Jean-Marie Téno is one of those filmmakers who never weary of subjecting the post-colonial situation in their country of origin – in this case, Cameroon - to critical examination. Many of his films, such as »Vacances au pays« (2000), investigate the specific promises of modernity that the Western powers dangled before the eyes of the colonised country and, later, of the independent state. The theme of hopelessly backward »tropical modernity« reoccurs constantly, whether as a pretext for withdrawing from former responsibilities, or as a way of introducing new dependent relationships. Reason enough for Téno to embark on a journey of discovery and to capture both the promises and the disappointments in a sort of local probe. In his most recent film, his thirteenth, »Le Mariage d’Alex« (2002), Téno carries out his local spot check by looking at a topic that is largely taboo – the practice of polygamy, which is widespread in Cameroon. Téno was a guest at the VIENNALE 2003 with this film, and the following interview was held there.

[b] Christian Höller: [/b] The video footage you used for your most recent film, »Le Mariage d'Alex«, was never really intended to become an official or public film. What ultimately prompted you to release the film and make the practice depicted in it – polygamy in rural Cameroon – known to a wider public?

[b] Jean-Marie Téno: [/b] I just shot these images because my friend Alex asked me to film his wedding. During the shooting, I realized that there was a very tense situation. Elise [Alex's first wife] was very silent, and, of course, I respected that silence – she just didn't want to talk. But this silence was also disturbing to me because at one point I asked myself how this whole practice could ever stop. It was Alex’s mother who had pushed him into having a second wife, for the reason that, whenever a woman is in a polygamous situation herself, she has to emotionally and economically rely on her son. So she pushes him into having more wives so that she herself will be better off. In order to stop this circle, I wanted to remind people of the kind of suffering the wives go through on the first day of co-habitation. So that, in 20 or 30 years, if one of these two women wants to push her own son into doing the same thing, she should remember the day when she herself went through this painful moment.

[b] Höller: [/b] As you said, the film ends with a moment of silence, with Elise shaking her head, and your voice-over coming in with a commentary that you want to break this silence. On the one hand, it appears as if you are taking on the responsibility of speaking on behalf of the silent woman in order to take sides and to represent what she could not have expressed herself or made known to a wider public. On the other hand, the film seems to be very neutral in its overall depiction of this seemingly almost everyday practice, not only in Cameroon but in other parts of Africa and the world as well. So where exactly would you position your approach vis-à-vis the topic at hand? Does it primarily speak on behalf of the silent woman, or does it rather look at the whole situation more ethnographically and neutrally?

[b] Téno: [/b] This is a very controversial issue, and whenever people in Cameroon talk about it, it always results in a very tense and dead-end discussion. In order to elaborate the positions involved, I needed to film just what was happening in front of my eyes and to try to be as neutral as possible during the course of the whole event, so that I would not over-emphasize the pain and feelings at a particular moment (something I did, for instance, with the music – so actually, I was not quite neutral). I wanted the film to be almost like a reportage that registers all the movements. Of course, I did not have three cameras to accomplish that, but I managed to let the story flow and keep it as verité-like as possible. Towards the end, I gradually revealed what my position was towards the whole story. My sympathies went to the women who were suffering, not to the beneficiaries. Yet I also tried to go beyond what people were saying – Alex, for instance, is constantly claiming that everything is perfect, but of course, nothing is perfect. So I just kept asking more questions in order to expose that. I have always worked like this, because I have learnt that you cannot just start with a big announcement, like »this is a bad thing« – no-one will listen to you. I rather take the attitude of just going around people, allowing them to express themselves, letting them go as far as to ridiculously reveal their own bullshit. That is what I gradually do in the film.

[b] Höller: [/b] What I also found interesting is that polygamy is used as a kind of rhetorical device in the film. First, it is shown as an ordinary, widely accepted custom. But then, towards the very end, the male guests (who are slightly drunk at that point) give it a very special political connotation – polygamy as something anti-Catholic, anti-white, and ultimately anti-colonial. How would you assess this paradox: that polygamy, for many people, is supposedly part of an anti-imperialist attitude, or is seen as supporting self-determination in the face of the former white colonials who were opposed to it?

