IN THE BOOK’S fifth and final chapter, I consider how my study of power associations in western Burkina Faso relates to cinematic images of Komo presented from the late 1980s to the present to disparate unseeing audiences in international arenas, from cinema experts in the French seaside town of Cannes, to film critics in the American cultural hub of New York, to still other movie watchers in locales all over the world. I also return to a West African vantage point in order to view power associations and their arts through one more lens, namely, the perspective of Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé, director of the award-winning feature film Yeelen (1987).¹ Cissé’s creative work provides us with another mode for thinking about power associations and disseminating knowledge about them to audiences within and beyond Mali, including audiences not privy to the organizations and their arts through their own firsthand experiences.² An examination of Yeelen offers an opportunity to bring together and expand on key themes discussed in previous chapters.

The first time I watched Yeelen, the film perplexed me, because it seemed distant from assessments of Komo familiar to me through published scholarship and other written accounts as well as my own research in western Burkina Faso. Intrigued, I watched the film again and again. Through the repeated viewings, I started to see more clearly features of Komo and other power associations I had gleaned from other sources. Yet I also saw that Cissé presented his analysis of the organizations and its arts in distinct ways. His film reminds us that there is not a single, authoritative way to know.

Now I recognize that references to arts and knowledge of Komo abound in Yeelen. But as Nyamanto Sanògò, the actor who plays the father, explains in a 1987 documentary on the film’s making, “One can create scenes that resemble Komo, but the secret remains a secret.”³ In previous chapters, I have investigated tensions at the core of power association arts—tensions between seeing and not seeing and between the secret and its disclosure—that lie in the organizations’ assemblages, installations, performances, and architecture. In this chapter, I examine how Cissé navigates a similar set of tensions in his film, itself a visual and aural art. The seen and unseen in particular constantly oscillate in Yeelen, as Cissé often hints at characteristics of Komo and its arts, rather than illustrating exact forms. Through the medium of film, he manages what his audiences can and cannot see, respecting common strictures of local Komo chapters while conveying key aspects of the organization and its arts.

In the film, which Cissé released to worldwide audiences, the filmmaker charts the rivalry between Nyanankoro Diarra, a young man who flees his mother’s house after he discerns that his father, Soma, a Komo power association member whom Nyanankoro has not seen in years, is pursuing him.⁴ The father’s membership in Komo suggests his highly specialized knowledge to marshal tangible materials and intangible energies in order to effect change. Concerned about the maturing son’s innate abilities to work in similar ways as well as the son’s potential to surpass him, the father seeks to eliminate his own progeny.

Yeelen premiered in 1987 in competition at the Festival de Cannes in France, an event that film scholar, maker, and curator Lindiwe Dovey characterizes as “the world’s most prestigious film festival” and also as one known for the “paucity of African films” it has featured since its inception (Dovey 2015, 47; cf. Cissé and Senga 1987, 135). With Yeelen, Cissé earned the Prix du Jury at Cannes, making him the first African filmmaker ever to garner the accolade.⁵ For years after the film’s release, critics and other writers implicitly or explicitly lauded the film for its accurate renderings of unchanging rituals, a precolonial Bamana culture, or a more generic African setting. One reviewer praises Cissé for locating the film “in a real African world” and concludes that the film allows global spectators to “understand how Mali feels.”⁶ Another reviewer states, “Yeelen is more memorable as a documentary of Malian culture than as an adventure story.”⁷

Scholars have offered similar assessments. Manthia Diawara characterizes Yeelen as a film that serves as a “corrective to the anthropological gaze which constructs Africans as objects” (1988, 13). He also states that the film recovers the past for “African spectators” (1988, 15).⁸ Suzanne MacRae asserts, “Yeelen is so firmly rooted in West African Mande culture that the plot, characterization, artistic intent, and social/political significance cannot be understood outside the cultural and historical context” (1995, 57). Similarly, Phillip Gentile sees “Cissé’s faithfulness to the role of historian . . . in his meticulous fidelity to the language of worship and the performance of ritual” (1995, 134–135). These assessments of the film imply that because of his Malian citizenship or his African-ness, Cissé necessarily created veritable images of Komo, Bamana culture, or an African setting.

Such presumptive framing coincides with the characterization of the film or its content as “authentic.” In an analysis of Yeelen, N. Frank Ukadike highlights what he considers “Cissé’s concern for authenticity and the respectful treatment of the subject” (2005, 819). For Ukadike, Yeelen is “an indigenous African art form” that combines “aspects of repressed cultural motifs . . . into a historical tapestry of ritual values.” Meanings of authentic and authenticity vary, but Ukadike seems to suggest that the authenticity in Yeelen results from its maker’s Malian or African background or the presumed real traditions, rituals, or cultural phenomena past or present that the film shows, whatever real traditions, rituals, or cultural phenomena might be (see Ukadike 2005; cf. Monroe 2012; Van Beurden 2015).

Cissé was born into a Muslim family in Bamako and has primarily resided in urban centers, including Bamako, Dakar, and Moscow. Cissé himself indicates that he was not a Komo expert at the time of the making of Yeelen (Cissé in Diawara 1988, 13, 14; Cissé in Ukadike 2002, 22–23). Consequently, Cissé’s experiences of Komo likely differed from other individuals’ specific experiences of the organization in and beyond Mali, and the film does not present the view of Komo from someone with intimate, insider’s knowledge of the organization. Instead, the film presents ideas of a single filmmaker who hails from Mali, who has watched films from around the world since his youth, who studied cinema in the Soviet Union as a young man, and who worked with diverse teams in the mid-1980s to realize Yeelen.

