FILM: FANON’S ARC FROM THERAPIST TO REVOLUTIONARY

By Dimitri Keramitas 

Franz Fanon, Chroniques fidèles survenues au siècle dernier à l’hôpital de Blida-Joinville au temps où le Docteur Franz Fanon était Chef de la cinquième division, entre l’an 1953 et 1956 (Franz Fanon, Faithful Chronicles from the Last Century at the Blida-Joinville Hospital when Dr. Franz Fanon was Chief of the Fifth Division, between 1953 and 1956) - a film by Abdenour Zahzah

Sixty-four years after his death - and during the centenary of his birth - the great psychiatrist, polemicist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon seems to have fully returned to the public consciousness, with his ideas being used to address current societal divisions.

Fanon has been the subject of bios, studies, graphic novels, and several films (documentaries and features). Now, a new biopic, directed by Abdenour Zahzah, focuses on his professional experiences at the Blida-Joinville hospital in French Algeria in the 1950s, when l’Algérie Française was giving way to decolonization. (Algeria was divided into fifteen French departments until it won independence following a brutal war.)

As a historical document, the film is fascinating, and even important. Fanon’s hugely influential thought and writings about the effects of colonialism on the psyche of the colonized germinated in the Blida hospital. He would later apply his ideas in political action.

Originally from Martinique, Fanon was educated in elite schools and joined the French Resistance when WWII broke out. (He was awarded the Croix de Guerre, by Colonel Raoul Salan, who as a general would lead a right-wing terrorist group that tried to keep Algeria French.) After completing his medical studies in Lyon, he was sent to the colonial hinterlands of the Maghreb to work with mentally ill patients. At the Blida-Joinville hospital he found wretched conditions and patronizing doctors (one ascribed the mental dysfunctions of Arab patients to racial differences in the brain).

Fanon immediately began trying to reform and humanize the hospital environment with early versions of group encounter sessions. He realized that racism and colonial oppression played a strong part in mental illness. Eventually he became an opponent not only of the imperialism victimizing his patients but of that found in Algerian society in general. He joined the revolutionary FLN (National Liberation Front) and after independence served in the Algerian government.

Fanon would later become associated with the Third World and Black Power movements with his ideas of the “false consciousness” imposed on the oppressed, an idea taken up by many others, including famous writers and academics. He attracted controversy by stating that violence could be a legitimate way for victims of racism and imperialism to break out of their psychic straitjackets. In some "Western" countries, he was accused of championing terrorism. It’s difficult to ascertain how literal this was, how much the overheated product of the times (as with the theories of Wilhelm Reich and J.D. Laing). So perhaps it was a good idea to take a look back at Fanon’s clinical work with mentally ill people.

Zahzah himself is from Blida, and he gives us an assured sense of place, mostly of the hospital grounds (which included staff housing), also of a bucolic mountain where orderlies take patients on an outing. He has chosen to film in low-contrast black-and-white, which is pleasant but feels too sedate for the setting, and the context. The hospital is, after all, a “madhouse” as the patients themselves say, with some very extreme cases. This becomes even more the case when the independence war begins. The Algerian War was a violent, often gruesome conflict, and the soft grayish tones somehow seem evasive. We feel that a more extreme style, on the order of Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor, would be more appropriate.

Alexandre Desane as Fanon is brilliant, and he has Fanon’s physical presence (at least as expressed in photos). 

He possesses just the right balance of humane empathy, outrage at the conditions patients are subject to, and assertiveness. Unfortunately, we don’t get a convincing character arc – of his transformation from hospital psychiatrist to revolutionary. The transition seems too smooth, as if Fanon had simply gravitated to a social movement, as opposed to political revolt. This may not be completely inaccurate: To Fanon, joining the Algerianh independence struggle wasn’t all that different from joining the French Resistance. (The Resistance too was a proscribed, violent movement opposing what had been termed Free France until it became known as Vichy.)

The supporting actors do serviceable work, but not much more than that, and some secondary characters seem to be played by non-actors. Fanon’s own son plays a small part (as an old friend of Fanon). This adds to the distancing effect of Zahzah’s mode of filming. Perhaps Fanon himself would have wanted his story to be told in an “objective” fashion, except that there’s a contradiction between his portrayal (as well as that of the French characters), and that of the Arab-Algerian patients and staff. This is ironic given that one of the themes is French Algeria’s segregation of French and Arab citizens.

The director trenchantly shows how mental illness was induced by cultural and social forces. This was exacerbated by the war, as we observe both victims of the French army and traumatized perpetrators of torture. The policies applied by the hospital itself become oppressive. In a way reminiscent of the theories of Michel Foucault, Fanon’s notions about colonialism’s damaging impact on the psyche could be extended to other institutions: school, workplace, government bureaucracy, culture.

Regrettably, in delineating this theme, the narrative structure breaks down. While multiplying case studies, the film is desultory and diffuse. Zahzah doesn’t develop and dramatize his cases sufficiently, and then overcompensates with set-pieces in which characters present overwrought monologues about past trauma.

There’s something telling about the film’s long, rather curious, official title. It sounds like self-parody, or something Brechtian, or like Peter Weiss’s play (adapted to film by Peter Brook), The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade - it implies taking literal fact into surreal territory.

Before making this film, Zahzah had made a documentary about Fanon (Frantz Fanon, Mémoire d’Asile, 2002, also about his experiences at the hospital). The director obviously felt a need to get beyond a discursive approach, but he doesn’t quite manage the leap from documentary to dramatic fiction.

