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“A Meditation on the Stigmas of Colonization”: Mati Diop on Dahomey
Dahomey Mati Diop likes summoning spirits. In 2019’s Cannes-premiering Atlantics, the ghosts of young Senegalese men lost in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Dakar come back to haunt people in their bid to demand what is rightfully theirs. In her latest hybrid documentary, Dahomey—which won the Golden Bear at Berlinale this year—she exorcises the spirit of artifacts looted by the French from the West African kingdom of Dahomey between 1892-94. After centuries of lying inert in Paris’ Musée du quai Branly, 26 of these artifacts were restituted to Benin in 2021.
Dahomey not only documents their long journey home but also explores what home even means to objects that originated in the eponymous kingdom of Dahomey, a place that doesn’t exist anymore.
Navigating through Beninese jingoism and France’s seemingly magnanimous gesture, Diop creates space for the artifacts that have been mute witnesses to history. More importantly, she uses the film to create a pulpit where Beninese youth come together to try and deconstruct the messy, heavy topic of restitution and what it means to a postcolonial generation whose future is still determined by its country’s colonial past.
Before Dahomey’s release on Mubi this Friday, I caught up with Diop to talk about the film, its music and its making. And whether she likes museums anymore.
The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Filmmaker: Atlantics actor Amadou Mbow said in a New Yorker interview that with Mati “there is no timing, only searching until you find.” Keeping that in mind, I would love to know what the timing of this film was, and how did it find you?
Diop: Lots of artists and directors share the feeling that through many different films, they are haunted by one and the same story. It takes different shapes, different forms, different lenses. So, the starting point of a film or its timing, it’s both very connected to constraints and worldly things, but also completely timeless. Whether it’s Atlantics or Dahomey, they both come from places that I wouldn’t even be able to know where the starting point is. They seem to be anchored in a story that goes beyond my own lifetime. What we’re dealing with is intertwined between very intimate and political, individual and collective history. So, a film is not only about me, my concerns and my obsessions, it’s also about what inhabits me.
Filmmaker: But this is the fastest film you’ve ever made, right?
Diop: This film took me the least amount of time. I was able to make the film in two years, which is very short for me compared to the journey that Atlantic and A 1000 Suns were. The first films you make are your own cinema school. They are films where you search for your own language and tempo and pace, and it was more a confirmation, an affirmation of that language that is now much more integrated in me; not only in terms of form, but also in terms of purpose. The purposes, the topics, the issues, the questions I was dealing with, are quite philosophical. I feel that is what gives it this timeless feeling, because it’s a very meditative film, which doesn’t take away the political dimension and urgency of it. But it’s really a reflection, a meditation on the stigmas of colonization and an invitation for action. The journey was extremely rich but in the end it was quite fast—from the first ideas to the final cut.
Filmmaker: You said somewhere that when you heard Macron talk about restituting these Beninese artifacts, you felt like the ground under your feet slipped.
Diop: Some of that may be lost in translation. I said two things, one that the speech of Emmanuel Macron itself was hors-sol, which means disconnected from reality. And the other is the idea of vertigo that I felt when I first heard the word “restitution.” It was the first time I had heard the word being pronounced by a French president in the political landscape. The feeling I went through was comparable to a vertigo provoked by a slight earthquake, because it was the first time in my life that I was hearing this topic being considered in politics. And the shock is, when you hear a topic that is suddenly becoming a reality, it confronts you with the immensity of the taboo. It just revealed the slowness with which French society is processing its colonial legacy.
Filmmaker: Is restitution something you had thought a lot about?
Diop: The subject of restitution was something that I took time to face, because it’s one of those angles of a colonial legacy that is probably the most well dissimulated. As a child to your teenage years, when you cross these [museum] spaces, you experience the most strange, completely deformed and transformed relationship to actual history. You see artifacts exposed in an appearance of respect and conservation without any traces of violence or context of colonialism. That creates a very oblique and completely reversed experience of reality. It really shapes your historical consciousness in such a dysfunctional way. It works on people’s minds and makes them accept a universal Western narrative that is much more difficult to get control of. It’s difficult to deconstruct.
Filmmaker: My favorite parts of Dahomey are where a large cross-section of students are trying to deconstruct this act of restitution. Why did you decide to include that?