Cissé has indicated that he considers the film’s primary audience to be Malian or African. In a 1988 interview with Diawara, Cissé distinguishes between Malian spectators, whom he imagines can discern layers of meaning in the film, and American, French, and British viewers, whom he suspects access only literal meaning (Cissé in Diawara 1988, 15; cf. Cissé in Ukadike 2002, 21). Similarly, MacRae (1995, 57) suggests that only viewers familiar with Mande culture and history can fully understand Yeelen. By contrast, Gentile (1995) asserts that non-Malian audiences can still appreciate and investigate the film’s complexities. Malian spectators’ comprehension, he also recognizes, could vary depending on their knowledge of Komo, an institution that different people within and beyond the three-corner region experience in various ways, as the previous chapters of this book have shown. David Murphy claims that Yeelen is “deeply embedded in the culture of the Bambara [Bamana] people of the Western Sudan, particularly the rituals of the secret society of the Komo” (2000, 245–246), but he also acknowledges that meaning may waver, including among people who identify as Bamana. Murphy concludes that appreciation of the film does not necessarily hinge on a viewer’s African-ness, Malian-ness, or profound knowledge of Komo. Given that Yeelen immediately reached international audiences and earned global acclaim when it premiered at Cannes, the film has clearly held appeal for audiences outside Mali.

Cissé may have at times preferred to emphasize his Malian or African audiences, but he must have had other viewers in mind when he was making the film for release at a major international film festival. Diawara hints at Cissé’s attention to international audiences in a revised assessment of Yeelen published in 2007 that markedly differs from his 1988 commentary. According to Diawara, support that African filmmakers, including Cissé, received from French institutions made film production possible but “also trapped these directors into a self-representation that remains reassuring to the Western imagination of Africa as primitive” (Diawara 2007, 80). Diawara further recognizes that, “at best, African films like Yeelen (1987, by Souleymane Cissé) and Tilai (1990, by Idrissa Ouedraogo), by attempting to correct European representations of Africa, have legitimized the search for anthropological aesthetics in their narratives” (2007, 80). Diawara sees the two films as directly connecting with “ethnographic cinema” (2007, 80). He then goes on to explain that “‘magic’ and ‘sorcery’” in the productions maintain stereotypical themes and demonstrate an inability for Africans “to adjust to the modern world” (2007, 80). Diawara concludes that such approaches to African filmmaking captivate European film critics and juries because they “[show] Africans like insects caught outside of human history and trapped in Afro-pessimism” (2007, 80).⁹

While Cissé, a postcolonial Malian filmmaker committed to promoting Mali and Malian film, secured French aid and other foreign support for the making of Yeelen and worked with French filmmaking professionals, he has favored an emphasis on Mali as a source of inspiration for his films.¹⁰ In the documentary on the making of Yeelen, Cissé even states, “What we’re making, it’s a Malian film.”¹¹ Yeelen situates a Komo member and his son in a timeless setting, and its distinctive landscapes locate the story in areas of present-day Mali. The narrative may relate the film to specific events in the country. MacRae (1995) posits that in creating Yeelen, a film about a younger generation challenging a corrupt gerontocracy, Cissé anticipated the fall of Moussa Traoré, who served as Mali’s head of state from 1968 to 1991, when officers staged a coup d’état and ushered in Amadou Toumani Touré as the country’s new head of state. When Cissé began filming Yeelen in 1984, Mali and neighboring countries were experiencing effects of severe droughts, so Adeola Solanke sees that its scenes of parched landscapes highlight the environmental degradation plaguing Mali in the 1980s.¹²

Even if Mali figures prominently in the film and in Cissé’s statements about it, Yeelen also demonstrates the filmmaker’s familiarity with international cinematographic concerns and broader aesthetic considerations. Cissé has said that he began watching films in Bamako on a daily basis when he was young.¹³ Few published interviews identify the films he saw as a child. But in archived interview transcripts compiled in conjunction with the making of Rithy Panh’s 1991 documentary on Cissé and his films, Cissé, who was born in 1940, recalls watching movies from the United States and India in Bamako theaters as a child.¹⁴

Cissé received a three-month scholarship to study film projection in the Soviet Union in 1961.¹⁵ He secured a second, yearlong scholarship to return to the Soviet Union and study cinematography. He then pursued a third scholarship to study cinema.¹⁶ Cissé rarely discusses his time in Moscow in published interviews. In a 1984 interview with Howard Schissel, Cissé explains that attention to social concerns and quotidian experiences in Soviet films intrigued him. He also notes that he was “influenced by Italian neo-realism of the post-war period” (Cissé 1984, 973). The archived transcripts from the making of the 1991 documentary further indicate that when Cissé was a student in Moscow at the Vsesoyuznyi Gosudarstvenyi Institut Kinematografii (VGIK), or the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, Sergei Eisenstein’s ideas about montage motivated Cissé to experiment with the method.¹⁷ Panh speculates that Soviet filmmakers’ interests in myths and symbols informed Cissé’s work.¹⁸ And Josephine Woll, a scholar of Soviet cinema, explains that Cissé’s framing of narrative around journey resonates with early twentieth-century Soviet directors’ approaches to filmmaking (Woll 2004, 232). Woll recognizes other similarities between Cissé’s art and the film of Soviet filmmakers, including a preference for nonprofessional actors and the use of long shots to situate characters within their natural and social settings (2004, 232–233). Other writers have highlighted Cissé’s studied use of light and techniques for filming, framing, and editing, further suggesting that he was attentive to more than the Malian-ness of his work when he made Yeelen (e.g., Andrew 1995; Lelièvre 2013).

