FESPACO. Now I'm going to the guild meetings in Paris, now I'm actually being seen, now I actually have an office that is big enough in Ménilmontant where people are starting to look for offices. I end up sharing an office with Abderrahmane Sissako who is producing Mahamat Saleh Haroun [Abouna, 2002] and so the office I'm sitting in, that I am actually paying part of the rent for, becomes the hub. I shared the office with Abderrahmane, Haroun, Idrissou Mora-Kpai, it is the hub for African filmmakers where everybody comes. So I was at the centre, included but at the same time dismissed, I end up going to dinner every night with the boys. [...]
So I was at the centre and getting clear insight of the configurations and of alliances and things I wasn't even aware were happening. But I was still the only clear skinned face who little by little was acquiring more knowledge than theyhad about the continent, so when somebody wanted to do something about the Congo—Zeka Laplaine included, Zeka who is half Angolan and half Congolese, but he hadn't lived in the Congo, he'd say Have you got a fixer in the Congo? Do you know someone in Rwanda? So I became part of the African configuration but still not accepted as...a full ‘African’—I don't think I ever will be accepted. But to come back to the word sub-Saharan.
Just as we're doing collective talks and now I'm thinking I'm part of the guild, because you always hope to be part of something and you stand up and call for this and call for that and then it comes to financing, Oh no but you can't apply. Why can't I apply? Because you're not sub-Saharan. And suddenly the funding lines, the invitations, everybody, absolutely everybody will get invited to Cannes for the “Cinema of the South” pavilion, but I wouldn't. Why am I not invited? By this time I've probably done more films than them, all about the continent, I’m from the continent, so Why?Because you're not sub-Saharan.
So little by little you get out of the way, the gender thing. Then you get out of the way, the colour thing and the Francophone / Anglophone thing. Then you sort of, by elimination you get all of these things out of the way and then you realise that the problem of divisions is so deep... . At some point I was left with this sub-Saharan thing. So I decided let me look at what this sub-Saharan thing is. And of course, we always take for granted that these divisive demarcations are part of the colonial residue. But from all the reading that I've always been doing I didn't seem to recall the word sub-Saharan sticking to my brain as a concept as such. So I started going back. In French we would say j'ai essayé de dérouler la pelote, so it is like this thread... And then I came again, but this isn't a word that comes from colonial terminology. So now why are all these Africans around me claiming themselves as sub-Saharan. When did these divisions happen? How did these divisions happen? And how did my buddies now, because some of them are my buddies, how did they claim this new identity to become their main identity? And how did that main identity become this collective thing?
The Great Divide
So sub-Sahara became the centre of my problematic. And I didn't give it enough attention until about 2014 or 2013 when initially I tried to figure it out for funding reasons, more to confront them with their game of divisiveness, but then Koyo Kouoh asked me to do a keynote speech for 1-54 in London. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to talk about, but after a chat with Koyo I was delighted that she too was questioning how the Sahara had become that demarcation line. So I agreed, and that's where my writings about The Great Divide comes from. As I am doing research to prepare for my public talk I come accross a report by the Social Science Research Council, an appraisal and history of Aerea studies as a discipline
For the After Year Zero exhibtion at HKW [2013], one of the things I wanted to do was my vitrine about Suez. As I was trying to look for maps—I had my radio, I had these clips—suddenly I was being confronted with this year 1956 which for me, being an Egyptian, was a ground shaking moment, because of the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, but I've always put it on the fact that it's so important because I'm Egyptian. But suddenly while I'm doing After Year Zero, I realized, this isn't just important for Egypt, it is because 1956 was a crucial moment for shaping the new world order, for example it is out of the Suez Crisis that the concept of peacekeeping troops was forged. The concepts of peacekeeping troops which is now all over Africa and is a new tool of control, meddling and domination on the continent and it is a direct out come from that moment.
There are so many things that happen to shift realities that come along with Suez that I started thinking, disentangling this problematic starts from there. I concentrated on why the Americans react so violently to the British and ultimately it was not the Egyptians that managed to halt the “Tripartite Agression” as we call or rather the war of 1956—it was the Americans that told the British, if you don't shut your mouth and get the hell out of there we are going to break your back and get you to pay your debt of the second world war. So why are the Americans doing that? And it's the quick resignation of Anthony Eden that I don't think the Americans counted on, that sent them in a scurry, suddenly trying to figure out oh my god, it's the end of Empire. And end of Empire means that suddenly we're going to have all these African countries—Guys, does anyone know anything about these places? Does anyone know what this country called Guinea Conakry is? Who is this guy?
