Akomfrah: Yes, I know what you mean. The thing with that moment is that you see Lumumba trussed-up like an animal, and I don’t use that word as a pejorative. Animality is not a problem for me—but in that instance, Lumumba is being treated as something less than human. And for me, it’s a culmination, because we’ve set in motion these violent events that run a minute and a half before, of soldiers chasing people and throwing guns at them. You know, people being punched. The Minister being hit in the head. So by the time you get to Lumumba being trussed-up, you have been made aware of a kind of history of violence unfolding, and that’s what I meant by trying to hold different conceptions of time—different registers of time simultaneously in the same project.
The image of Lumumba being tied up runs alongside the ones of the man who, in a way, has licensed that: Joseph-Désiré Mobutu. He was Lumumba’s chosen commander of the army, somebody brought along who’s standing there with his arms folded in this kind of relaxed mode, watching this happen. But then at the same time, you see a series of color photographs of Mobutu at the White House four months later, being serenaded by the actual figures who made this possible. He’s in the Rose Garden with John F. Kennedy being saluted as a hero. He’s just had an elected Prime Minister killed, but that didn’t seem to affect his international standing. In fact, if anything, it made it more acceptable—made him more acceptable.
Nonetheless, it is an unflinchingly brutal moment to confront people with. But at the same time, I offer it as one of several fragments of one story, which is the dissolution of the Congo. Who was responsible? Who paid for the deeds? Who carried out the deeds? What’s the history that led to that moment? The Congo is one of those things I’ll never get tired of, because at the center of it is an enigma that I can’t solve, and so I go around it again and again and again. Why is it okay to have a destroyed Congo? In whose interest is the destroyed Congo, when you could easily have it the other way? I mean, the Congo is a vast place with enormous resources—every conceivable mineral on the planet is there. Why is it okay for it to always be fucked up? Why can’t the Congo just be okay? I mean, who benefits from the Congo being in this state? I don’t understand. It doesn’t make sense to me. Who actually gains anything? I don’t understand it.
So I go back to the Congo over and over, trying to understand something that is beyond understanding, and actually I’m not sure that there’s anyone for whom this makes sense. And normally, when people get to this bit, they resort to a kind of African fatalism. They think, “Oh, well, that’s what happens.” It’s like, “Well, yeah, but why does it?” I don’t get it. There was a century, starting with Leopold II—1890s to the 1990s—when you think, “Jesus Christ, man. Anyone who was unfortunate enough to be born in this place has to have, like, ten generations of hell.” Why? It doesn’t make sense to me. Really, who gains from this hell? Certainly not the Congolese.
It’s like, okay, you’re an extracting machine. But why do you need for things to be fucked up in order for it to be extracted? I don’t understand the equation. So I go back to these moments—not because I want to teach anything, but because I’m trying to learn something myself. They don’t make sense to me. Lumumba’s death does not make sense to me, even now. So you have uranium in this part of the Congo, and you don’t want the Soviet Union to know. Alright, okay, so that means you can kill this guy? Dissolve his body in acid, so that all that’s left of him is a tooth that’s given to his kids? That’s it? What’s the point of all of this? What’s the point of all this violence? I don’t get it. And either it makes me naïve or stupid, or both. I’m happy to accept that, but I don’t understand why the dystopic has to be the norm.
Rail: You’ve cited Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs as an influence. That piece draws on a fragment written on the wall of a Gestapo prison cell during the Holocaust. It made me think about how fragments migrate across works and across time. In your films, is sound meant to intuit meaning—or to generate it?
Akomfrah: We just spent the last three hours installing Canto VI, and as usual, fine-tuning the images—relatively speaking—didn’t take too long. The sound always takes a bit longer, especially with this one, because it’s a 360 degree experience. You’ve got eight screens, and they go across four walls, so at any one time what’s happening in front of you corresponds to something behind you. So there’s never really a back. Everyone’s got their own front and a back, but they’re interchangeable. So that makes it take a while.
The second reason it takes a while is because the sound is not an accompaniment in the obvious sense of the word. Usually, the ways in which sound accompanies is that it directly talks to what’s happening on screen. There’s a person, and you’re hearing them, but non-diegetic sound is not emanating from the image, so it has a freedom to go where it wants to go—but it also has the burden of independence. And there are perils to that freedom: Does it have the clarity? Does it have the authority? Does it have the autonomy to speak for itself? And that’s why it takes a very long time to get it to a position of independence.
