It’s the foolish innocence of Sili in the film that gets to me.
A bare-footed girl on crutches walking the streets
of Dakar selling newspapers. Dubbed: La Petite Vendeuse
de Soleil. After earning 10,000 francs, she buys
her grandmother a parasol. When I am asked “have you
been back home yet?” I think of Sili laughing at me
before asking “What do you have to give Lusaka?”
and “Haven’t you lost the language?” Which means
to lose everything. My eyes moving between the subtitles
on the screen and Sili’s mouth twisting between French
and Wolof. When the jealous street beggars take one
of Sili’s crutches, she yells Nous continuons!
And adorns yellow sunglasses, performing a crazed dance
while singing a French song. The beggars confused,
not sure what to make of Sili’s act. The intimacy of language
I’m severed from. Or you could think about Diouana,
La Noire De…, who leaves Dakar for France, but returning
becomes a sort of shame. I share Diouana’s ambivalence
to the idea of home. So what then to make of her suicide
in the bathtub? The window open to a view of the
Champs-Élysées. A Senegalese mask she places over her face.
The knife at the side with blood stains. The burden
of France serving as a post-colonial trauma, but I’m still not
sure what my relationship to America or Zambia means.
A white Frenchman, Monsieur, finds Diouana and returns the mask
to Dakar, but a boy chases Monsieur with the mask.
Haunting him to the point where he can’t shed Diouana, or Diouana
can’t shed him. In this sense, I see Zambia and America
not as places of distance, but a reminder of the self-transformation
or the condition for the immigrant and native:
Sili’s broken legs in a barefooted dance on a dirt road in Dakar,
Diouana’s death in a porcelain bathtub in Paris.
Cheswayo Mphanza was born in Lusaka, Zambia and raised in Chicago, Illinois. His work has been featured in or is forthcoming from New England Review, American Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Hurston/Wright Foundation, Callaloo, Cave Canem, and Columbia University. A recipient of the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers, he earned an MFA at Rutgers-Newark.