response to Biko's review:
What is trash? that is the question that came to animate me as I wrote my book "Trash." I am grateful that Biko Agozino took the trouble to read and even more to review my book. But I want to offer my own views of some of his comments, in the interest of having an exchange of ideas. I should try to cut to the chase of where I find shortcomings in Biko's review. He writes, "The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. 'What is worthless? Who is trash?' He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers."
I see trash as operating on many levels, and in different orders of value. I don't think Biko was willing to take "trash" as signifying more than worthless in a univocal sense. Without establishing the system of value within which worth is measured, that claim doesn't convey anything. For instance, in the above quote, "who is trash," he responds, "no one is worthless." What is the point of that response? My question is provocative, as he rightly says, in the same way that the word "nègre" was used by Césaire and Senghor in framing Negritude. The inspiration for my usage here was not in the response to Akudinobi, where I was stating that we critics of African cinema needed to get out of the mold we had fallen into for decades, which was to repeat the increasingly tired formulas about engagé or committed criticism. I believe that Biko's values remain within that frame, without him seeing quite where I wanted to go beyond it.
When I used "trashy" originally, it was in the preface of my previous book, when I wrote, "It is time for a revolution in African film criticism. A revolution against the old, tired formulas deployed in justification of filmmaking practices that have not substantially changed in 40 years. Time for new voices, a new paradigm, a new view—a new Aristotle to invent the poetics we need for today.
Something trashy, to begin, straight out of the Nigerian video handbook. Something sexy, without the trite poses of exotic behinds, spinning the ventilateur for the tourists. Something violent, etc…." I called this a "new third cinema challenge."
The cover of the book in which I wrote those words came from Bekolo's "Aristotle's Plot," as did, of course, my reference to the need for a new poetics, following Bekolo. The way Biko frames my reference to Aristotle or trash misses entirely Bekolo's point in that film. Biko writes, "the dismissal of African cinema in a scene analyzed in that earlier book was contested by a character who condemned the speaker as trash: 'If African cinema is trash, then you are trash because you are an African', he retaliated. For reasons best known to him, Ken decided to double down on this pejorative description of Africans."
I wonder if it is necessary for me to respond, when Biko doesn't seem to get the lines from Bekolo's film. The person speaking is E.T. He is the figure in the film who represents the old school of African cinema, whose value he is trying to claim in challenging the tastes of the young "tsotsis" in the film who want to watch western action films. The ironic voice of the narrator, actually Bekolo's voice, asks whether the new generation of African filmmakers are to be condemned to the same old notions of political filmmaking forever, whether they are not to be free to make films, like those "trashy" action films that entrance the young.
The answer is now clear. We have had our burgeoning revolution in African film criticism. We have an expanded opening onto a range of critical voices with Tcheuyup, Adesokan, Diawara, not to mention the terrific scholars of digital, video films—Haynes, Garritano, Okome. The approaches to African culture have expanded enormously with Mbembe, Olaniyan, Quayson, Gikandi.
For Biko these critics represent a threat because they don't ground their theories or approaches in ancient egypt/cheikh Anta Diop, etc. In writing of Mbembe, he states that I "accepted Mbembe's astonishing slur that Africans focus exclusively on the mouth, the belly and the phallus as if they have no mind of their own." Biko misrepresents Mbembe completely, but in the same direction that he misunderstands my own intentions in turning to "trash." He seems to imagine only old-school protests can carry the weight of critique today.
He cites me when I wrote that trash doesn't figure in Fanon's libertionist schema. The liberationist schema calls for solidarity and national liberation, throwing off colonial oppression, and ultimately neocolonialism. This approach had driven our embrace of revolutionary values from the outset. But it can't drive the aesthetic choices, or intellectual development of African thinkers, forever. It would die from the fatigue of truth having turned into "truths." That's why Bekolo mocked E.T., and set out a new agenda for "New African Cinema," one which Diawara has now celebrated in his most recent work.
This struggle between yesterday and tomorrow is also my own: I was as much a part of leftist critical theorizing and writing as anyone; and I am not suggesting we turn neocon in order to move beyond it. But trash is really the place to begin challenging the values/value systems to which we adhered for so long. I believe Gerima's latest brilliant film Teza does exactly that—force us to question our earlier embrace of revolutionary rhetoric in which we had condemned new directions or critiques always as neocolonial or bourgeois. That's why henri duparc was given such short shrift, unfortunately.
So Biko is right when he says the book is a wrestling match I had with myself. I wanted to walk in new steps, not in the same old ones. So I turned to those whom El Hadji calls "dechets humains," human detritus, in Xala. The beggars thrown out of town by the "president" and the wealthy businessman. I wanted to stand next to jimmy cliff in The Harder They Come when he has fallen so low as to be forced to come to the rubbish tip where the desperately poor had to pick through the leftovers to survive. The camera takes us there; we need to follow, and then follow the lead through all those films and characters deemed trashy by high cultural value systems, follow down the same paths that lead us to the cartoons in Le Messager where Mbembe analyzes the cultural forms of autocracy that mark Cameroon today, where they are given a mocking gross form, a belly laugh, to dismiss their bloated pomposity.
When Biko writes, above, "No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers," he misses the point of Césaire's turn to the down and out when coming to embrace his Negritude. It is not that the poor and broken with whom he associated were not "worthless," but that only by coming through the portals of what is deemed worthless can one move beyond the notions of superior that condemned them as "dechets humains." That was Césaire's own struggle, as he returned from Paris.
I am possibly going to continue to catch hell for my use of the term "trash"—as one of my editors feared. Let it come. This is the time to fight against a new age of values that devalue "les damnés de la terre"—the wretched of the earth—more than ever. I don't want to resolve this struggle as does Biko by saying, "No, we really aren't trashy." I don't want to buy into a system by saying, we really have value, despite what you say. I want us to move where we are standing in to a location, not of culture, but of detritus, where we can reconstruct our vision. The defensive language, "no we really are…," will not emerge from there, but something closer to the beggars' spit, with which Sembene ends Xala. That scene is gross, but restorative. Couldn't have been done without abjection.
And now we have to look elsewhere, past Sembene, Fanon, Cesaire, or we will never catch up with Bekolo's Saignantes, not to mention the "New Nollywood."
--Ken Harrow's Trash: Garbage In Garbage Out
Reviewed by Biko Agozino
Ken Harrow is a very thoughtful writer whose contributions to online debates is always a signal to me that a thread is important enough not to be junked automatically. I was pleased to see that his new book has two chapters on Nollywood whereas his past books on African cinema ignored this iconic genre because, according to him: 'The images scattered to the wind in Nollywood films are continually relegated to the rubbish bin by celluloid film standards' (p. 279). Gloria Emeagwali alerted me to the controversial nature of the new book when she questioned online why the author obsesses with trash and why there is no distinction between the people and trash in the book.
Having read the book, I admit that the author has an original thesis that he argued with varying degrees of conviction mixed with serious doubts. To argue that there are tropes of trash in African cinema is far from the mantra that African cinema is trash or that Africans are 'worthless people'. The author over-generalized his observation of trash in some scenes by concluding that such trash is what defines the films, the culture, the politics, the law and the people. 'What is worthless? Who is trash?' He asks provocatively (p. 57). No one is worthless, and everything is not trash should be the answers.
Follow link to read on and or to leave a comment:
http://massliteracy.blogspot.com/2013/05/ken-harrows-trash-garbage-in-garbage-out.html
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-- kenneth w. harrow faculty excellence advocate distinguished professor of english michigan state university department of english 619 red cedar road room C-614 wells hall east lansing, mi 48824 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu
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