[b] Téno: [/b] Polygamy, in this context, is something very complicated. When you look at history, people do a lot of things just in response to certain problems. For instance, when there was slavery, imposed by capitalism, most of the people who got displaced were men. When men have to go abroad or go looking for work, there will always be more women who get left behind in a particular place. So people will very likely resort to polygamy to re-gain some sort of social balance. This can sometimes be used to justify polygamy in a socio-economic way, but that is of course not addressing the injustice of the system. In the particular case of the film, it almost appears like coquetry – when a club of men is created who enforce polygamy and who never question the attitudes and feelings of the other party. Another thing one could say is that nobody is forced to accept polygamy, but if they do they should know what to expect – after all, it is not »false marriage«. There are also many women in the town shown who do not want to be alone and who are prepared to accept being a second or a third wife, in order to have the status of being married. In my language, there is no word for »single woman« – a single woman is called a »prostitute«.

[b] Höller: [/b] How is polygamy considered within the local spectrum of politics? Is it condemned by more progressive forces, or is it just tacitly accepted?

[b] Téno: [/b] In Africa and especially in Cameroon, there is no real spectrum of politics. What you have is people in power and those who are not, and if you come into power, you suddenly become rich, change class and attitude and so on. We do not have a long-term political history because independence only came about 40 years ago. What you have is one-party states, single parties, dictators, and so on.

[b] Höller: [/b] So is polygamy attacked at all on a local basis?

[b] Téno: [/b] No, it is not attacked, because even the law tolerates it. Even the church has started to tolerate polygamy. When they tried to enforce monogamy, hardly anybody stayed in the church – because almost all the elders in the church were polygamists themselves.

[b] Höller: [/b] In the film, polygamy is shown as being very much connected to ideas of social nobility, respect, and self-empowerment. Although it is the mother of Alex who pushes him into the second wedding, there seems to be a very self-assured notion of masculinity at work as well. How can such a concept of masculinity be criticized, or even dismantled, without immediately bringing in a kind of »outside« morality – Western, hypocritical, whatever?

[b] Téno: [/b] As long as people consider gender as a kind of heritage, with men standing above women, the notion of polygamy will just feed on the fact that, in traditional society, women were considered to be part of the furniture, part of the goods that men possessed. That is how things work in my society: when a man reaches a certain age, he goes to see the elder of the family, who gives him a piece of land. When he manages to build a house on that piece of land, he asks someone to help him »hit the house« – that is, to have a woman. And because he can »hit his house«, he can also »hit his own body« – that's what we say for making love in our language.

[b] Höller: [/b] Let me come back to the question of a possible point of departure for a critique of these kinds of social relations. You more or less practise the gaze of someone who has grown up under these conditions, but has moved from rural Cameroon – as you showed in your film »Vacances au pays« (2000) – first to Yaoundé, the capital, and then to the Western metropolis of Paris. Could the same kind of critical approach that you take also come from within Cameroon society, or is that only possible from outside?

[b] Téno: [/b] That is a very hard question, because »inside Africa« is not outside the influence of the world. Even when you live in Africa today, you have access to the internet, to television and you see almost the same things that you see everywhere else in the world. So wherever you are, you might be »inside« or »outside« – you even see a lot of people living »outside« in Europe who go back to become polygamists. They even want to enforce polygamy because they have been disappointed in Europe, and they take as their justification the fact that the couple model does not work, that women do not respect their men, and so on, whereas in traditional society, the man can be the sole centre– a privilege which he does not want to lose. On the other hand, women do not have enough power to be able to change history and get rid of polygamy. Maybe with AIDS and the current situation, we are gradually moving towards an awareness that polygamy is a problem. One has to be able to address this debate, but such a debate cannot be addressed in a society in which freedom of speech is not yet an accepted thing. How are you going to address these issues in a context where, if you criticize things, people confront you as someone who has been abroad, who does not understand anything about that particular society, who is trying to enforce colonial ideas, etc.? Usually, a lot of arguments like these are used to counteract the quest for more equality, gender equality, freedom of speech, and so on. So it is difficulty within Cameroon society, but we try – we do it with film, and in the various arts. For instance, we have a lot of artists now who are also questioning society by showing pictures that most people just consider disgusting.

[b] Höller: [/b] In »Vacances au pays«, you deal with the notion of »tropical modernity«. Historically, this was a promise from outside of modernizing and civilizing Africa – a promise that was, of course, never really fulfilled. Instead, it created a lot of dead ends that you depict very vividly in the film. You also use the very telling picture of the journey: going back, so to speak, from the city (Yaoundé) to the place in the countryside where you originally came from (Bafoussam), including all sorts of contradictions that get revealed along the way. Do you think that journey, taken as a metaphor, can somehow be continued, or has the movement towards a more fulfilled notion of modernity come to a full stop?