In addition, the director misses opportunities to explore his subject’s contradictions. Fanon’s own personality had an authoritarian streak, reinforced by the discipline of serving in a military capacity and by the French education system. His marriage with a Frenchwoman is portrayed as conventional and dominated by his vocation. Fanon tries to “liberate” the patients by imposing Beethoven (shades of Clockwork Orange) and having them put out a newspaper. Another of his methods is to establish that most French of institutions, a café, in the hospital. A couple of times he takes patients into his own household in what might seem a patronizing manner. If all this was for the benefit of the patients, it perhaps indicates that his views on imperialist influence were sometimes tempered with pragmatism.

The film ends with Fanon, now an FLN member, leaving his post to “await instructions” elsewhere. He doesn’t seem much concerned about his wife, young son, or the patient who’d become a member of the household. It’s a sort of grim foreshadowing: The FLN had the structure, and the ruthless methods, of a clandestine liberation movement fighting a more powerful enemy; the structure and methods were later used to remain in power undemocratically. Likewise, the film depicts the importance of the Muslim religion for the Algerian fellah, and this foreshadows the civil war in the 1980s pitting the authoritarian FLN government against Islamists.

At the Paris screening of the film, among the attendees was a woman who had worked with Fanon at the Blida hospital, and who has also written about him. Now nearing 90, she was then a young intern. Whatever her sympathies at the time, like many other Algerian Jews she left the country for France. She declined to speak of that period except to say that while the film was “good” it contained “historical inaccuracies”. She refused to say what they were.

One possible example: Fanon’s tenure at the hospital apparently ended when he was deported, not because of a James Bond-like escape. A life lived semi-underground would seem to guarantee murky historiography, and it’s clear that the life and legacy of Frantz Fanon will continue to provoke debate and controversy. But continuing the discussion is necessary. For that reason alone, Fanon is worth seeing.

Dimitri Keramitas is a Paris-based writer and legal expert.

Photos are courtesy of the film distributors. Fanon will be in cinemas in July.

AT UN, ARTISTS CALL FOR ACTION ON SAVING OCEAN

As government leaders, scientists and civil organizations gather in Nice, southern France, for the 3rd United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC3) from June 9 to 13, artists across the Atlantic are equally sounding the alarm about the calamitous situation facing the world’s seas.

HOMO SARGASSUM is a contemporary art exhibition taking place at UN headquarters in New York to raise awareness about ocean pollution and other ills, through “the lens of the sargassum seaweed”. The show runs throughout World Ocean Month (June), until July 11, and admission is free upon online registration.

“It’s really about understanding our human responsibility in environmental disasters,” said the exhibition's curator Vanessa Selk. “If there’s a proliferation of sargassum seaweed, it’s because we contributed to it through the use of chemical fertilizers, through climate change, global warming… and we have to take full responsibility of this.”

Selk, a former diplomat who now directs the US-based non-profit TOUT-MONDE Art FOUNDATION (TMAF), told SWAN in a telephone interview that the exhibition aims to highlight the voices and work of contemporary Caribbean artists in a wide-reaching way, alongside the subject of the show.

She said that presenting the exhibition at the UN rather than in a museum is “not merely symbolic”, as the aim is to use art to “speak up on certain issues”, in addition to words and diplomacy.

“Museum audiences are great, but that is still a niche,” she added. “By showing the exhibition here at the UN, we’re totally targeting a different public, including international tourists that come to visit the headquarters. The artworks are right at the entrance, and it’s fabulous to see how everyone stops and engages with the show and the information.”   

First presented at the Museum of Fine Arts of Florida State University in Tallahassee from September 2024 to March this year, HOMO SARGASSUM brings together more than 20 artists in an immersive “multisensorial” exhibition – representing countries and territories in the Caribbean and elsewhere, including the French overseas departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

Through their work, the artists express concern and invite viewers to “reflect on what can be done individually and collectively to change our relation to the Ocean”, the exhibition states.

The public also learns about the history of the sargassum seaweed scourge, through scientific information showing how the “proliferation of the algae across the Atlantic and on Caribbean coasts since 2011 has wide-ranging environmental, economic, social and health-related impacts for coastal communities and ecosystems.”

Beyond this, the works address wider global problems of marine pollution and degradation, which is the focus of the Nice conference (co-chaired by France and Costa Rica). According to UN figures, some 12 million metric tons of plastic are put into the ocean each year, as images of floating “plastic islands” have graphically shown.

Li Junhua, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, and Secretary-General of the gathering, told UN News: “The ocean is facing an unprecedented crisis due to climate change, plastic pollution, ecosystem loss, and the overuse of marine resources.”

The UN is hoping for decisive international action that will help to stem further deterioration, and representatives of small island developing states (SIDS) attending the conference are adding their voices to this call.

Jamaica’s Foreign Minister Kamina Johnson Smith, for instance, is highlighting the need for “innovative approaches to financing… that considers the special circumstances of SIDS” and these nations’ vulnerability.

Against the backdrop of the Nice conference, the HOMO SARGASSUM exhibition has included artist talks and curatorial tours to “engage with the public”, as Selk told SWAN.

But the striking works on their own are perhaps enough to spark reflection; included are a large-scale installation by Alejandro Duran, made of “recycled plastic found on Mexican coasts” over the years, as well as a dress by eco-designer duo Felder Felder using “alternative leather” made of Sargassum seaweed.

The overall HOMO SARGASSUM project, which was initiated five years ago, includes a short film launched in 2020; an artist residency curated by Matilde dos Santos in Martinique in 2021 (including virtual exchanges because of the Covid-19 pandemic); a comic book edited by Jessica Oublié, Marion Lecardonnel & Ulises Jauregu, published by Collection Alliance Française in 2022; and an experimental documentary film, according to the organizers.