Cissé’s statements about his films may direct attention to Mali, but the work itself demonstrates his expertise in cinematography, an art that crosses borders and depends on filmmakers’ manipulation of light, images, and sound. The title of Yeelen signals this aspect of the film. Translated into French as “lumière” and into English as “brightness” or “light,” Yeelen points at the film’s study of light and filmmaking. Fascinating not for its straightforward presentation of Komo, Bamana culture, or an African setting—or for the singular audience it addresses—Yeelen explores many themes, several prevalent in power associations and their arts, and it engages diverse viewers.

Yeelen certainly reflects Cissé’s experiences and commitments as a Malian citizen who became an adult at the time of his country’s independence. But no single person’s experiences and commitments can account for the range of perspectives within an entire group of people, however that group is defined. Cissé’s identity, like the identities of other people in and beyond colonial and postcolonial Mali, is complex, making it impossible to limit him to any one group. In addition to recognizing his Malian citizenship, he identifies Bamanakan as his maternal language and his paternal ancestry as Soninke. He belongs to a Muslim family. Furthermore, the fact that he is from a part of the world where Komo is prevalent does not necessarily mean he had extensive knowledge of the inner workings of the organization when he decided to make the film. Moreover, as Diawara suggests and as we will see later in the chapter, certain aspects of Yeelen align it with French and French-trained ethnographers’ films and their studies of Komo (see also Austen 2007).

Analyses are richer when we look beneath any single label applied to a person in order to understand the particular nuances of that person’s subject position and how the complexities of a person’s experiences may inform or shape the individual’s work. The authenticity discourse—sometimes as cursory as an authenticity presumption—limits analysis as well. Characterization of Yeelen as authentic may also imply that it was created without regard to the form or content of arts produced beyond Mali or the African continent or that it was made specifically for a Malian or an African audience (see Murphy 2000; cf. Austen 2007, 39–40).¹⁹ Perhaps counterintuitively, the emphasis on authenticity and the implication that an authentic creation somehow expresses a pure, cultural essence—be it a Bamana, Malian, or African essence—make it difficult to see the specificity of any single creation. A purely neutral position in the construction of knowledge or the creation of anything else may be impossible to attain and foolish to force, because as we have seen throughout this book, any individual’s understandings of the world depend on prior interactions and experiences.

Yeelen offers insights into Komo and its arts—insights specific to and framed by a single filmmaker and his collaborators. Without disclosing their exact contours, Cissé creates visual and aural landscapes that manifest intricacies of power associations and cinema. His studied use of light, image, and sound maintains what Michael Taussig describes as a “verge where the secret is not destroyed through exposure but subject to a quite different sort of revelation that does justice to it” (1999, 3). The result is a film that amplifies the power of Komo and cinema.

My analysis in this chapter draws on published interviews with Cissé, production materials for Yeelen, film reviews, and other documentation, including the previously mentioned archived transcripts gathered for Panh’s 1991 documentary, as well as my own interviews with members of the film crew and my field-based study of power associations. I use the disparate sources to focus on presentations of Komo within Yeelen. Itself like a power association assemblage, Yeelen results from the overlapping aims and concerns of its maker, a specialist operating in a specific place with sophisticated knowledge of the materials, methods, and audiences on which his work depends.

Healing and Causing Harm

Leaders of Komo are specialists who develop the capacity to treat illness, combat malevolence, and address other difficulties in people’s lives. The capacity to heal also entails the capacity to cause harm, as scholar and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel (2005) has taught us. Each specialist must make choices about how to use potent knowledge, and decisions about what practices help or harm depend on one’s perspective (see also Beck 2014). Through the father, Soma, and his son, Nyanankoro, Cissé cinematically explores individuals’ cultivated abilities or latent potential to use powerful knowledge benevolently or malevolently. The actions of a power association leader may also help or harm an individual or a community, and assessments of the beneficial or destructive nature of any one action may vary from person to person.

The first person to speak in Yeelen is Soma, who leverages his expert knowledge to find and kill his son. Addressing the otherworld entity Mari, Soma bellows, “Mari, to succeed we must betray. . . . Let me catch Nyanankoro, wherever he is. . . . Break it all, and give me Nyanankoro.”²⁰ Soma subsequently explains to an elder blacksmith that Nyanankoro stole power objects and fled the country with them. Later, in a scene that Diawara describes in his earlier assessment as “one of the best moments [he has] seen in film” (1988, 13), Soma consults with a Komo leader and other members of the association in a sacred grove to announce that he plans to kill his son for disobeying their rules (fig. 5.1). At first, the Komo leader and other members counsel Soma not to kill Nyanankoro. When Soma insists that Nyanankoro is not like other children, citing an alarming ability to make his uncle Bafing disappear before townspeople’s eyes, the group endorses Soma’s quest. As they see it, Nyanankoro threatens their well-being, and Soma’s actions are justified.²¹

As Nyanankoro travels from his mother to his other uncle, Djigui, and then to Soma, he realizes his capacities to effect change.²² The son’s process for discerning his abilities during the trek recalls the journeys to acquire, refine, and enhance their knowledge and abilities to effect change that power association leaders in western Burkina Faso described to me. Nyanankoro works throughout his travels to protect or help himself and others. By contrast, his father remains focused on causing his son harm as he moves from place to place.

FIGURE 5.1. Soma consulting with other elders in the Komo grove. Souleymane Cissé, Yeelen (Bamako: Cissé Films; Kino International, 1987), 1:01:13.

