Postcolonial Amnesia: The “Vanishing Present” of the Past in Le Cercle des noyés

The end result of a decade-long research in Belgium, among Mauritanian expatriates and political refugees, and in Mauritania, Drowned in Oblivion stands as a powerful poetic evocation of the plight of members of the Black minority who were arrested, tortured and sentenced to four years of detention in faraway Oualata for their alleged involvement with FLAM (Forces de Libération Africaines de Mauritanie), a militant organization founded in 1985 to advocate for the political rights of Black Mauritanians.4 In the "Liner Notes" to the DVD set, Birgit Kohler provides a concise summary of the film: What sets Drowned in Oblivion apart, as a meditation on state-sanctioned violence, exclusion from the national body politic, and collective amnesia, in comparison with, say, Achkar's Allah Tantou and Raoul Peck's Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (CH/DE/FR, 1992), among countless other films adumbrating the old dictum that "the personal is political," is the embodiment of a subject of memory embedded in the experiential immediacy of the native language, a subject steeped in the habitat of primolinguisitic interiority. In a comparative study of Ngangura Mweze's Life Is Rosy (FR, 1987) and Peck's Lumumba: Death of a Prophet, Jeanne Garane makes the astute observation that the Haitian-born documentarist "examines Lumumba's martyrdom, 'sealed with blood,' and constructs a memorial through personal testimony"; her further contention that, through Peck's aesthetics of implication, "the viewing audience comes to see history and complicity with power differently, to experience the political personally" is also on target.12 Yet such a personal dimension, more or less characteristic of the documentary essay à la Marker and Varda,13 doesn't necessarily entail a subjective, let alone a micropolitical dimension.14 The tenor of Kohler's summary of Vandeweerd's film is precisely that through its ponderous voice-over narration, the personal translates into the political by way of an oralization15 of the film's visual contents, a cinematic synergy geared to achieve, not closure of some traumatic past, but certain subject-effects, effets de sujet, as French philosopher Alain Badiou argued in one of his first classic essays.16 This micropolitics of subject-formation is confirmed by an interviewer commenting on the ethics of testimony driving Vandeweerd's project as a whole: In Black African Cinema and African Cinema: The Politics of Culture, two oft-cited overviews of African film history, bo