The exhibition is “endorsed” by the Permanent Missions of France and Barbados to the United Nations, and supported by the Winthrop-King Institute for French and Francophone Studies. – SWAN

Photos courtesy of TMAF.

Further information: https://www.tout-monde-foundation.org/

Further reading: https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/06/1164026

‘CARIBBEAN DAYS’ REACH PARIS, WITH FOOD, ART, BOOKS

The Paris arts scene grew hotter at the beginning of June, when the Caribbean Chamber of Commerce in Europe (CCCE) organized a five-day festival featuring the cuisine, contemporary visual art and literature of the Caribbean region.

Titled Caribbean Days / Journées des Caraibes, the inaugural Paris event took place June 2 to 6 during the annual Semaines de l’Amérique latine et des Caraibes (SALC), a French government initiative that celebrates the diplomatic and cultural links that France shares with Latin America and the Caribbean. 

SALC marked its 12th edition this year, and the festival was among the range of events that included concerts, exhibitions, dance performances and literary meet-ups.

Held at the imposing Maison de l’Amérique Latine (MAL), which occupies two “mansions” dating from the 18^th century, Caribbean Days comprised inventive multi-course lunches and dinners, created by three well-known young chefs and served in MAL’s acclaimed restaurant. It also featured an art exhibition with vivid works by rising Dominican artist Yermine Richardson, and an exposition of books by award-winning Caribbean writers, in Spanish, Portuguese and French translations.

The festival in the French capital followed successful editions in Brussels, Belgium. To learn more about the goals of the venture, SWAN spoke with Jo Spalburg, executive director of the CCCE. An edited version of the interview follows.

SWAN:  What is the aim of Caribbean Days?

Jo Spalburg: Caribbean Days is a vibrant series of business and cultural events designed to raise the profile of the Caribbean and to promote “The Best of the Caribbean”, featuring premium regional products such as cocoa, coffee, rum and spirits, and cigars. The program also celebrates the creative industries — including art, fashion, film, literature, music and dance — along with other cultural showcases. After a successful first edition in Brussels in 2022, the initiative is now expanding to other European cities.

SWAN:  And the main focus of the Paris event?

J.S.: The main focus of our first Caribbean Days in Paris is the arts; firstly culinary arts by means of our Caribbean Culinary Week at the renowned restaurant of La Maison de l'Amérique Latine, for which a special three-course Caribbean Gourmet Menu has been created by a group of Caribbean chefs of the famous French culinary association les Toques français; secondly a special art exhibition featuring works from Dominican painter Yermine Richardson (also known as @Popcaribe); and lastly a special Caribbean books exhibition by the Caribbean Translation Project [an initiative founded by Alecia McKenzie to highlight the translation of writing from and about the Caribbean and to profile pioneering translators].

SWAN: You also organized an event in Brussels last year - what were the principal features?

J.S.: At the Caribbean Days in Brussels in June 2024, we had the same kind of events, with the Belgian National Bartender competition, in conjunction with UBB (Belgian Union of Bartenders) and the Belgian national Latin Dance competition, in conjunction with BeSalsa, as well as our first Caribbean Gala Dinner.

SWAN: What else is on the 2025 calendar for the Caribbean Chamber of Commerce in Europe?

J.S.: The next edition of our Caribbean Days in Brussels will be held in November at the Steigenberger Wiltcher Hotel (with details to be confirmed).

Photos (top to bottom): Dominican artist Yermine Richardson, aka @Popcaribe, stands in front of one of his works; CCCE executive director Jo Spalburg, speaks at Caribbean Days on June 5; an exposition of books by Caribbean writers; chefs Jerome Bertin, Mathilde Durizot and Leila Albert address diners.

MARLEY, MUSIC, MORRIS, LIFE: A PHOTO VOYAGE IN PARIS

Reggae fans may be initially drawn just by the iconic image of Bob Marley on the Music + Life poster, but once inside this exhibition, they will find themselves immersed in a world of extraordinary photographs. 

Music + Life is the first retrospective of work by Jamaican-born British photographer Dennis Morris, and it has been pulling in visitors at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris, where it runs until May 18th.

A banner on the wall of the museum - located in the bustling, historic Marais area of Paris - shows reggae legend Marley in a relaxed pose, his locks streaming out from under his tam and a playful smile directed at someone the viewer cannot see.

Inside, a vast space is devoted to Marley, with a range of depictions: playing football, performing on stage, laughing in his tour bus, posing with accompanying singers the I-Threes (including wife Rita), sitting solemnly alone with his guitar shortly before his death from cancer in 1981.

But this is only one segment of the exhibition. Music + Life is a look at Morris’ overall career photographing ordinary people in London communities, as well as later portraying Marley, the controversial punk group the Sex Pistols and a gamut of other artists - exploring the “intersection of punk and reggae,” as the curators put it. It’s also about the arc of his own life.

Morris arrived in London from Jamaica at age four in the early 1960s, part of the post-World War II “Windrush generation” of Caribbean immigrants to Britain. He says he developed an interest in photography early, as a choirboy at a church in London’s East End, which had a photo club. 

“The director of the club was a man called Donald Patterson, and he saw my enthusiasm and my potential, and he took me under his wing and basically taught me more or less everything I know,” Morris told SWAN. “He took me to museums, he took me to galleries, and that’s how things started.”

Morris says he began taking pictures in his teens, documenting life in Hackney in the 1970s. Then, one day, he heard that Marley would be performing nearby, and he headed to the venue with his camera, waiting for hours before getting to meet the Jamaican singer, who subsequently invited him to tour with the band. That crucial meeting would lead Morris into the music world, where his photographs would be published by magazines such as Time Out and NME, providing up-close portrayals of Marley, and many others over time.

