Making Waves

In an article titled "Impossible Africans," the queer Cameroonian po liti cal scientist S. N. Nyeck (2008, 6) argues that, within mainstream African discourse, queer African subjects are considered to be "impossible" or unimaginable, not because homosexual desire itself is seen to be impossible but because queer Africans are considered to be noncitizens, or misnomers, held somewhere in suspension, somewhere in the shadows of the state and the social institutions that support it.Nyeck therefore calls for a focus on queer eroticism-an eroticism which names the "network of relational be hav iors, ideas, aspirations, emotions, common socio-economic and po liti cal dreams" of (impossibly) queer Africansand which seems to be precisely what po liti cal and social institutions find threatening (6).In the early years of West African queer cinema, that is, the first de cade of this century, erotically threatening queer figures were almost exclusively figured to be women.(Though West Africa's first queer film, the 1997 film Dakan, focused on two teenage boys, gay men did not appear again in West African cinema until 2010, with the exception of minor subplots in a few Nigerian films.)But the ways these erotic noncitizens were imagined 1 Making WavesQueer Eccentricity and West African Wayward Women and treated on screen was often dependent on whether the film came from Francophone or Anglophone Africa.In West African Francophone cinema, which tends be art or "auteur" cinema, nonconforming women are often used to critique the postcolonial state, and women's sexual agency in general, along with the threat it poses to an often corrupt state, is often celebrated on screen.However, in the popu lar West African Anglophone video film tradition centered in Nigeria and Ghana, films are often tied to Christian, and more often specifically Pentecostal, worldviews, and women's erotic agency or nonconformity, at least in the first de cade of the 2000s, was often presented as spiritually and morally dangerous to the heterosexual family. 1 But what I suggest is that in their depiction of queerness these two cinematic traditions converge in unexpected ways, ofering insights into the often messy links between women's queer eccentricity, West African spiritual traditions, and the resistant practices of Afri-queer fugitivity.I begin Queer African Cinemas with a formal study of one film from each of these film traditions-Joseph Gaï Ramaka's Senegalese art film Karmen Geï (2001) and Socrate Safo's four-part Ghanaian video film Jezebel (2007-8)-in order to foreground the dif er ent ways that some of the earliest queer West African films focused their attention on women's sexuality and on its ability to upset the state, in the case of Karmen Geï, and the family, in the case of Jezebel.Perhaps one of the most widely written-about African films, Karmen Geï is an adaptation of Prosper Mérimée's 1845 novella Carmen, which was famously turned into an opera by Georges Bizet in 1875.In both Mérimée's and Bizet's versions, Carmen, a Gypsy and outlaw in southern Spain, seduces the officer Don José, who destroys his career for Carmen and joins her fellow bandits.But when Carmen turns her afections to a bullfighter (Escamilo in the opera, Lucas in the novella), Don José murders Carmen.Karmen Geï, the first African adaptation of the story, follows this basic plot with one major change: in the original Carmen, and in most of the eighty-some filmic adaptations, Carmen is caught in a love triangle between two men; in Ramaka's version, Karmen loves both men and women. 2 In all Carmens, Carmen is an outsider and outlaw, a wayward woman, who challenges the status quo.In Karmen Geï this remains the case: throughout the film Karmen, a queer, drug-smuggling free spirit, performs her opposition to patriarchy, the national bourgeoisie, and compulsory heterosexuality and links her strug gles to French colonial oppression and to the transatlantic slave trade.But here, Ramaka connects Karmen to a long line of historical and divine resisters and calls Karmen the daughter of the water spirit Kumba Kastel.Ramaka's Karmen therefore has the same discourse on love, re sis tance, and freedom that is the hallmark of all global Carmen making waves 39 stories, but here it becomes both a localized discourse and a queered discourse, one, I argue, that is embedded in the improvisational jazz and drumming score that connects the film to a trans atlantic Black fugitive imagination and a critique of the postcolonial state.Jezebel is also a remake, but it is a remake of one of Safo's earlier films, Women in Love (1996).Women in Love is about a woman, Julie, who is struggling to make her clothing shop successful in her coastal Ga neighborhood of Accra and who seeks the advice of a well-to-do, single friend.The friend sends Julie to a priestess who takes her to the beach and initiates her into a cult that worships a lesbian water spirit.Julie quickly becomes quite successful, acquiring her own mansion and Mercedes-Benz, but her wealth comes with a condition: she may never again sleep with a man, and any woman whom Julie sleeps with may also never again sleep with a man under penalty of going mad.In other words, Julie's choice to join the cult is a direct threat to heterosexual reproduction.When I met Safo in Accra in 2007, just as he was preparing to begin filming Jezebel, he proudly and without prompting-I was actually working on an entirely dif er ent proj ect at the time and did not know about his queer films-showed me Women in Love on a small monitor in his minivan.He told me that he wanted to remake Women in Love, his most popu lar film, because he knew that the production values were substandard and that with all the development in technology he was confident that he could do better.The film, to him, presented a true story of how lesbians obtain wealth through secret networks, and he knew his audiences would be keen to see a sleeker version of the film.Jezebel, the multipart remake and expansion of Women in Love, keeps the same story line but is full of digital special efects that Safo had mastered in the de cade that separated the two films: in the new version the water spirit materializes out of thin air and transforms into a human, the Mercedes-Benz is replaced with a yellow Hummer emerging from a morph ing fireball, and good and evil spirits fight each other with breaths of fire and Bible shields.In the end, Christian forces prevail and Jezebel is defeated.As can be seen from just these brief descriptions, many things separate Karmen Geï and Jezebel, but in addition to the difering content of the two films, they also have incredibly dif er ent forms.Karmen Geï is an avant-garde film whose generic categorization has confounded critics, who have called it a "quasi-musical," a "musical drama," a "musical comedy," or even a "dance review" (Dovey 2009, 221). 3Moreover, though it follows the basic story line of Carmen, Ramaka cares very little for conventional plot, often favoring cuts and breaks over linearity.Ayo Coly (2016, 399) writes that "the elliptical structure of

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