So there was a sudden panic on that level, alongside Suez and Nasser at the time, Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Touré, they are the buddies. So that space that I tried to figure out, the three main people and Nasser being the center because that's where I start, but it is Nkrumah and Sekou Touré—they're both sub-Saharan. So why were they okay together then? That's only 1956. And when did they not become okay together as a group? I stumble on documents whilst I'm trying to disentangle the creation of Area Studies as a new discipline. Initially I thought why would I be interested in the creation of a new department in American universities? But I kept coming back to these five organisations Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford foundations, Social Science Research Council and the CIA that sat together and tried to figure out how to deal with Africa in the postcolonial era. All the different documents that talk about Area Studies say more or less the same thing about launching of Area Studies being is a kind of alliance forged between the universities, the intelligence services and the foundations, finding together a way to collect information and design programs from the prism of US perceived national security interests. So I think the penny dropped when I suddenly visually imagined it to be something like the Scramble for Africa. How in 1884, this image during the Berlin Conference of all the representatives standing around a map and dividing the continent on these terms and suddenly that imagery of these foundations of America standing around the map saying hold on, how are we going to divide this? That imagery became very potent for me and the question of why is Mauritania way up north considered sub-Saharan and Sudan that goes way down to the south considered Middle East? How did these demarcations things happen?
So the more I looked into that the more I got into area studies. So I start looking at areas and then names kept popping up. Samuel Huntington, Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami—I studied their books as part of my curriculum, they came to our university and were treated as semi gods. These were the most celebrated scholars in the world after all. Huntington had already started talking about his concept regarding the clash of civilizations and how the new confrontation will no longer be between Captialism and Communism but rather between Islam and the West. Now we know he was right or did he already know something about what was to come? His book Clash of Civilizations was published shortly after the Gulf War if I remember correctly. Fouad Ajami was Lebanese and his book The Arab Predicament reframes the intellectual, political and social crisis in the Arab World seen through the prism of the 1967 defeat. That would obviously strike a chord with anyone living in Cairo.
So all these stars that were the stars of that world of politics that taught me politics, that made me know all these things. I read these book avidly and they all made sense to me. I guess they played on the right chords since all of us as young rebels were questioning What Went Wrong and Why? But at that age I was not really able to read between the lines. I did not see until much later that I had adopted their analysis without questioning its vantage point nor its vested interests.
These names keep popping up in connection to Area Studies. And then I start thinking, why are they investing $350,000,000 annually to create this discipline throughout American universities. What is the aim? What is the ultimate goal of this? It is a lot of money at the time and this having been retained as the best methodology to think up a new world order which then includes reacting to African independences—I could not see the connection. Then I suddenly realised that it's all about brainwashing in a different formula. Actually we are talking about the same thing, it's just colonialism in a different format. But in a format that you can hardly combat because it's not just about brainwashing, this “education” becomes who you are. And as Huntington, Ajami, Lewis and others kept popping up it freaked me out. Because that's me! And that's how I get to the point of saying I'm not only a product of this system, I am exactly what the system was designed to do. I am what they wanted to design. And me being the rebel, they got me! How did they get me?
They won their bet by stealth. These stealth fighters that you don't see coming and suddenly it's a bomb. All the premises of my thought, all the frameworks of reference that I have available in my brain to analyse anything are theirs! Maybe I exaggerate and this ‘conspiracy’ is not as coherent as it seems from my research. Maybe my professors—who mostly graduated from and taught in the Middle East Departments of the carefully constructed Area Studies discipline—don’t share the State Department’s agenda. Maybe they have a completely different agenda. How can one even find things like that out? As far as I was concerned my professors were all very sincere and knowledgable and I never even suspected an agenda of any kind, and maybe there wasn’t. Indeed, I was soo proud to be an A student, I even have a recommendation I have a letter from my professor Raymond W. Baker, he wrote this amazing book called Egypt’s Uncertain Revolution under Nasser and Sadat. I was so proud, of his recommendation letter! He was an excellent professor, he spoke perfect Arabic, knew lots about the culture and religion and knew Cairo inside out. I was very impressed and it didn’t occur to me to question how I felt about learning about my own country through an American. In fact I'm also learning Ancient Egypt through the Americans, Islamic Art and Architecture and South African politics through the Americans. I'm learning everything through the Americans and I've never lived in America. I've always refused to live in America. And all my crap about using their tools to counter this...I didn't even see the extent to which I was a part of it.