A major theme of Music + Life is “story-telling”, according to Laurie Hurwitz, who curated the show with MEP’s director Simon Baker (a huge reggae fan and the force behind developing the retrospective in Paris). The aim, Hurwitz said, was to recount Morris’s journey as a young photographer, moving on to his wide-ranging music portrayals, and then his later activity as an art director in the recording industry. 

The exhibition begins with three series Morris photographed as a teenager: Growing up Black, which depicts life in Hackney and its rich Caribbean culture; Southall - documenting London’s Sikh community through an intimate lens; and This Happy Breed - a “blend of humour and resilience that illustrates the spirit of the British working class”.

Morris told SWAN that despite some of the hardships shown in the series, he wanted to focus on the dignity of the communities portrayed, and to give insight into people’s daily lives. 

“What I’m trying to show is that with all the hardships, we had dignity and we had pride,” Morris said. “That’s how we made our way through. It’s like in some ways Nelson Mandela. Despite all the things he went through, he was never bitter and he showed people that no matter what they do to you, you have to hold yourself together, you have to keep your dignity, you have to keep believing in yourself, keep moving forward.” 

Leaving this section, visitors can progress to the portrayals of Marley, with both recognizable images and unfamiliar shots, in black and white as well as vibrant colour. The museum has covered two walls with massive enlargements of portraits of the singer, but equally striking are the smaller framed portraits, where Marley’s aura shines through.

“Bob Marley didn’t need artificial lighting to be photographed,” Morris says. “He had an inner light and you can see that.”

Asked whether he thinks Marley’s legacy is currently being diluted with rampant marketing of his image and work, Morris said he would agree but explained that he tries to ensure his photographs are used in a way that respects the singer’s art.

After the Marley rooms, the exhibition continues with Morris’ photographs of the Sex Pistols, documenting their “turbulent rise to fame”, and their “anarchic image”, to use the show’s description.

Over the course of a year, Morris covered “their chaotic performances as well as their life behind the scenes,” according to the curators. This includes “seminal moments” such as the controversial release of the album Never Mind The Bollocks in 1977 and their cruise down the Thames for the single God Save the Queen during the royal Silver Jubilee that year.

The “in-your-face” atmosphere of this section was intentional because that was the band’s persona, Morris told SWAN. Viewers will find themselves immersed in the stormy energy of the group through the photographs of Syd Vicious and Johnny Rotten, and of their concerts and "energised" fans.

“Bob represented the new youth of Jamaica, and the Sex Pistols represented the new young white generation of Britain,” Morris says. “It’s the ying and the yang. From Bob, I learned spirituality, how to hold my head high, and from the Sex Pistols, I learned how to kick the door down in the face of obstacles.”

The exhibition ends with a section showing the “breadth” of Morris’ career, with photographs of artists such as Patti Smith, Marianne Faithful, Oasis, Grace Jones, French group Les Rita Mitsouko, dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, and many others. His work designing album covers and his stint in a band called Basement 5 are also featured.

Before leaving the show, visitors can enjoy a diverse playlist including Marley songs, booming from a huge sound system that the MEP’s own engineers have constructed. The temptation to dance will be hard to resist. - AM / SWAN  

Photos (from top to bottom): a poster on the outside wall of the MEP; Bob Marley by Dennis Morris in Music + Life; a photo from the exhibition; Syd Vicious and Johnny Rotten by Dennis Morris; inside the exhibition. 

BRUSSELS SHOW OFFERS DIVERSE VIEW OF ART HISTORY

It’s like walking through several psychedelic halls of history, where bold colours, electrifying compositions and contagious rhythms hit the senses all at once.

This is When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting – a momentous exhibition running at the Bozar Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, Belgium, until Aug. 10, 2025. 

The show places African diasporic art firmly within the global sphere of art history, bringing together some 150 luminous artworks from the past 120 years, by Black artists worldwide who explore daily life and other topics.

“One of the most enduring features of the human condition is the inexhaustible desire to see oneself through visual culture and storytelling,” said Koyo Kouoh, co-curator of the exhibition with Tandazani Dhlakama, and executive director and chief curator of Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) – which conceived and organized the exhibition.

“Whether living on the continent or within the vast, impressive African diaspora, Black artists have invested in a spectrum of narratives that encompass the experience of blackness, intentionally rejecting limiting tropes of representation,” Kouoh told journalists as the exhibition opened this month.

According to Zoë Gray, Bozar’s director of exhibitions, When We See Us demonstrates how art history is “plural, diverse, and always intertwined”. She said that when she first saw the exhibition in South Africa, she immediately wanted Bozar to host it as well. (The show has now travelled from MOCAA to Basel, to Brussels. It will move on to Stockholm in October for a 10-month stint in the Swedish capital.)

The paintings – from a timely “insider” perspective – are grouped into sections titled “The Everyday”, “Repose”, “Triumph and Emancipation”, “Sensuality”, “Spirituality”, and “Joy and Revelry”. As visitors wander through these sections, they stroll to an accompaniment of global rhythms (arranged by musician and sound artist Neo Muyanga); and the overall effect is of a lively, panoptic world. 

A feature of the display is the “interconnectedness”, or “inter-generational similarities”, among artists and art styles across the African diaspora. The organizers highlight, for instance, the commonalities between an iconic African American artist such as Romare Bearden (1911-1988) and a South African artist like Katlego Tlabela (born in 1993), by placing their works in juxtaposition.

