DAHOMEY – Essay by Yael Friedman (Guest Post)
Who can lay physical claim to the past? Colonial powers plundered and possessed by an unquestioned victor’s right; swashbuckling gentleman-explorers carried off treasures they labored through “hostile” and “virgin” territory to obtain; Nazis looted the expansive and expensive art collections of fleeing Jews or those they dispatched to their deaths; and some countries took from peoples within their own borders to synthetize a unified whole. Mexico’s Anthropology Museum is perhaps the world’s most successful project to express a fearsome national patrimony that nevertheless paves over so many societal cracks.
Dahomey, the new beautiful documentary from director Mati Diop, addresses these forces that wrested history from its original owners, and interrogates what it means to try and recompense for the past. The film plays witness to an unprecedented moment – the return by France of 26 objects (26 out of many thousands) to Benin – the once Kingdom of Dahomey (1600-1904). It is the first such return of the cultural heritage colonial powers plucked from their African vassal states. The Europeans carved up a continent and removed its sacred objects (among other sins), sending them across the Atlantic to sit in sterile vitrines in grand galleries, tourists strolling by once-mighty gods.
Diop breathes life into these long dormant witnesses so they can take part in their journey back through time and space. These objects hear and see and sometimes even speak. As in her gorgeous modern gothic tale “Atlantics” (2019), Diop resurrects the presumed dead to confront the living. In that movie, after a ship carrying desperate unpaid laborers capsizes on its way from Senegal to Spain, the families, wives, and lovers of the dead suddenly embody their spirits. They haunt the rich developer who refused to pay their men, sending them to their deaths. These are not ghosts but corporeal beings demanding their rightful claims, defiant and unwilling to fade into the pages of history. Continue reading on THE FEMALE GAZE
ABOUT YAEL FRIEDMAN
Yael Friedman is a journalist based in New York. She covers art and culture and their intersection with economics, politics, and history. She has written extensively about urban history and urban planning, particularly New York’s, analyzing its past and assessing its present and future. Her articles have appeared in Bloomberg CityLab, 1843, The Conversationalist, The Economist, The Daily Beast, Haaretz, Forward, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Urban Omnibus.