In one scene, after Nyanankoro encounters a herd of cattle, a young boy accuses Nyanankoro of trying to steal cows from the herd. The boy’s charge rallies his companions to capture Nyanankoro. Once they take custody of Nyanankoro, they bring him to meet the leader of their town, Ruma Boly, and other elders. Nyanankoro tells Boly and the elders that he, Nyanankoro, could have killed his captors if he had not been distracted. When one of the townspeople raises a spear, Nyanankoro immobilizes the man, revealing to everyone present his distinctive capacities. Shortly thereafter, invaders threaten the town. Boly and the elders recall Nyanankoro’s claims that he possesses abilities to effect significant change, and Boly asks Nyanankoro for protection. Nyanankoro subsequently constructs a power object to harness energy sufficient to provoke an assault of bees that thwarts the invaders’ attack.²³ Impressed by Nyanankoro’s skill with the power object and the protection the traveler brought the town, Boly asks Nyanankoro to treat the infertility of Atou, Boly’s youngest wife, before Nyanankoro leaves the town and continues his journey. Nyanankoro agrees to try and, at a mound outside the town, offers Atou a medicine to cure her. When the two return to the town, Nyanankoro confesses to Boly that he had intercourse with the leader’s wife—the same woman his medicine was designed to heal.

Yeelen traces Nyanankoro’s evolution from a child under his mother’s care to his own standing as a specialist, with the young man manifesting abilities to protect himself from a spear-wielding man, to prevent an attack on a town, and to cure a woman’s infertility. All his powers also intimate capacities to cause harm. If he had killed his captors after he was accused of stealing cattle, Nyanankoro would have protected himself but also taken life. When the device he assembled to safeguard his captors and their town from invaders worked, his actions benefited his captors and their town but precipitated other deaths. Nyanankoro did cure Atou’s infertility, but the treatment led to Nyanankoro’s union with her and thus his betrayal of Boly. Through Nyanankoro as well as through Soma, Cissé highlights the thin line between wielding specialized knowledge for positive or negative ends.

Both Nyanankoro’s and Soma’s abilities to effect change rely on their knowledge of how to obtain and harness tangible materials and intangible energies. Cissé makes several references to such skills. Scenes of animal sacrifice convey important qualities of the action without showing the actual slitting of animals’ throats, a method that Komo leaders and other specialists commonly employ. The archived interview transcripts reveal that Cissé deliberately sought alternate means to refer to animal sacrifice and show viewers its importance.²⁴

When Soma first addresses the otherworld entity Mari, he immolates a chicken rather than slitting its throat. Cissé shows Soma crouching in a clearing. A pestle with a chicken attached to it and a dry tree trunk stand before him. After Soma waves a fly whisk in his left hand, the chicken and trunk erupt in flames (fig. 5.2). The flames seem to refer visually to the release of energy that occurs precisely when a specialist slits an animal’s throat. The burst of energy is necessary to relay a message from this world to the otherworld (cf. Strother 2000, 61–63). And in order to send a message, there must be a message to send (cf. Strother 2000). Power association leaders also concentrate such energy in the objects that they create and maintain. Soma’s words comprise the message that he dispatches with the energy released from the sacrificed animal. With each additional sacrifice he executes, Soma amplifies his message to Mari.

FIGURE 5.2. Soma sacrificing a chicken during his address to the otherworld entity Mari, releasing energy necessary to send Soma’s message from this world to the otherworld. Souleymane Cissé, Yeelen (Bamako: Cissé Films; Kino International, 1987), 3:54.

Through animal sacrifice and other actions, Soma concentrates energy in the pestle, or kolonkalanni, described in the film’s title sequence as “a magic pylon [. . .] used to find lost things, and to expose and punish thieves, traitors, and perjurers.” As a tool to find and discipline wrongdoers, it helps specialists who wield it to effect change. Soma’s two apprentices accompany Soma throughout the film and carry the unwieldy pestle. Power association leaders commonly travel with power objects, but they often hide them in their pockets or bags.²⁵ With the pestle, Cissé makes visible tools that specialists typically conceal. The unwieldiness of the pestle also intimates the skill and energy required for specialists to maintain powerful objects, and it provides opportunities for comedy. For example, when the apprentices use the pestle to smash open the door to Nyanankoro’s mother’s room shortly after the mother and son fled, the force of the apprentices’ actions causes the young men to tumble to the ground. Later in the film, near the story’s end, one of the young men stumbles, falls to the ground, and loses his grip on the pestle as the pair enters a town. Soma screams, “I didn’t say to make him fall.”

An early scene in the film hints at how a specialist concentrates potent energy in an object. A chicken hangs from a pestle. Blood drips down the pestle and onto one of two glass prisms attached to it. The prism absorbs energy, rendering the pestle a sharper tool. As we saw in the second chapter, absorption constitutes one method for rendering objects potent. When Komo and Kono leaders sacrifice a chicken or other animal, they incorporate its blood into their assemblages to transfer energy from the animal to their power objects.