But this is just one noteworthy element. When We See Us can be viewed as an historic art journey, a parade of artistry, a different way of seeing, an explosion of joy.

The curators say the show’s title is “inspired and derived” from the 2019 miniseries directed by US filmmaker Ava DuVernay, When They See Us, which depicts systemic racial prejudice and violence.

“I like shifting things and flipping things … as a way to continue the conversation,” Kouoh said. “So, flipping ‘they' to ‘we’ allows for a dialectical shift that centres the conversation in a comparative perspective of self-writing, as theorized by Cameroonian political scientist, Professor Achille Mbembe.”

She said it was important for the organizers to show a plurality of experiences and to avoid “reductive” and “myopic” narratives. Pain and injustice are not at the forefront of this exhibition, as black experiences can also be seen “through the lens of joy”. 

As for the choice of figurative painting, this reflects the history of the genre throughout the world and especially amid Black artistic practice, she remarked. 

When We See Us naturally represents a range of countries and regions, with paintings from the African continent, Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The canvases include a gamut of large-scale paintings – work by Kudzanai-Violet Hwami and Cornelius Annor among them – as well as smaller creations such as the introspective “The Reader” by William H. Johnson. 

Many of the artists have lived in different places and reflect an array of influences or associations; Cuban-born Wifredo Lam, for example, was a long-term resident of Paris, and died there in 1982. He was friends with Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, associated with other European artists including Henri Matisse and Joan Miró, and knew Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. In the exhibition, visitors get to see Lam’s striking 1938 work “Femme Violette” up close.

Meanwhile, works by the “kings of Kinshasha” – Congolese artists Chéri Samba and Moké – stand out for their audacious, animated canvases, as well as their satirical themes. 

“They were both pivotal protagonists in the political provocative Zaire School of Popular Painting, a style that developed in Kiinshasha in the 1970s, a decade after Congo’s independence from Belgium in 1960,” state the curators. “The work of both artists was focused on the daily life in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

(For a profile of Chéri Samba: https://www.globalissues.org/news/2020/09/28/26874)

Emerging artists are shown with established painters too, and several young artists were present alongside their work at the exhibition’s opening.

In the section “Joy and Revelry”, Netherlands-based British-Nigerian artist Esiri Erherienne-Essi said she wanted to show a different side of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko. Her painting “The Birthday Party” depicts a group posing for a photograph at a joyful event. Here, she centres a happy-looking Biko, celebrating his niece’s birthday.

In her work, Erherienne-Essi uses photographs from historical archives as a starting point to create her paintings, according to the curators. She brings to the fore “archives and moments from Black people’s lives with vibrant depth, colour and detail, countering the flatness of the Black figures in the Western art historical narratives,” they added.

This idea of reversing the gaze is central to When We See Us – especially in the section “Sensuality”, where artists explore “various levels of pleasure, leisure and desire” with works in a variety of media. Among these, the remarkable “Never Change Lovers in the Middle of the Night”, by American artist Mickalene Thomas, employs acrylic paint, enamel and rhinestones to depict sexuality.

All the artworks are arranged in such a way as to make visitors feel fully connected to the paintings, said Ilze Wolff, of Cape Town design firm Wolff Architects, responsible for the exhibition’s scenography. Visitors can sit in some sections and become immersed in a particular set of paintings.

Then, emerging from this universe, they are invited to explore further, as the exhibition also offers a timeline, a video archive, and a documentarian area, with a wide selection of books. (The timeline’s starting point is 1805, just after the Haitian Revolution, and it details other important events that have shaped black art history, including the Négritude movement and the Harlem Renaissance.) 

“MOCAA calls this the ‘brain’ of the exhibition,” said Maïté Smeyers, Bozar’s Curatorial Project Coordinator. “In association with the timeline, the curators wanted to have this documentation room, where they’ve put all the important writings on Black art and on the artists that are in the show. We’ve also included some literature, poetry, and other work by African diaspora writers because this has a role in the Black arts consciousness, and it contributes to the Black art movement, the history and the shaping of the fields.”

Visitors can freely browse some 80 books, loaned by Belgian institutions including the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), local library Muntpunt, and art galleries.

"The books on display give a glimpse of the history of research into Black art, as well as of Black literary writing, philosophy, and political thought," said Eva Ulrike Pirker, VUB professor of English and comparative literature. "While the exhibition is temporary, the books, including the beautiful catalogue, which offers reproductions of all the artworks, are in Brussels to stay and available at the partner libraries free of charge."

Pirker said she liked the idea that the exhibition will have a "concrete, lasting impact" on the collections of libraries that have partnered with the show, as it prompted librarians to look into their holdings and acquire new books to fill existing gaps.

Showing the richness of African diasporic art, the documentation section may even spur viewers to seek out more information, as well as related artwork.

“When We See Us is about a historical continuum of Black expression, Black consciousness and joy, and we hope (audiences) will enjoy it,” said co-curator Dhlakama. – AM/SWAN

Photos from top: An Evening in Mazowe by Kudzanai-Violet Hwami; paintings by Romare Bearden - Jazz Rhapsody - and Katlego Tlabela - Upper East Side, New York (Study); The Conversation by Cornelius Annor; Esiri Erheriene-Essi and her painting The Birthday Party; books in the documentation section of the exhibition; a composite picture of members of the curatorial and organization team: (top, L-R) Koyo Kouoh, Zoë Gray, and Tandazani Dhlakama; (bottom row): Maïté Smeyers and Ilze Wolff. Photos by AM/SWAN.

