Читать книгу German as Contact Zone - Russell West-Pavlov - Страница 8

Let us return to Sissako’s strange road movie to upack these theses about ‘German as Contact Zone’ in more detail.

Given its conclusion, Sissako’s film might better be titled Rostov-Luanda-Berlin—but even this ludic alteration might demand some further ludic tampering, producing perhaps something like Rostov-Luanda-[Berlin] or, even more adventurously, Rostov-Luanda-Berlin (with Berlin placed sous rature, in the notorious expression of Derrida). For after a long quest through the war-torn rural and urban landscapes of South-Western Africa, we see almost nothing of East Berlin. Nor indeed do we see much of Baribanga himself, except for a brief glimpse as the long-lost friend leans for a moment over the balustrade of his flat’s balcony to see who is ringing the bell at the downstairs entrance (Sissako 1997: 57:35). Barely an audible word is spoken, except the narrator’s concluding voice-over in French, supplemented by subtitles in German:

Baribanga wohnt in Berlin, aber nur noch für kurze Zeit. Ein letztes Exil, das er für die Heimat verlassen wird. An diesem Oktobermorgen, habe ich ihn etwas sagen hören, in jener Sprache unserer vergangen Illusionen. Es war das Wort ‘Rückkehr’, und es klang wie eine Erfüllung. (Sissako 1997: 57:29-47)

[Baribanga is living in Berlin, but only for a little while longer. This is a last exile, one that he is about to quit to return home. On this October morning I heard him say something in this language of our bygone illusions. It was the word ‘Return’, and it had the sound of a fulfilment.]

The penultimate word of the film is in Russian: ‘vozvrashcheniye’. In the German subtitles, it is translated. This translation has a double effect. On the one hand, the translation erases, in part at least, the ubiquitous Russian that nestles, quixotically, among the French, Portuguese, Arabic, and a number of national or regional African languages that are spoken during the protagonist’s travels through North- and South-Western Africa. By the same token, however, the translation also enacts the constant translative process that marks not only the interface between the film’s spoken languages, but also between the spoken languages and the visual footer carrying the printed German subtitles.

Yet the final moments of the film are only very partially about linguistic translation, for the simple reason that they are largely mute. The silence is broken only by a couple of murmured words between the East-Berlin taxi driver and his passenger Dramane/Sissako, as the latter navigates with the help of a classic Falk street map of Berlin through industrial areas to Karlshorst (Sissako 1997: 56:20). Once again, the mutedness of the final scenes produces two effects.

On the one hand, it makes space for a new gaze, and for the presence of a new visual interlocutor: the landscape. The spectator gazes across the driver’s and Dramane/Sissako’s shoulders, through the windscreen and the side-windows at the East Berlin urban and semi-industrial landscape, replicating the same device that has been used repeatedly in the scenes of the long journey from Mauretania down the West coast of Africa to Angola and through the countryside between coastal Luanda and southerly inland Huambo and Humpata (see Adesokan 2010: 152). Several things are visually ostended here: the mediated gaze of the director, translated via the camera lens and the car windows; and the landscape itself, whether rural or urban, that ceases to be mere setting, and advances to the status of a character within the film. As Adesokan (2010: 147) notes, ‘in Sissako’s films the open desert or despoiled landscape is not only inhabited, it also draws attention itself through motion and quest’. Indeed, this landscape, at least the urban one we see in the final scene of Rostov-Luanda, is sometimes even endowed with its own language, as in the street sign or the scribbled nameplates on the doorbells of Baribanga’s block of flats. Such inscriptions of the natural or built environment once again blur the boundaries between the observing-semiotizing world of humankind and the observed world of nature which, as we shall duly see, is engaged in no less creative semiotic practices.

On the other hand, the mutedness of the final scenes contribute to a strange sort of hollowing out of the ‘national’ site, if not its visual incarnation, that provides the film’s diegetic ending and point of arrival. Germany is shown here almost entirely devoid of Germans—and of German. This means that in Sissako’s film, German and Germany have an eminently paradoxical status. Germany is the (almost) culminating moment of a postmodern Global South quest narrative—yet this status is neatly undercut when the final scene announces an imminent return to Angola, thus diegetically displacing Germany as the mimetic point of arrival. At the same time, German is also present throughout as a visual translative target language in the subtitles of a film that has been co-produced with the German ZDF (Das Zweite Deutsche Fernsehen, or Channel 2). Indeed, the film was originally produced as part of a series of documentaries made for the Documenta X bienniale in Kassel in 1997. In an interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Sissako has narrated the various encounters with fellow African filmmakers in Zimbabwe, in Luanda, a request from the Documenta organizers, and several visits to the locations in Angola, that variously ‘enabled’ the film and led to its final creation (Appiah 2003: 147-8). German institutions and actors, in the form of the Documenta X director Brigitte Kramer, and ZDF, were essential parts of the network of ‘affordances’ that also include the Global South participants and even the African landscapes that serve as putative ‘settings’ or ‘backgrounds’ (a misnomer if ever there was one, as this book sets out to show) for the film’s quest narrative and its translative work.

Yet despite this centrality, German and all that it stands for is curiously marginal in the film, working as one of the ‘absent causes’ (Jameson 1981: 102) within the text. Sissako thus banishes Germany and German to a peripheral threshold position that I will term in this book a translative ‘contact zone’. It is a place that cannot stand alone, in any sense of the word. Rather, it is one that is defined by interdependence: it is dependent, diegteically, linguistically, even semiotically, on various neighbouring elements or entities (as they, however, are also dependent upon it). Significantly, the decisive verdict on Germany—turning one’s back on the country and on the language—is delivered in Russian. Russian is a language once hegemonic in Karlshorst (where the Russian occupation forces were concentrated) but now residual in Germany except as a significant ethnic language, although it functions as a bizarrely diasporic and anachronistic lingua franca within the film’s own fictive time-space. In summary, then, Germany and the German language are both crucial, ubiquitous sites and linguistic media, yet simultaneously pushed to the edge of the verbal and visual text: Germany is pinned precariously at the end of the film, and the German language is present not as a spoken medium, but rather, clings to the bottom margin of the screen as a late scriptural addition of an almost cosmetic sort. But for artists such as Sissako, peripheries are not the end of the world: rather, they are the ‘contact zone’ par excellence.