It felt a bit like an unintended irony when I found Professor Bakers web page on ‘International Council for Middle East Studies’ while I was following up my research. All the ingrediants were there! He was designated a Carnagie Scholar in Islamic studies and the page also stated “Prof. Baker consults periodically for the U.S. State Department, Department of Defense, USAID, the Pentagon, and a variety of other government agencies and private foundations.”
So, yes, I had to face that I was a pawn in that game, with our without my consent. What happens with that recognition is that you suddenly realise okay, now I know. What do I do about it? How do you replace the very foundations on which you stand on? How do you replace the references? How do you replace details you don’t even remember that you know? How do you un-know what you know? I have no idea. It's actually quite a thing—it’s of magnitude. I think the tools I learnt at university are becoming a kind of Frankenstein monster helping me to use what I have learnt to expose all what I can. At least the tools allow me a lucidity that these are the spaces and these are the things I refuse. I'm reading Derrida. I'm slap-bang in the middle of deconstruction, but is Derrida any less area studies? Where do I go for references?
[...]
How do we address it ?
I guess I have to accept that in my head I am both the West and the South, just like I am both Arab and African and I claim these spaces because I can't be anything else. Where I'm at now is the combining. It is not the either or, it is the and. I want the and, because you have to trust that my brain is as good as yours and I am capable of being both and being really both. I'm not anyone's tool but I cannot unlearn English to be something else. But I can use that English to go in the direction that will add on to my Arabic. So it's this combining. And when we were talking about linear narratives and restricting linear narrative to if you do that then you are from this side. I am saying fuck you. I'll do a linear narrative if I want to. And if with your blinkers, blinders, want to put me into that narrative based simply on that linearity, that is your problem. If you look at the form that I'm using alongside content, alongside the tools, alongside where it's going you're gonna know that's not where I'm going. So your frameworks of references don't have to apply to me. I'm going to pick and choose what I want to pick and choose because actually, unfortunately for you, not you, what you guys don't understand, you guys being the undermining other, is along these years most Africans have acquired skills much much higher and bigger than yours.
Each one of us Africans speaks multiple languages, can actually do a whole thing outside of your parameters as well as inside of your parameters. Each one of us Africans—be it from Togo to Bahir Dar—has at his disposal our own indigenous knowledge as well as—because of the internet—all the western knowledge too. We have access to your knowledge but you don't have access to ours. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that my belief in the next generation is—we're talking about a level playing field because what we are addressing is still the world order that exists today, that's not what's going to be existing in the future. It is crumbling in front of our eyes. So I believe that area studies, and what I'm trying to figure out with area studies for me, is just how do we address it. It's not, how do I break it down, because I can't. Replace it with what? I can't un-be who I am. But how do I expose that trajectory, so others go into it with their eyes wide open... . I wish I had read Ayi Kwei Armah’s Eloquence of the Scribe earlier. You know that Ayi Kwei Armah was hand picked out of his school as part of the early scolarships for Area Studies but he was bright enough to understand how he was being manipulated. He left his last semester at Harvard and went to Cuba and Algiers to join the struggle. Another unintended irony!
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Gail Gerhart Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1lMDyuBdFs
http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/inventories/inv_pdfo/A2422/A2422-B-001-jpeg.pdf
http://disa.ukzn.ac.za/sites/default/files/pdf_files/ora19700808.000.009.000.pdf
http://psimg.jstor.org/fsi/img/pdf/t0/10.5555/al.sff.document.gerhart0024_final.pdf
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After Reuters, I did the Sunday Times, then New York Times but very briefly and then Sunday Times again, The Washington Post and then U.S. News & World Report, so it was always the big guys on big stories and never quite becoming the correspondent. I was always a critical part of the machine which was good enough for me because after all I was a twenty-two year old kid covering a major news event and being the only one who understood the two languages so the correspondent was dependent on me. In parallel, I was stringing for small alternative press. I always wrote for Middle East Education, Middle East Health and even Middle East Money! I also wrote for Africa Confidential, even before Patrick Smith started editing it in 1991.