THE CARIBBEAN MOURNS LOSS OF A SINGULAR WRITER

By A. McKenzie and S. Scafe

Jamaican writer Velma Pollard provided a special kind of sunlight in the Caribbean literary space. Known across the region for her warm personality and welcoming nature, she also defied simple classification as she shone beyond genre. The work she has left behind encompasses short stories, poetry, academic writing, and novellas. She was also a keen naturalist photographer. 

An early poem, “A Case for Pause”, reflects on the interconnections between all the forms she used: “Arrest the sense / and let the fancy flow / Without design / collecting cloud and air / petal and leaf … Rein in the fancy now / unleash the sense … constructs and theories not yet pursued / rush in perfected, whole,” she wrote. 

Her sudden death earlier this month, on Feb. 1, has created a huge gap in the lives of those who loved and admired her as a person and poet and who must now draw solace from reading or revisiting her work. Her generosity to other writers, scholars, and artists was legendary in the Caribbean and internationally. In the days and weeks before her passing, and despite her incapacity from a fall and subsequent operation, she took pains to read and comment on work that young writers sent her, carefully and unsparingly collating her responses. 

As fellow Jamaican author and academic Earl McKenzie said after her funeral service on Feb. 21: Dr Pollard “was a friend and supporter of her fellow writers, and we all miss her”. Her long-time friend and colleague, Dr. Elizabeth “Betty” Wilson, added that the service was “an outpouring of love”.

Born in 1937, in the parish of St. Mary on the north-eastern Jamaican coast, Dr Pollard spent her early years in a rural setting along with siblings that include her equally renowned sister Erna Brodber. 

She later attended Excelsior High School in the capital Kingston, where she won several elocution contests, and she gained a scholarship to continue her studies at the University College of the West Indies, focusing on languages. 

Afterward, she earned a Master's degree in English at New York’s Columbia University, and another Master’s – in education – from McGill in Canada, followed by a PhD in language education at the University of the West Indies (UWI). She would go on to become dean of the education faculty at UWI, inspiring numerous students, while also raising her three treasured children - one of whom has said she was the strongest woman he knew, with the largest circle of faithful friends.

Dr Pollard lent her presence and expertise to important scholarly and literary conferences around the world, often writing about her experiences. She once joked that a self-important critic had remarked that every time she attended a conference, she “just had to write a poem”. But that talent for acute observation and for recording the places she visited and the people she met forms part of the richness of her work. In the poem "Bridgetown", she writes for instance: Because the sea / walks here / this city / hands you heaven. 

She addressed myriad issues in her work: family relationships, gender, colonialism (and its legacies), history, love, injustice. Many of her poems are tributes to the everyday struggles of ordinary women, the unlettered makers of “hot lunches and hot clothes / cooking and stitching miracles / with equal hand”.

Her landmark scholarly publication Dread Talk: The Language of Rastafari remains a must-read for linguists and others, while her distinctive fiction - including Considering Woman I & II - places her among the Caribbean’s best short story writers. In 1992, she won the Casa de las Americas Prize for Karl and Other Stories (which is being relaunched this year as a Caribbean Modern Classic by a British-based publisher); and, with Jean D’Costa, she also edited anthologies for young readers, including the essential Over Our Way.

Her poetry stands out for its imagery, symbolism and use of Jamaican Creole, or nation language, with collections such as Crown Point and Other Poems, Shame Trees Don’t Grow Here, The Best Philosophers I Know Can’t Read and Write, and Leaving Traces.

Her work has likewise appeared in a range of international anthologies, including Give the Ball to the Poet, which sought to “represent the past, the present and the future of Caribbean poetry”, as Morag Styles, Professor of Children’s Poetry at Cambridge University and one of the editors of the anthology, said when it was published in 2014.

Years before that, Dr Pollard's writing was included in the ground-breaking 1989 collection Her True-True Name: An Anthology of Women’s Writing from the Caribbean, edited by Wilson and her sister Pamela Mordecai, and including other acclaimed authors such as Maryse Condé and Merle Hodge.

Then in 2018, one of her stories was translated into Chinese and included in the compilation Queen's Case: A Collection of Contemporary Jamaican Short Stories / 女王案 当代牙买加短篇小说集, among the first such publications in China.

Dr Pollard was perhaps foremost a poet, but she was equally a scholar, editor, educator… an overall literary star. When she contracted meningitis several years ago, messages flowed in from all over the globe (as tributes are now doing upon her passing). 

Following her recovery from that bout with meningitis, she told friends she felt the need to do “something worthwhile every day”, as a way of giving thanks for her survival. Part of this naturally included writing, but it also involved taking care of her extended family and being there for her friends and community.

As her sister Erna said at the farewell service, Dr Pollard got “10 out of 10 out of 10 out of 10” for following the commandment: love thy neighbour as thyself. The work she has left behind may be considered a testament of that love, and light, too. - SWAN

Photos , top to bottom: Dr Velma Pollard at her Kingston home (photo AM/SWAN); the cover of Considering Woman; the cover of Crown Point and Other Poems.

ART OF WEST AFRICA CUTS THROUGH GREY PARIS WINTER

The Cecile Fakhoury art gallery in Paris sits on one of the fanciest streets in the French capital, sharing a neighbourhood with the Élysée Palace – the official residence of the country's president – and Le Bristol hotel, the five-star haunt of film stars and other celebrities.

When you step inside the gallery, however, you quickly forget the ostentatious atmosphere of the area, as the artwork pulls you into another world. Vibrant canvases depicting a range of characters and topics take visitors on a trip to Western Africa, at least as seen through the eyes of the region’s established and emerging artists. 

The Paris gallery is one of three entities set up to showcase art from countries including Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mali and others. The first Galerie Cecile Fakhoury, which bears the name of its French founder, was launched in Abidjan in 2012, and some six years later, a second space in Dakar, Senegal, was inaugurated, with a showroom in Paris following soon afterward. 

