Between “the Housewife” and “the Philosophy Professor”: Music, Narration and Address in Ousmane Sembene's Xala

Abstract

The acclaimed Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene saw himself as a modern-day griot (an oral performer), producing often didactic films that address a diverse spectatorship. Examining Xala, this article argues that this address cannot be fully understood without attention to the film's complex music–image relationships, which refigure classical and modernist film aesthetics to mobilize a discourse that recalls oral performance. In this way, Sembene negotiates the tensions of address generated by a spectatorship that is situated in the culturally hybrid spaces between the literate and the oral, the urban and the rural, and the global and the local.

Notes

Wolof is the largest ethnic group in Senegal, and also an indigenous language, one of the Niger-Congo family, with about 3.5 million speakers.

Paul Willemen [2003] recently used Godzich's ideas about oral culture and its persuasive rhetoric as a means of explaining the emphatic use of the zoom in popular Turkish cinema.

In S/Z [1974], Roland Barthes makes the distinction between the “readerly” (lisible) and the “writerly” (scriptable) text. This distinction separates those texts or aspects of texts that imply a passive engagement with the text vis-à-vis an active one. Barthes characterizes the “readerly” text as the dominant form of text, one that may easily be decoded by its implied readers. The narrative closure and formal convention of a readerly text provide little room for alternative interpretation. The writerly text, on the other hand, is a narratively open text to the extent that the reader is required to “write” the text through the act of its reading. For Barthes, “[t]he writerly is the novelistic without the novel, poetry without the poem, the essay without the dissertation, writing without style, production without product, structuration without structure” [1974: 5]. In the writerly text, the reader may remove himself from the subjective due to the text's challenge to the codes and conventions that organize the subject's position. In Le plaisir du texte, Barthes reformulates the writerly text in terms of jouissance (“bliss”), derived from the text's challenge to the readerly text's forms of subject positioning, while the readerly text invokes only “pleasure” [1973: 13].

A sabar ensemble is a group of musicians and dancers whose performance is based on the rhythms of several sabar drums (low-pitched drums used extensively in West African performance).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexander Fisher

ALEXANDER FISHER is Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen's University, Belfast. His research looks into the relationships between music, culture and cinematic form in African cinema, and recent publications have considered the films of Souleymane Cissé, Med Hondo and Djibril Diop Mambéty. He has also written on the aesthetics of development film in Africa.