Unexpectedly, at least for an art historian studying Komo and other power associations, Cissé does not show in Yeelen the helmet masks and other assemblages that foreign observers have associated with Komo for more than a century and that I considered in the previous chapters. Cissé also does not depict masquerade performances. Yet one synopsis of the film refers to Komo masks and other arts, suggesting that at one point, Cissé planned to feature them in the film.²⁶ According to the text, the film would end after Nyanankoro’s pregnant wife walked between a Komo mask and a mask for Ntomo, described as a youth’s association. Cissé’s decision not to show the masks perhaps relates to the idea that one can create scenes resembling Komo but cannot completely reveal it, or perhaps it reflects an agreement Cissé reached with elders who, in the 1987 documentary on the film’s making, expressed concern about a disregard for certain formalities during the film’s production.²⁷

Still, Komo masks and masquerading are not entirely absent from the film Cissé finally produced. Shortly after Nyanankoro leaves his mother, he looks toward a tree, the source of unfamiliar sounds, and sees a spotted creature (fig. 5.3). Presumably from the otherworld, the creature demonstrates the presence of the otherworld in this world. Its gaping maw, filled with sharp, pointed teeth, recalls the wide-open mouths and pointed teeth characteristic of Komo helmet masks. The creature’s spots also echo spotted feathers on outfits covering Komo masqueraders’ bodies. And the costume itself is a mask worn by the actor who plays the creature. Later in the film, when the Komo leader calls “Hail to the mask!” after he enters the Komo grove where Soma explains his case against Nyanankoro, the Komo leader refers to objects that Cissé never exactly shows.²⁸

FIGURE 5.3. Wild creature in a tree addressing Nyanankoro. Souleymane Cissé, Yeelen (Bamako: Cissé Films; Kino International, 1987), 16:33.

Even though Yeelen does not feature objects or performances that visually replicate extant Komo assemblages, installations, or masquerades, Cissé appears to hint at the objects and their complexity. For example, when Boly asks Nyanankoro to protect the town from invaders, Nyanankoro assembles a power object from the bone of a horse’s right leg. The sun sits low in the sky, and Nyanankoro, wearing no clothes, crouches at a fire and pulls from his bag different things including the bone, which is split longitudinally. After removing the items from his bag, Nyanankoro holds half of the bone in his left hand and rubs flame from the fire over the interior of the bone. He places twigs inside the bone and covers the twigs with the other half of the bone. Nyanankoro wraps string around the two halves of bone to finish construction of the power object. As the sun continues to rise, Nyanankoro walks to a mound behind him and drives the power object into the center of the mound. He then expectorates. Shortly thereafter, bees swarm men threatening the town Nyanankoro sought to protect. Nyanankoro’s abilities to gather materials, work with fire, and assemble the materials according to a particular protocol appear to have provoked the bees to overtake the invaders.²⁹

Through the characters of Soma and Nyanankoro, Cissé examines how people with potent knowledge and exceptional skills harness their capacities to effect change, either positive or negative. Cissé also shows how specialists work with disparate materials and accumulate energy to accomplish their goals. But rather than exactly reproducing scenes of animal sacrifice or recipes for the construction of power objects, Cissé develops metaphoric presentations of their critical features. For audiences not privy to the secrets of Komo, Yeelen illustrates how the organization and its arts operate without revealing details.

Beyond Signs and Initiation

Given that Cissé was born in Mali, has lived there for much of his adult life, and has for decades dedicated himself to the promotion of Malian cinema, some viewers of Yeelen seem to assume that Cissé’s understandings of Komo are grounded in firsthand knowledge of the organization or Malian thought more generally. The assumption reproduces anthropological conjectures about “natives” or “insiders.” As Arjun Appadurai explains, “Proper natives [in the anthropological imagination] represent their selves and their history, without distortion or residue” (1988, 37; see also Abu-Lughod 1991; Narayan 1993).

But Cissé himself acknowledges that before filming Yeelen, he had not participated in a Komo gathering like the one featured in the film (Cissé in Diawara 1988, 13; see also Cissé in Ukadike 2002, 22–23). Still, the idea that the scene offers an almost unmediated view of a Komo event has lingered. Cissé and Diawara (1988, 13, 14–15) contributed to the idea, suggesting that the scene shows a near-candid view of a Komo event. According to Diawara, “Cissé [filmed] the Komo ritual from beginning to end, shooting most of the details in long takes without much editing” (1988, 13). Diawara also states that the scene operates as a kind of “show and tell.” Cissé (in Diawara 1988, 14) says that due to insufficient equipment available at the filming location, possibilities for illuminating the scene were limited. As a result, he was restricted to filming “within ten or fifteen meters . . . [leading him] to create a mise-en-scène which was more convenient and realistic for the means [he] had in place” (see also Gentile 1995, 128–130). Assessments of the scene as a show-and-tell tease unseeing audiences with the possibility of revelation. An insistence on the documentary quality of the scene also overlooks Cissé’s own complex subject position or possible sources for his understandings of Komo, including sources rooted in colonial approaches.

Cissé’s emphasis on symbols of Komo point at the possibility that he approached the organization and its arts at least in part from the perspective of French ethnography. Symbols featured in the film’s opening sequence as well as on the tree in the Komo grove recall the image of Komo promoted by French ethnographer Germaine Dieterlen and her coauthor, Malian scholar Youssouf Tata Cissé (Dieterlen and Cissé 1972). The pair describe a system of 266 ideograms or signs that they assert belong to Komo and are at the core of Bamana culture. Their analysis, like the analyses of other ethnographers trained in France in the mid-twentieth century, follows the model of Marcel Griaule, who sought to elaborate intricate cosmologies and systems of signs. Griaule distinguished himself for his studies in Dogon communities of central Mali, and his work provides a foundation for studies of phenomena recognized as Dogon. However, Griaule’s findings have also become the subject of critique.³⁰ Based on his own field research in central Mali, Walter van Beek (1991, 2004) claims that the Dogon cosmology Griaule elucidated reflects Griaule’s methods, assumptions, and goals more than the lived experiences and knowledge of people in Dogon communities. Griaule’s followers may not exactly reproduce the same problems in each of their studies, but we must remain attentive to the possibility that their working methods and assumptions may have at times coincided with the practices and ideas of Griaule.³¹