That showroom has now transitioned into the Paris gallery on the "luxury-themed" rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The current exhibition, Le pays de Cocagne, features the work of 10 artists and provides an antidote to the greyness of the French winter, according to gallery director and curator Francis Coraboeuf. 

He says the show is meant to evoke the spirit of “Western Africa”, and to spark reflection, with works ranging from the sunlight-filled canvas of young multicultural French artist Rachel Marsil, to the introspective and iconic creations of the late Senegalese painter Souleymane Keïta (1947-2014).

Other artists featured are Thibaud Bouedjoro-Camus, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, Yo-Yo Gonthier, Carl-Edouard Keïta, Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux, Vincent Michéa, Kassou Seydou and Ouattara Watts.

SWAN spoke with Càraboeuf about the exhibition and about the role of the Cecile Fakhoury galleries in highlighting contemporary African art globally. The edited interview, conducted in person in Paris, follows.

SWAN: Please tell us about the artists and paintings on display.

FRANCIS CORABOEUF: All of the artists represented by the gallery have something in common, which is Western Africa – as a geographical, human, cultural common ground. Many of the artists live in different places, or have a background that is diverse, so you have all the situations that you can imagine, and that reflects the complexity of today’s world. When you go to Abidjan, or to Dakar, those are cities that are cosmopolitan, with people coming from everywhere in the world, and they reflect colonial history and colonization, but also pre-colonial history and recent history, which is one of circulation, migration. 

The artist Rachel Marsil, for instance, was born in France, of a French mother and a father originally from Western Africa (she doesn’t know her father). But her work is a kind of identity research, and that is why she was attracted by Western Africa and why her work is oriented towards this region of the world. She and the gallery wanted to work together because those subjects of identity, history, geography, what are we doing here and where are we going - these are questions that the artists of the gallery are constantly raising.

SWAN: What else is notable about this exhibition? Can you expand on the focus?

FC: This is a group exhibition, and I wanted to present the work of different artists that have a presence right now in Paris, to create an echo, and also to gather some works that are all channelling an idea of warmth, of happiness, of positivity. It’s a response to this time of the year; it’s a response also to how can we create an echo to what’s happening in Dakar and in Abidjan and how do we take people from here and orient their gaze towards Western Africa. 

“Pays de Cocagne” refers to an imaginary land, which is a land filled with abundance and dreams, and it’s a utopic place. This is a more subtle approach to the evocation of Western Africa, which is often exoticized. At the gallery, when we present the works of the artists in France, we often confront the clichés that people have toward Westen African countries. So, there’s a kind of deconstruction.  

SWAN: How did you go about choosing the works?

FC: The idea was to create a group where the works would echo one another. The exhibition gathers work from very young artists (for example, Rachel Marsil is under 30) and also from artists such as Souleyman Keïta, who died in 2014 and is considered to be someone at the intersection between the modern art scene and the contemporary art scene. 

The title of his work here is “Voyage au Mali”, and I wanted to include this work because I thought it was important to show some works by Souleymane Keïta in Paris, as we’re in this process of reevaluating, revalorising his work - on conceptual, historical and art-market levels. This painting is interesting because it was created between 1980 and 1985, in New York where he was living at the time, and he was evoking his roots which are in Mali, although he was born on the island of Gorée (off the coast of Senegal).

SWAN: There is also another Keïta in the exhibition, Carl-Edouard Keïta, the Ivorian-born, New York-based artist who is influenced by Cubism and portrays a fantastical world in his art…?

FC: Yes, Carl-Edouard Keïta is represented in this exhibition, and he will also have his first solo show in Abidjan at the Cecile Fakhoury gallery there - titled Goumbé, from 13 February to 12 April. The works in that show draw inspiration from cultural associations that were founded by migrants of the Ivorian interior and other areas during the post-independence years. (More info about Goumbé: https://cecilefakhoury.com/exhibitions/117-goumbe-carl-edouard-keita-abidjan/overview/)

SWAN: What do you hope visitors will take away from “Pays de Cocagne”?

FC: It’s important for people to understand where these artists stand in the history of art. When I went to university and studied art history, what I studied didn’t give me the tools to understand how things are interconnected. So, this is what we do, or try to do as gallerists.

Pays de Cocagne runs until March 29 in Paris.

Photos (by AM/SWAN), from top: Paintings by Ouattara Watts and Rachel Marsil; Paris gallery director Francis Coraboeuf, with artwork by Rachel Marsil and Souleymane Keïta; artwork by Kassou Seydou; Voyage au Mali by Souleymane Keïta; Le dormeur du sable by Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux, 2024 (below). 

FILM REVIEW: ‘PÉPÉ’ PORTRAYS A COLOMBIAN ‘OUTSIDER’

By Dimitri Keramitas

One of the strangest cases of invasive species appeared a number of years ago in Colombia. The notorious narco lord Pablo Escobar - a man worth billions - decided to create a private animal sanctuary and imported, among other fauna, a number of hippopotami. The sanctuary went to seed after Escobar was killed by law enforcement officers, but the hippos remained - and multiplied, disturbing the environment. 

Pépé, a film by Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias - winner of the Golden Bear for Best Direction at 2024’s Berlinale - recounts the story of one such hippo as a surreal fable. The movie resembles certain films of Werner Herzog, with its combination of documentary footage and metaphysical fiction, but the director isn’t always in control of his form. Neither is he always in control of his metaphysics. 

