Death and negritude

In 2018, Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Miraculous Weapons won the Sembène Ousmane Prize at FESPACO. The film carries the title of a 1946 poetry volume by the ‘father’ of negritude, Aimé Césaire, and it feels very familiar, but also quite distinctive from the rest of Bekolo’s oeuvre. There are old themes (revolt, race, freedom), but they are represented with updated artifices (e.g. drone shots) and new stylizations (at least for Bekolo), such as high contrasts relying on vivid colours. The end result is a (textual) meditation on life, death and the role played by art and negritude, all coloured by overt postcolonial tensions. Consequently, this article explores the representations of death in the film (with support from previous films by Bekolo) and aims to answer the following question: Could negritude (the movement that refuses to die, as it were) and art (as literature and as film) really ‘erase the traces and the symbols of death’ in the postcolonial, as the main character of the film, Djamal, boldly claims

Art · Theology · African history and culture studies · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Philosophy

• Négritude-Literature and Ideology

  Open Access•Abiola Irele•The Journal of Modern African…•1965

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