With respect to Dieterlen and Cissé’s system of signs for Komo, observers of the organizations and their arts, including myself, have not been able to document or confirm the arcane symbology (for example, see McNaughton 1979a, 1988; Brett-Smith 1997; Zobel 1996; Diamitani 1999; Aden 2003; Gagliardi 2010). Citing Dieterlen, Jean-Loup Amselle explains that “a series of monographs on secret societies (komo, do, ntomo, koré) . . . taken together, allowed for the concoction of a ‘Bambara religion.’” Amselle further characterizes the fabrication as a “pseudo-religion” (Amselle [1990] 1998, 14; see also Amselle [1990] 2010, 54). He suggests that Dieterlen and her followers presented this pseudo-religion as an expression of Bamana thought, thus simplifying complex practices that in fact transcend “colonial ethnic limits” and denying recognition of the political import of power associations (Amselle [1990] 1998, 14–15; see also Amselle [1990] 2010, 54; cf. Brenner 2000). Credits for Yeelen acknowledge Youssouf Tata Cissé, who advised Souleymane Cissé in the making of Yeelen, directly connecting the film with the French-trained ethnographer and French ethnography’s interest in discerning systems of ideograms (see also Cissé in Centre nationale du cinema et de l’image animée 2010, 4–5; cf. Downing 1996, 213–222; Jansen 2000, 97; Austen 2007, 37).

Even Cissé’s choice of the Bandiagara Escarpment in central Mali as a site for the film’s production aligns Yeelen with Dieterlen, who, like Griaule, conducted research in the same area. Members of the film crew reported that during the filming of Yeelen, they stayed at the same house in Sanga where Griaule, Dieterlen, and the filmmaker Jean Rouch had lodged.³² Furthermore, Cissé’s depiction of the Bongo Spring, where Nyanankoro and Atou bathe to cleanse themselves before meeting Nyanankoro’s uncle Djigui, evokes references to the same spring in films that Dieterlen produced with Rouch.³³ Cissé explains in the archived interview transcripts that he selected the Bandiagara Escarpment as a filming location because of its dazzling features.³⁴ But his choice of filming location, his reference to the Bongo Spring, and his attention to symbols make it difficult to deny the impact of mid-twentieth-century French ethnography on the filmmaker’s work or his understandings of Komo.

Although the clearly defined system of 266 signs promoted through French ethnography is not evident in Komo chapters documented by other observers working at different moments and in different places, power association leaders do observe visual and verbal cues in their environments in order to garner insights into past, present, or future events. Souleymane Cissé replicates this aspect of Komo leaders’ work in Yeelen, offering viewers visual and verbal keys to events that have happened, are happening, or will happen in the film. At the beginning of Yeelen, Nyanankoro tells his mother that he can manage the conflict with his father on his own. His mother replies, “You can’t vie with your father. He is a terror. You’d be preparing your own shroud. In one stroke, he’d burn you to ashes.” Her statements anticipate the film’s ending. As Nyanankoro and his mother continue to talk, the mother encourages her son to leave her house and avoid his father. In response, Nyanankoro asks, “If my father didn’t want me, why did he marry you?” His question unsettles his mother and adds drama (cf. Downing 1996, 219). She explains, “Only an accursed son talks of his parents’ ties. I wish I’d never heard those words from you.” Her response suggests that Nyanankoro’s question itself signaled to his mother that somebody had already started to work against him. And indeed, the scene immediately follows Soma’s request for help from Mari, the otherworld entity, to capture his son. The scene of Nyanankoro’s encounter with the spotted creature from the otherworld offers more positive insights into Nyanankoro’s life and death. The creature addresses Nyanankoro by name. It then declares, “Your road will be good, your destination happy. Your future is grand; your life, radiant; your death, luminous.” The creature’s statement proves accurate by the end of the film, a work that reflects its maker’s engagement with disparate knowledge structures and his own understandings.

Yeelen focuses on the conflict between a powerful father and his capable son, but its meaning extends beyond the story illustrated in the film. When, in a 2004 interview recorded in Bamako, Awa Toé asked Cissé why he made a film about initiation, Cissé said, “When one asks the question like that, I have the impression that one didn’t understand the message that is written in the film, in Yeelen. Yeelen goes beyond Komo initiation . . . it goes beyond. Yeelen raises the problem of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. . . . And if one does not understand this film, and one stops only at initiation, then one has lost the history.”³⁵

MacRae posits that the film captures political tensions in Mali that came to a head with the 1991 coup d’état. But the film may present a veiled statement about Cissé’s own quest to become a filmmaker. Continuing his response to Toé’s question about why he made Yeelen, Cissé says:

When you ask why choose this subject, why initiation, life is itself an initiation, beyond Komo, life itself is an initiation. And this initiation you can do in one way or another. The life of this boy who wants to learn and who is prevented from learning by his father because his father does not want to see him, because his father feels that his son, if he studies, will become better than the father, [reflects a selfishness]. When such selfishness [égoïsme] becomes dangerous, it is that which is tragic. It is for that reason that I told you [previously during the interview] that sometimes there are little nuances among Malians that are difficult to capture.³⁶