I learned that from a lot of people, but you’re right to mention Górecki and the Sorrowful Songs, because what you get from him—and I think you get it from most great operatic scores—is the value of the libretto. The libretto is obviously always a fragment. It’s been drawn from something bigger, in this case, the history of the Holocaust. So you have to find the appropriate fragment from the whole, which is what he does brilliantly, and he does that every time—but the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs is particularly great for that.
You think, “Okay, so this is how compassion and care and brilliance and insight into a moment of the Holocaust can be made manifest in a project.” It’s not by bombastically announcing the horror itself. It’s about trying to get a fragment that stands as a revealing portrait of the whole, so you know what you’re looking at is an embodied fragment of something larger. But at the same time, that moment is not trying to be everything. It wants to be true about itself, and it believes that if it’s true enough about itself, it will tell you something about the larger portrait. In other words, it’s a kind of local-universal relationship—a discussion. If you’re sufficiently specific and brutally local, sometimes you’re lucky enough to break into the underground river of eternity.
Another work that does that well is Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, which is this nine-and-a-half-hour documentary about the Holocaust. It starts with the voice of a young boy, but it accompanies an older man who’s floating on this river. Slowly it becomes clear that you’re watching someone who’s part of something bigger than himself. But for that moment, it’s just him floating in a boat going down this river. He gets off the boat and meets a group of older women. They all say, “So you grew up to be a big man!” The reason they remember him is because they remember him singing as a child in the concentration camp. They heard his voice because they lived around the camp. And as you’re watching this boy listening to them, you can see him thinking, “You guys were always here?”
Rail: Your films attempt to restore presence and testimony. I sometimes wonder where that restoration sits philosophically. Is it closer to John Ruskin’s idea of sublimity? Or nearer to what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation?” Or perhaps to Christina Sharpe’s notion of “wake work”?
Akomfrah: The point is always where you jump off, isn’t it? Where you take the leap into the unknown. And of course, I will forever acknowledge how important J.M.W. Turner has been in my life. I’m never going to deny the affinity with me. But he is a jumping off point. You look at his Slave Ship (1840), and as a painting, it’s just incredible. There’s a section of the painting that I’m particularly interested in, in that he wants to render an abstract study of light. But I want to be in there. I want to understand that, so I literally jump off the boat that he’s offered, because Turner is very cinematic. Every time you look at a Turner, there’s always a point of view—a place from which you can get into the painting. And it’s clear that the view of the slave ship is from a boat. You can sense where you are. You’re on the deck of a boat watching, spectating on a disaster, and you’re going away from it. But I’m going to be where I want to be, where the disaster is—you know what I mean?
I’m interested in that fragment. I’m interested in that texture of the disaster that he’s delineating without necessarily wanting to be graphic, and I think we have to be careful in our choice between the pornographic and the graphic—that we don’t get overly sensational in our understanding of things. But there is something there. And I know that with Afro-sublimity, once you’ve gone through the door of no return, there’s no going back. You have to go forward. There’s no way I can go with that ship, because that ship’s not going to take me to port. The port is worse than the water, so I need to stay there. I need to understand what’s happening there. So, yes, I mean, obviously, like everybody else who’s written stuff about it—whether it’s Christina Sharpe or Saidiya Hartman—I want to stay there. We all want to be there for different reasons, but we all want to be in that moment to understand the unfolding disaster and what the ethical implications of that are.
Rail: What are your expectations for Listening All Night To The Rain, when it opens in New York?
Akomfrah: We’ve spoken for the last hour about fragments, and everything I’ve said is that the possibility is that the fragments can stand for the whole. Well, this is one concrete example of that. The Venice iteration of Listening All Night To The Rain had eight cantos; here, you’ve got one. But I think there are sufficient thematic, aesthetic overlaps between this one and the others that—if you didn’t make it to Venice—you can get a sense of what we tried to do in Venice. I’m really glad that out of all the cantos, it’s this one that’s here. I think Canto VI has many of the thematic concerns of the others. I hope people have a good time with it, and if not, at least they have a thoughtful time with it.