Diop: It’s not even about why I decided to do it. The only purpose of the film is for this debate to happen. It’s not one amongst many ideas, it’s the film itself, the gesture and meaning of this film. It’s a counter point of view, a radical shift of paradigm, to switch the point of view to the space from where this story of dispossession should be told; from the view of the dispossessed. That’s the place the film decides to talk from. We should consider it as one and the same gesture—from Paris to Cotonou—to experience the journey of the artifacts that is leading us to this debate, to these African youth. This journey of these artifacts is really a journey to these debates, which is what the film was made for, for these debates to happen and to be heard. It’s really the core, the heart and the purpose of the film. It is the only single statement of the film.
Filmmaker: I have read reviews where the film is called magical realist, and I have read interviews where you say you refuse to be put in a box. How do you react to these reviews?
Diop: I don’t react to it. I make the films I make. I don’t refuse to be put in a box. I mean, how can I have control over that? I just have the feeling that I cannot be put in the box, despite the temptation. Even though I’m also fortunate that lots of journalists are in appreciation of the very hybrid language I’m trying to define. I’m not so good at judging and thinking about how I’m perceived from the outside. I don’t really put a lot of energy and reflection into how people project things on me. I’m more concerned with maintaining a certain level of conversation with my era that corresponds to what is urgent in this time. But as a woman, as an Afro descendant woman, and as an artist, it’s extremely important to be vigilant about not letting that exterior image get to that vision.
Filmmaker: Fatima Al Qadiri scored the music for Atlantics. Dahomey uses music by Wally Badarou and Dean Blunt. Can you tell me how music fits into your vision of a film?
Diop: For Atlantics, it was an original score composed by Fatima Al Qadiri. So the process was very, very different than in Dahomey, where I used music that was already existing. I even wrote the script for Atlantic listening to Fatima’s previous albums because it was extremely close to the imagery of the film. I never use music just for its aesthetics, it has to be connected to the understanding of the artist and musician, of the political purpose of my film. For Dahomey, I used existing tracks of Wally Badarou, who is a French Beninese musician, and Dean Blunt, who is an English-Nigerian artist. They both embody a perfect syncretism between Western and African legacy, in a way that’s very rare. Their cultural hybridity aligned with my own experience of being both from the Western world and [of] Africa. The richness and the political, historical, social layers of each of their musical worlds enrich the voices of these treasures and the community of people they are holding.
Wally Badarou was present in one of the film’s premieres in Paris, and he gave a beautiful speech on stage. He said the film reminded him that he was not only half Beninese, but that he was coming from Dahomey. Using his music goes way beyond the melodic affinity. It’s really about using the whole story, the whole timeless story of an artist.
Filmmaker: And your father, Wasis Diop, is also a musician.
Diop: I come from music, from sound before I come from image. I’m the daughter of a very great African musician who is of the generation of Wally Badarou. They are both considered pioneers of a certain type of music that, unfortunately, gets called “World Music.” It is a very problematic way of considering things from the Western point of view, which has always been very frustrating for me to witness. They are such avant-garde African musicians in the way they were the first generation to really experience this cultural hybridity, and to have been able to translate that very complex hybridity to a musical language.
Filmmaker: I watched your pandemic film for Miu Miu, where opera plays a big part. You say you come from sound. How does music play into your filmmaking?
Diop: I do feel like I come from music and that my approach to filmmaking, to writing, and even to mise en scene is very musical. The debates that I staged [in Dahomey], even though it was definitely based on ideas, and not on theory, I cast these students based on their point of view, their capacity to put words to their relationship not only with the artifacts, but with their colonial legacy. But it was almost composed as a chorus with different tones, different textures of voices or timbers, and at the end, I really felt like the chief of the orchestra in this debate. That I composed a debate that sounds harmonious in its contradictions. The debate was actually first edited through sounds. I first listened to all the rushes and built a first version with the sound, only because I was not ready to compose with the images. I thought it was more important to see how it sounded first. And I guess that makes sense because the most important thing is for this debate to be heard, not seen.
Filmmaker: Before we end, can I ask what is your relationship to museums? Do you enjoy going to them?
Diop: Obviously there’s a big difference between the Musée du quai Branly and [Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin] where I want to see the retrospective of Nan Goldin. But concerning the category of museums like quai Branly, I hope the film gives you an idea of my relationship to this kind of museum. The sequence in quai Branly is almost [like] a funeral sequence. I found these spaces morbid. The morbidity these spaces express and embody was not something I feel I forced in terms of gaze and mise en scene. It was a matter of revealing the very morbid aspects of the European Western colonial gaze that has enclosed these artifacts. When you see the [museum’s] underground, it’s filmed both as a prison and a morgue. So yeah, I hope my relationship with this type of public museum is revealed. I think it is very transparent.
