At times you can't tell whether what you're hearing is daily labor or music.
More than the music of labor, you also have the body rhythm of collective work. In the film, the way women bodily relate to each other while working is very rhythmic and musical. In other words, daily interactions among the people
music. You mentioned earlier the various aspects of the sound track: the silence, the commentary, the environmental sound, vocal and instrumental music. All these elements form the musical dimension of the film, but the relationship between and within the visuals is also rhythmically determined. The way an old woman spins cotton; the way a daughter and her mother move in syncopation while they pound or beat the grain together; the way a group of women chant and dance while plastering the floor of the front court in a house; or the way the different cultures counteract or harmonize with one anotherthese are the everyday rhythms and music of life. In such environments one realizes how much modern society is based on compartmentalizationthe mentality colonialism has spread.
On the sound track, the statements about Africa are presented in such a way that the deepest voice seems to speak from within the cultures being discussed, the highest voice speaksas you said in the introduction to the text'according to Western logic and mainly quotes Western thinkers,' and the medium-range voice (yours) speaks in the first person 'and relates personal feelings and observations.' But while the speakers vary, their statements often overlap. Were you suggesting that what you hear about any given culture, or within any culture, is a combination of what it says about itself and what it knows is said about it by others?
One can see it that way, certainly. Some viewers have told me, 'If you had fictionalized these voices a little bit more (which probably means they want the voices to be more in opposition rather than simply 'different'), it would be easier to understand the role of these voices.' But I find it informative that a number of people have difficulty hearing the differences between the voices, even though their tonal ranges, their accents, and their discursive modes are so distinct. In the media we consume one, unitary, narrating voice-over. It is not surprising then, that it may take some viewers more than one viewing to hear several voices in their differences. A viewer thought the difficulty comes from the fact that the voices are 'disembodied' (meaning that the narrators do not appear on screen), which may be true. But I think there are other factors in-
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volved, because this same viewer may have no difficulty whatsoever listening to a 'disembodied' omniscient voice-over on a TV program.
Any person who has had prolonged interactions with country people and villagerswhether from their own culture or from another cultureknows that you have to learn to, speak differently in order to be heard in their context. So if you listen carefully to your own speech in your interactions with them, you recognize that even though you may both speak the same languagethe case is further complicated when you don'tyou speak differently. This sounds like a very banal statement until you find yourself in a situation where you wish to relate what the villagers say, to your audiencein other words, to translate them. Translation, which is interpellated by ideology and can never be objective or neutral, should here be understood in the wider sense of the termas a politics of constructing meaning. Whether you translate one language into another language, whether you narrate in your own words what you have understood from the other person, or whether you use this person directly on screen as a piece of 'oral testimony' to serve the direction of your film, you are dealing with cultural translation.
To give an example: a villager may say, while pointing toward the front court of her dwelling: 'Calabash, we call it the vault of heaven.' The local interpreter may translate: 'The calabash is the vault of heaven.' But when outsiders to the culture try to translate this to their audience back home, it might come out, 'The calabash is like the vault of heaven' or 'stands for the vault of heaven.' There are all these little devices in language that 'explain'' instead of stating 'this, this' or 'this is this' with no explanation added. When you translate, you automatically rationalize what people say according to the logic and habits of your own language or mode of speaking. This tendency, which seems to me to be particularly naturalized in the media, is dealt with in
by assigning the explanatory logic and its ensuing linguistic devices to the voice of the woman (Linda Peckham) whose English accent (actually South African) is easily detectable. It was a real challenge for me to try to bring out these subtleties of translation and to remain consistent in the distinction of the three discursive modes. Moreover, the only voice in the film that can afford to have some kind of authority (not media or academic institutionalized authority, but rather a form of insider's assertion) is the mediated voice of the people, the low voice that quotes the villagers' sayings and other statements by African writers. My voice gives little anecdotes and personal feelings.
The distinction made between the voices is not a rigid one; the voices of the women of color at times overlap in what they say and how they speak. All three voices are joined together in the last third of the film, when the viewers see images of the Fon's lake-dwellings. The two
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voices of the women of color (Barbara Christian and myself) meet here in the sequence about this village, whose people's income thrives on tourism. The meeting concerns the controversy of giving and taking. As is fairly well-known, in the first-world/third-world relationship, what may assert itself in appearance as 'giving' very often turns out to be nothing but a form of taking and taking again. The problematic of donor and acceptor is thus played out in that part in the sound track: for example, the Linda Peckham voice says, 'They call it giving'; my voice says, 'We call it self-gratification'; the Barbara Christian voice says, 'We call it self-gratification.' This can be said to be the only place in the film where the first-world and third-world voices work in opposition. Most of the time, it was important for me that the voices meet or not meet, but that they are not just set up in opposition to one another.
The voice of Western logic quotes a number of Western writers, including Cixous, [Gaston] Bachelard, and Eluard. For me, these quotations are very relevant to the context of the dwelling I was in. I don't situate myself in opposition to them just because the writers are Westerners. Actually, in a public debate, a white man resentfully asked me why I quoted Heidegger and added, 'Why not let
quote him?' This is like saying that I have encroached on some occupied territory and that the exclusive right to use Heidegger belongs to Euro-Americans. Such ethnocentric rationale is hard to believe (although not the least surprising) when you think of such figures of modernity as Picasso or Brecht (to mention just two): what would their works be like without their exposure to African sculpture or to Japanese and Chinese theater? History