The story of Pépé begins in Namibia, southern Africa. We follow a group of German tourists being bused into the wild to see the animals, led by a German (or perhaps Afrikaner) guide. There’s amusing satire in the discrepancy between the guide’s account of hippos’ ways and the “superstitions” of his African assistant.

The shots of the landscape are powerful, but even more so is the depiction of the hippopotamus. We all have a cartoon image of a goofy animal (like the TV images of a cartoon hippo the filmmaker sometimes shows us), as opposed to the rhino with the pointy horn and the elephant with his tusks. But the hippo is also an intimidating beast with a massive size and thick leathery hide. 

In fact, the hippo is one of the wild’s most dangerous animals when riled. It can charge at high speed, and though it likes to lounge in the water, it can also move there with great rapidity. We don’t see precisely how Pépé was captured, but there are darkly comical scenes of two flunkies transporting it through the Colombian hinterlands in a rickety truck (they don’t really know what their cargo is). The animal almost causes the truck to tumble over, but the men manage to bring it to its watery destination. 

The scenes of Pépé, first in Africa, then in Colombia, are strikingly vivid, and sometimes verge on a mystical vision of nature, the images saturated with colour.

The hippo seems like a waterlogged tree in the river, a living boulder on land. Its nature is utterly inscrutable, at least until it goes into action against anyone disturbing its space. An exception are the birds that hop onto its hide to peck at the insects which are an irritation for him but sustenance for them. 

The nature footage, whether of Pépé or the environment enveloping him, are the best parts of the film. The voice-over purporting to express the hippo’s thoughts seems, with a few exceptions, too philosophical and, especially, anthropocentric. It doesn’t help that sometimes the voice-over is in Spanish, sometimes in another language. The noises that the hippo makes on occasion (which appear to be the filmmaker’s invention) are more expressive of his elemental strangeness. 

For the viewer, the Colombian landscape seems just as “natural” as that of southern Africa, and even more tropical. However, they are of course not the same, and the difference acts upon the nature of the hippos. Animals that lived together in natural harmony begin to have conflicts, and after a falling-out with one dominant hippo, Pépé migrates to a different area. 

Pépé’s travels don’t always seem clear, although this may be meant to evoke the hippo’s furtive movement in the water, his muzzle barely above the surface. The specifics of migration can seem mysterious, and Pépé is kind of lost. That doesn’t make it easy for the viewer. The director compensates by showing images of maps on the screen, but they don’t clarify the hippo’s path, and the territories highlighted aren’t familiar. Worse, the maps seem jarringly artificial compared to the immediacy of the shots of Pépé. 

The film recalls Robert Bresson’s great work Au Hasard Balthazar, which was about an errant donkey. That particular animal was an obvious Christian symbol, accentuated by its encounters with a gallery of mostly negative characters and a tragic end. The human characters in Pépé are also mostly nasty or stupid, but the hippo’s own character isn’t pressed through an overtly Christian cookie-cutter. Pépé is an Other, whose strangeness is intended to be unknowable. In the film’s vision of naturalistic alienation we are all Others, subsumed to elemental violence, yet even on this level, the film could have done with more dramatization. 

It’s when Pépé approaches a remote river village that the film comes to life. Candelario (Jorge Puntillon Garcia), an elderly villager, encounters the hippo on the river, and this changes his life in a strange way. It results in a breakdown of relations with his wife (an irascible type to begin with). As other villagers experience close encounters with the hippo, they come into conflict with the Inspector in charge of local order. He rejects their repeated solicitations, which frays the social fabric. 

Some surreal touches take the film’s naturalism into odd directions. Candelario leaves behind his fellow villagers, and his wife, to row his boat in the vicinity of the hippo. He knows it’s dangerous, but something attracts him. A different attraction principle attaches to a beauty contest featuring young village women who give the judges accounts of their exalted ambitions (one wants to become a scientist, another a journalist). The contest culminates in the women floating down the river on gaudily flower-laden rafts. They aren’t harmed by the huge animal in the river, so there does seem to be something beyond “nature red in tooth and claw”. 

The initial footage of Pépé and the dramatic scenes are the most effective parts of the film. The arty bits - the recurrent motif of soldiers on an operation, TV cartoon shots, occasional screen black-outs, the voice-overs - drive home the fact that the director isn’t a conventional hack of a filmmaker. Arias, who’s from the Dominican Republic, has a background in experimental film and studied in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Edinburgh, and Los Angeles.  Still, these techniques are distractions, venal sins committed by a filmmaker who hasn’t fully digested his technique, or his content. 

That content includes social and political context. Arias’ treatment of Colombian reality can be seen as a series of deft touches: the absurdity of the men transporting Pépé, the village Inspector, the beauty contest. They bring to mind the Colombia of Garcia Marquez (the film as a whole is like a Marquezian fable). However, the civil war between the government and FARC guerrillas, the bloody reign of the narco lords, America’s DEA interventionism, seem to have been extracted from the film’s universe like a painful molar. Even the killing of Escobar is presented as something of a natural occurrence, devoid of context. 

Pépé is an ambitious Dominican-French-German-Namibian co-production. Likewise, no less than four actors of different nationalities took turns voicing the hippo’s thoughts. But while the film succeeds in attaining complexity, it’s at the expense of its Colombian core.

Despite its flaws, the brilliant sequences redeem Pépé as a film, however. And as a fable it powerfully depicts the consequences of the disturbances currently being visited upon nature. The creatures displaced by these disturbances can be as small as birds (carrying a virus) or as large as a hippo, but the ultimate blame doesn’t lie with them. To paraphrase cartoonist Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the invasive species, and he is us.”  

Pépé hits French theatre screens in January 2025. Photos courtesy of the film distributors.