It’s unusual to have an African writer in Brussels to help launch a Belgian film, but this was one reason for Ben Okri’s visit at the beginning of March. The Nigerian novelist and poet was also interviewed on stage before the screening, answering questions about his early life and its influence on his writing. The following day he gave a lecture on art’s role in society.
The film was N — The Madness of Reason, by Flemish director Peter Krüger, a mix of documentary and fiction whose starting point is French encyclopaedist Raymond Borremans. After fleeing Europe in 1929, Borremans travelled around Africa, first as a musician then running a mobile cinema.
He also started collecting information on every aspect of what was then French West Africa. Towards the end of his life he assembled an encyclopaedia on Côte d’Ivoire, where he had settled, but when he died in 1988 only the volumes up to the letter N had been published, hence the title.
Krüger’s film begins with Borremans’ death, then goes on to imagine the Frenchman’s spirit roaming restlessly around Africa, unable to find peace because his life’s work is unfinished. Along the way he observes the world he has left behind and encounters old friends, associates and people who follow occupations similar to his own.
In this way the film contrasts Africa’s past and present, and challenges the urge to order the world. “The aim of Borremans’ life was to objectify and systematise African reality, but as a spirit he is forced to enter a world which cannot be reduced to facts and figures,” Krüger says in the film’s press material. “The film presents a subjective experience of reality which is penetrated by a world of imagination, dreams, emotions, stories and poetry.”
Okri’s involvement came late in the process. Krüger had approached him at the beginning to collaborate in writing a text for the project but Okri was busy with a novel. Okri also explained during the post-screening Q&A that he thought the film would take much longer than the three years Krüger suggested. He was right.
Seven years on Krüger had finished shooting the film and had a rough edit, but he still needed a text. When he approached Okri again, the writer’s focus had moved from prose to poetry and the notion was a better fit. Having seen the rough cut, Okri worked independently on his text. He then handed it over to Krüger, who distributed it through the film.
Most of it is spoken in French, but other languages also feature, and some of Okri’s text has been turned into lyrics to be sung. Largely, however, the words represent Borremans’ inner thoughts, voiced by Michael Lonsdale, and a dialogue between Borremans and an African woman (Wendyam Sawadogo) who can perceive his spirit. In some instances, Krüger said, he altered the editing slightly to accommodate the text, but it seems that Okri’s words were used rather like a musical score. This accords with Okri’s approach to the text.
“I wrote it like poetry,” he says in an interview recorded when the film screened at last year’s Ghent Film Festival. “I added oblique lines. I introduced words that pulled at the image, that sometimes subverted the screen, that sometimes opened a new door into the image and into the world of the characters. It was just little additions, just the way Miles Davis does his trumpet interventions.”
He also spoke about how he felt the text should complement the images. “The words must do things that images cannot do, which is imaginative suggestion, hinting at other realms, philosophical disturbances, ripples on the surface of the screen. A sneak punch underneath the mind of the viewer.”
This works to some extent if you are a French speaker, and the words enter your mind on the same level as the images. But reading the subtitles — which you have to do in any case when the language changes — puts the words at a disadvantage. Both Krüger and Okri spoke of an interest in the oral tradition in African art, which makes all the writing on the screen somewhat counterproductive. Unfortunately (but typically for a ‘Flemish’ film in Belgium) there appear to be no plans to screen N — The Madness of Reason in French-speaking parts of the country, nor was this Brussels avant-première at Bozar followed by a general release in the city.
The way of working and the translation into French makes it rather hard to assess Okri’s contribution, although in addition to providing the text it seems clear that he was an inspiration for Krüger’s appreciation of Africa. For example, there is one shot of a misty road at night that strongly recalls scenes from Okri’s The Famished Road.
Okri is complementary about the film, of course, but it is interesting that he situated his comments last year in the wider context of films about Africa, both by Europeans and by Africans. “There’s a way that Africa tends to be filmed that I’m not very fond of, which is to say it tends to be filmed too externally,” he said. “It’s too much of an outward gaze, too much of looking for sensational elements. But what Peter had done is he’d filmed Africa with warmth and with dimension, with transcendence. He’d looked at ruins and decay and sadness, but he’d also looked at fertility and richness and dance and celebration. He conveyed the richness. I like the textuality of the film, I like the layers of it.”
During the March Q&A he said that he hopes to publish his text, either as part of a future poetry collection or as a stand-alone publication. The press kit gives a 15-line taster, beginning:
The road is singing about the voices of the feet
The crooket feet of history.
We have suffered
And our songs will return our missing moments.
What does it mean to return?
And yes, ‘crooket’ rather than ‘crooked’. You can get an idea of the way Okri’s text is used in the film through this excerpt. Meanwhile, his lecture — entitled Can Art Save the World? — can be seen here.
text © Ian Mundell 2015
Beautiful Feathers is much simpler in its narrative than Jagua Nana (1961), the last Ekwensi novel I read. Wilson Iyari runs a pharmacy but also leads the Nigerian Movement for African and Malagasy Solidarity. These two activities take up all his time and his wife Yaniya feels neglected, seeking male company elsewhere. Hence the main theme: the great champion of African unity has a divided family, the respected leader has no authority at home.
mundellian 