Nearly thirteen years earlier, when he was interviewed for the making of Panh’s 1991 documentary, Cissé discussed initiation, Yeelen, and selfishness in similar terms. Reflecting on his understandings of what initiation is, Cissé explained that from birth until death, each person undergoes an initiation, acquiring knowledge and wisdom in the process. The filmmaker added that Yeelen follows this process of becoming an adult, although he differentiated his understandings of the term initiation from the idea that it is “a pejorative term people use for African things where there are rituals.”³⁷ Elsewhere in the archived interview transcripts gathered for the 1991 documentary, Cissé appears to use the term égoïsme (selfishness) to characterize Soma’s desire not to want to live with an equal even if that person is his son.³⁸ Cissé also explains that while egotism is a trait found all over the world, its expression in Africa is “more tragic” than it is in Europe or Asia. According to Cissé, the selfishness most common in Africa is one that involves “preventing [one’s] neighbor from doing what is in [the neighbor’s] heart, under the pain of death.” Cissé adds that “people must not cut the branch on which stand those who have succeeded. It would be impossible to live in such a case. All of that selfishness (égoïsme) is bound to a lack of future prospects.”³⁹

Cissé is not content to let the film stand as a simple metaphor: life as initiation, where initiation is some esoteric power association ritual in a marginalized Africa. His comments in response to Toé’s question resonate with statements about similar themes that he made more than a decade earlier, suggesting a steadfastness of opinion about initiation and selfishness. But Cissé’s reply to Toé also echoes descriptions he provides in the same interview of personal challenges he faced in the 1970s, when he first endeavored to make films in Mali. The resonance raises the possibility that Yeelen engages with and comments on Cissé’s own experiences, even if he does not make explicit through his own words the specific connection to events in his own life. As a filmmaker, Cissé investigates his world, harnesses tangible materials as well as intangible energies, and manages challenging situations through the films he makes; they are his power objects.⁴⁰

During Toé’s interview with Cissé, the Malian filmmaker says that he was eager to create his own films after he returned to Bamako from Moscow. According to Cissé, his colleagues in Bamako blocked his efforts to advance any project. Each time he suggested a project to the minister of information, the official rejected the proposal because Cissé’s colleagues had lobbied the minister not to accept Cissé’s projects. Cissé adds that only Malians can understand the extreme selfishness (égoïsme trop poussé) of his colleagues, who, because he had studied at a higher level than they had, did not want him to succeed. Cissé reasons that his own neighbors appeared to have thwarted his efforts to realize his passion and make films. He describes a discreet yet impactful rivalry reminiscent of contests power association leaders may experience.

Cissé explains that he persevered, refusing to succumb to obstacles he faced, including imprisonment after he made Den Muso (1975). He also says that he considers each film he has made, including Yeelen, a miracle.⁴¹ Indeed, Cissé encountered numerous challenges in the making of Yeelen. He reports releasing the film nearly three and a half years after the first take. A sandstorm five weeks after Cissé and his crew started filming interrupted production, leading French-based members of the crew to return to France. Shortly thereafter, Isimayila Sar, the main character of the film as Cissé first conceived it, died. Cissé rewrote the screenplay around extant footage of Sar (see also Diawara 1988, 14).⁴² With the new screenplay in mind, Cissé began searching for a man to play the role of Soma. He found Sanògò after a seven-month search but then had to wait an additional two months for Sanògò’s hair to grow long enough to play the part. Filming resumed, with cameraman Jean-Noël Ferragut replacing Jean-Michel Humeau, who had served as the main cameraman during the first round of filming. Six weeks after the filming recommenced, Ferragut developed a staph infection and returned to Paris for two months to heal. The production delays jeopardized funding for the project, and Cissé negotiated with donors to finance the film (Cissé and Senga 1987, 134).⁴³ Discussions with elders about whether production of the film violated local formalities constituted only some of the impediments Cissé faced in the making of Yeelen.

Like Cissé, who had to confront the jealousy of rivals and overcome adversities in order to realize Yeelen and his other major films, Nyanankoro perseveres despite the conflict with his father and the efforts of other elders to undermine his endeavors. Nyanankoro gives life to the next generation, which Cissé aspires to do through his films and the development of a robust film industry in Mali. The confrontation between Nyanankoro and Soma provokes their deaths. But creation follows destruction. The night before Nyanankoro confronts his father, he and Atou sit fireside with Nyanankoro’s uncle Djigui. The couple learn from Djigui that Atou is carrying their child and that the child will become a “bright star” who carries on the Diarra family name. Djigui adds that as his own death approaches, he sees a difficult future for Bamana peoples, who will deny their heritage. However, according to Djigui, the challenges can become sources of hope and strength. Similarly, Cissé himself has reportedly faced obstacle after obstacle yet still succeeded in transforming challenges into fodder for an award-winning film that honors ways of knowing common to Komo.

Light and the Art of Film

Uncle Djigui also tells Nyanankoro and Atou the story of his blindness and separation from his twin, Soma. As the story goes, when Djigui was a young boy, he asked his father to disclose the secrets of Komo so that everyone could benefit from them. The request infuriated Djigui’s father, who immediately retrieved from his room the wing of Korè, the last of seven initiation associations, according to the film’s title sequence. The father blinded Djigui with the wing’s light. In the film’s penultimate sequence, Nyanankoro carries the wing of Korè, which Djigui gave him, to the duel with his father. As father and son stand face-to-face, the energy concentrated in Soma’s pestle releases a blinding light. But before the energy kills Nyanankoro, the energy concentrated in the wing of Korè blinds Soma, who cries in anguish as he dies. Following the two men’s deaths, Atou emerges in a parched landscape. In the concluding sequence, Atou hands her young son the robe his father left for him and the wing of Korè, and then the son walks over the top of the sand dune and out of sight to an uncertain future. With the blinding light that caused Djigui to lose sight after inquiring about Komo and that eventually killed Soma, the twin who became a Komo member and maintained his sight until he died, Yeelen invokes power associations’ close relationship to seeing—and not seeing.