[b] Téno: [/b] Well, modernity has always been there in Africa, because people have always fought to improve the quality of their lives – even before the colonizers came and sold us this very false notion. But the journey we are making now is to challenge a modernity that has left out the »tropical« aspect. The modernity that was brought to us from outside meant putting us in a cage, keeping us there and having us deal with the pseudo-modern question of who we were, and so on. Even before we had that notion, we knew who we were, where we were, and what we wanted. Then they [in the case of Cameroon, the French] told us to become modern, to look modern – »this is the modern way of doing things«. But when you started to copy that and in fact, copy it very well, and you came to close to them, they told you that now you had lost what made you so special and wonderful, what you had before, and that it was not sure if you could ever recover that again: »You will never be as modern as we are because you have lost something that was important for you.« Suddenly, you are there in the middle of nowhere and you begin to wonder: why am I being defined in such-and-such a way, who does this person really think he is to tell me what is modern and what not. The solution today can only be to start to write French history from our own perspective, and question every single aspect of their history. To look at what they said, and to compare that to what they were and what they did, how they set themselves in relation to us – that whole construction of the mind. To reverse the »regard«, so to speak.

[b] Höller: [/b] At the end of »Vacances au pays«, it seems as if you want to say that a lot of modernizing processes have come to a dead end, and that projects of self-determination have come to a halt. In »Le Mariage d'Alex«, it seems as if you wanted to supplement that by saying that there is still a lot more work to be done.

[b] Téno: [/b] There is still a lot more to be done. For instance, my next film is called »The Colonial Misunderstanding«, and I will be questioning German colonialism through the work of missionary societies. The missionaries who did the work were probably – as individuals – just fanatics, but in the 18th and 19th century, they suddenly received the »faith«, such a big gift that they wanted to share it with everybody in the world. However, they did not ask whether anybody wanted it or not. They were so convinced that they were in the right that they started to impose their faith on everybody else. You either had to accept it or die. This is, for me, the whole starting point of the Western vision of the world. Why don't we start there and ask how people can suddenly be so sure of themselves, or so stupid, or so arrogant, as to think that their vision of the world is the only, the »universal«, vision? The whole issue of modernity really derives from there, and the next step is to question the basis of that vision – which is also the basis of racism, and the basis of what makes America suddenly go around the world today imposing its vision on the rest of the planet and calling whatever resistance people might put forward »terror«.

[b] Höller: [/b] To end with a more general question: Achille Mbembe is trying to theorize »African modes of self-writing«, as he calls them, where he speaks out against the approach of »self-victimization« on the one hand, but also against the celebratory cult of Afro-centricity on the other. He is looking for a third way, opposed to these tendencies, that would account for all sorts of »entanglements« of African societies with the West, and trying to find new ways of conceiving a more liberated self. How would you position yourself vis-à-vis these approaches?

[b] Téno: [/b] This is a very theoretical and difficult question – I know a little bit about Afro-centricity and, of course, I do not totally agree with it. Also, I do not see myself especially as a victim. But here, in the context of European society and especially in France where I live, we are still at another stage, one that is characterized by different fights. France, to me, is one of the most racist and most exclusive countries in the whole European Union. France has a long colonial history and a large population that comes from Africa, but there are a lot of false theoretical notions surrounding the place and the integration of minorities into society. This question is never really addressed; all that is said is that they have to integrate into society, but at the same time, everything is done in order not to allow them to become part of that society. So when we start to organize ourselves, people say, no, we do not want communitarianism. This creates a very dangerous situation, because people are pushed to the side and start to react violently. The reaction is that you have young Black French people who do not understand this and who will just start to burn down society. Their parents are not French, so they can say, this is not »our« country. But they were born here and they see that they do not have equal chances and that the system is putting them aside, and they will not accept that situation. When they resort to violence, people point to them and say they are becoming terrorists. So society itself is creating its own terrorism in order to able to fight these people and build fences around them, instead of giving them chances and opportunities. That is why – although I am not especially a friend of »victimization« – I try to look at society in such a way that all of its members get a chance to express what their situation is about. And yet, in European society, that is hardly ever the case.

»Le Mariage d'Alex« (Cameroon/France, 2002) was shown at VIENNALE 2003 (http://www.viennale.at) and is distributed by Raphia Films (http://www.raphia.fr).

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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