Yeelen also offers us Cissé’s meditation on light and the art of film, a light-sensitive medium.⁴⁴ When Diawara asked Cissé to comment directly on the film’s title, Cissé avoided discussion of actual light, instead characterizing it as a “guide to knowledge” (Cissé in Diawara 1988, 15). Still, Cissé demonstrates in Yeelen his ability to manipulate different qualities of light. On a technical level, film production demands the filmmaker’s attention to light and its effects. According to Ferragut, the cameraman, the crew filmed only during the months of September, October, and November, when the light and weather were most suited to working outdoors. In order to avoid the harsh shadows of the midday sun, the crew shot most outdoor daytime scenes between sunrise and 11:00 a.m. or between 3:00 p.m. and sunset. But the lighting in some settings required extra attention, further restricting hours for filming. Ferragut reported that lighting in the Komo grove was generally optimal when the sun was higher in the sky and penetrated the grove from above the tall trees.⁴⁵ Cissé himself has also commented on the poetic and powerful qualities of light. Reflecting on the light that emanates from Nyanankoro’s wing of Koré and the father’s pestle, Cissé explains it “is the light that makes the film beautiful, that sculpts bodies in motion, [that is] the material of the countryside and open spaces. . . . [That light] attracts beauty and repels: the sun’s radiance, its mortal violence.”⁴⁶

FIGURE 5.4. Bluish light filling the early-morning sky as Nyanankoro’s mother pours liquid over her body in an effort to protect her son. Souleymane Cissé, Yeelen (Bamako: Cissé Films; Kino International, 1987), 20:31.

The result of Cissé’s careful study of light and its effects is a film that shows different possibilities for natural and human-made light, ranging from the cool, blue light of the early morning sky over Nyanankoro’s mother as she attempts to calm the fiery situation her son faces to the hot, midday sun beating down on Nyanankoro and Soma when they finally meet each other (figs. 5.4–5.5). Red-hot fire burns a cock at midday, roasts a chicken on a spit at night, and warms people who sit by it. Iron glows red in a forge fire as blacksmiths transform it into a useful tool. And bright white light creates and also destroys. Bright white sky appears behind Atou when she conceives Nyanankoro’s son, and the screen fades white when Nyanankoro and Soma meet their demise. Exposure of film to light can generate images, but it can also obliterate them. The outcomes depend on the person who manipulates the camera and not on the film itself (fig. 5.6).

FIGURE 5.5. Harsh midday sun beating down on the dry earth when Nyanankoro and Soma finally confront each other. Souleymane Cissé, Yeelen (Bamako: Cissé Films; Kino International, 1987), 1:26:28.

According to Cissé, “The camera itself does not choose [how to show people]; it is a question of lighting, a question of the view.”⁴⁷ When Nyanankoro looks into the water-filled gourd to ascertain the challenges he and his mother face, he discerns an image of his uncle Bafing and two apprentices in the water (fig. 5.7). When Nyanankoro looks back into the water, an image of his father’s face emerges (fig. 5.8). By looking into the water, Nyanankoro catches sight of actions that are beyond his immediate surroundings. Ferragut, who worked with Cissé on Yeelen, said that to render these images, the crew exposed the film twice.⁴⁸ Cissé thus offers us a film superimposed onto another film (cf. Andrew 1995; Lelièvre 2013). But more importantly, he draws viewers’ attention to his careful study of cinema and its abilities to show what we cannot otherwise see.⁴⁹ The camera and film, like power objects constructed by a Komo leader or other specialist, are tools that work more or less well depending on the people who make or use them. Renowned filmmakers, like renowned power association leaders, wield tools of their trade with acuity and attention to their surroundings.

FIGURE 5.6. Bright light flooding the scene before destruction. Souleymane Cissé, Yeelen (Bamako: Cissé Films; Kino International, 1987), 1:32:59.

FIGURE 5.7. Image of Bafing emerging in a water-filled gourd that Nyanankoro holds. Souleymane Cissé, Yeelen (Bamako: Cissé Films; Kino International, 1987), 4:53.

While Cissé has characterized Yeelen as a Malian film, he does not present a one-to-one image of Komo and its arts in Mali. Instead, the film, a visual and aural art that draws on Cissé’s own experiences in and beyond Mali, reflects the complexities of Komo without showing everything about it. It exposes Cissé’s sophisticated knowledge of the art of film without disclosing all the details of a film’s making. The revelations of what Komo and cinema are from Cissé’s point of view do not destroy. Rather, the exposures engage disparate audiences and do justice to Komo and cinema, heightening viewers’ awareness of the potential for Komo and cinema to transcend borders, disclose alternate views, and effect change.

Through Yeelen, Cissé assesses qualities of film and perhaps comments on his own fraught experiences. He shows initiation as a way of becoming an adult rather than as a generic African ritual. Cissé also offers his own thoughts about what Komo is, how it operates, and how it relates to different specialists’ claims to power. The filmmaker investigates the thought worlds of Komo and other power associations, and he even creates his own power object, a film that brings together a single specialist’s context-dependent knowledge and experiences. And like a power association leader, Cissé attends to disparate audiences and manages an ever-wavering tension between seeing and not seeing.

FIGURE 5.8. Image of Soma’s face emerging in a water-filled gourd that Nyanankoro holds. Souleymane Cissé, Yeelen (Bamako: Cissé Films; Kino International, 1987), 5:25.