Odile Cazenave: Introduction

From the time it came out, Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu has attracted considerable interest in the media. Nominated for a number of film awards such as Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards, it was awarded seven Césars at the 2015 César Ceremony in France and was on the selection of films for the 2015 Fespaco Film Festival. While the media coverage was most favorable after the film was released in December 2014, and it was featured on the front cover of Le Monde and Libération the day after it won the César award, the critical reception started to change within a few days, to the point that there was talk of removing the film from Fespaco. While most critics followed one main line of attack—criticism of Sissako’s role in the Mauritanian government and his close relationship with the head of state, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz—a few critics focused on film technique. Hardly any addressed the film’s political analysis or the situation in northern Mali.

However, in his critical review of the film, titled “Frames of Resistance,” Manthia Diawara highlighted a crucial element: its poetic beauty.

Beyond that, the film bears Sissako’s recognizable signature: “a montage of independent but interpenetrating tableaux that together create a semantic structure far greater than the sum of its parts” (2015:75).

During our roundtable discussion at the 2015 ASA annual meeting, which took Timbuktu as a starting point, we also discussed issues such as media coverage, awards, and the critical reception of African films. Several critics argued that Timbuktu, first and foremost, targets European audiences and is presented essentially through an Orientalist perspective and the need to recontextualize Ansar Dine’s 2012 occupation of the north (see, e.g., Sellier Reference Sellier2015; Bourgeot Reference Bourgeot2014). If this is the case, we wondered, to what extent was the reception of the film in West Africa different from that in the West, and if it was different, what does this tell us?

On the other hand, can it be said that the film is too soft on Islamists? That it is too kind to Tuaregs? According to Bourgeot (Reference Bourgeot2014), the film revolves around three main myths: the myth of the desert (and the beauty of the desert); the myth of the Tuareg, which is associated with the notion of freedom; and finally, the myth of nomadism and the white Tuareg in northern Mali. Several critics also pointed out that the film’s mechanisms of generating affect hinge on the viewers’ identification with the Tuareg family.

In general, the controversy over the film was fueled by the number of César Awards it received, which, according to many, was related to the date of its release, shortly after the Charlie Hebdo and the Hyperkacher attacks, at a time when terrorism was on everyone’s mind and Mali was very much in the news. ^{Footnote 1}

Given these different questions raised by the film, the renewed importance of Boko Haram, and the recurrent violence and attacks in Mali and elsewhere, our conversation following the ASA meeting aimed to revisit and further explore these points: to reflect on our original reception of the film and how the renewed violence and jihadist attacks may have shaped our understanding of it then and our reactions to it now. This conversation unfolded throughout the summer of 2015 and was sustained by our respective remarks and questions. In the end, I believe, we were all pleasantly surprised to see how much this exchange deepened our understanding of the film, how it felt to all of us that we had barely scratched the surface until then. In the end, in fact, we were able to conclude that the controversy over Timbuktu was largely based on superficial critical readings or even misreadings of the film.

Kenneth Harrow: I’d like to begin with a question for Phyllis. In your essay-review of the film for ASR (2015), you detail the inhuman and hypocritical behavior of the Islamists. Yet I have heard other criticisms that Sissako was too soft on the Islamists, that he humanized them. Indeed, as you indicate, just as the stoning of the two adulterers occurs, one of the Islamic warriors is performing an interpretative modernist dance at the home of the mentally disturbed Haitian woman, perhaps suggesting two sides to the Islamists. Even Abdelkrim, who smokes and is smitten by the Tuareg woman, doesn’t engage in any brutish behavior toward her or her husband. Other elements of the film, such as the portrayal of the judges and the response of the leader to Kidane’s moving, father-to-father appeal, are similarly sympathetic.

Your review, however, evokes the Charlie Hebdo killings without any suggestion that the Islamists might have a human side. The fundamental conflict to which Timbuktu gave rise, it seems to me, might be expressed in terms of George Bush’s words about the so-called War on Terror: you’re either with us or against us. Sissako does not present the conflict in these terms. The Islamists may be wrong, but they are still human, and in the end, if music is to win out over dogmatic violence (as the film suggests metaphorically), it can do so only if we are willing to listen to one another.

Phyllis Taoua: I have heard only one person advance the claim that Sissako was too soft on the Islamists. At a social gathering I attended I overheard a conversation between a singer from a popular folk music group in Mali who is Tuareg and another Tuareg woman from Niger. The singer was in Mali when the Islamists occupied the northern region, whereas the Nigerien woman was in Belgium.

The woman from Mali said she saw things with her own eyes and lived through the experience on the ground, and that what she and everyone around her went through was much worse than what Sissako portrays. She felt that if he wanted to make a movie about that episode in Mali’s history, he should at least have had the courage to tell the truth. She pointed out that the situation in Mali is still in disarray: the communities are still divided, women are still frightened, internally displaced people are still struggling. The people of Mali, in other words, are still living with the consequences of the violence, the occupation, and the absence of a political solution. The political demands of the Tuareg population in Mali are still unresolved and some have refused to accept the most recent peace agreement; thus Sissako’s film tells only part of the story, and in muted tones.

“No, my sister,” answered the Nigerien woman, “give him some credit for at least starting the conversation, for bringing these issues to the attention of the whole world. That is a valuable contribution and a courageous act in its own right.”

In the end, they agreed to disagree, and then we danced together and drank tea.

On the whole, I tend to agree with those who see Sissako’s contribution as valuable, although like the Nigerien woman I live outside the country.

Regarding the humanizing depictions of Islamists that you mention above, I have to say that this portrayal is multifaceted. Sissako depicts them as somewhat emotionally detached from their own actions and also hypocritical; for instance, the viewing of soccer is forbidden, and yet we see Islamist recruits gossiping in the streets about players and teams. These are young members who have joined up for financial, rather than ideological, reasons. There is even an element of humor in the scene in which Abdelkrim lets his driver know that he is going off to smoke. The scene in which Abu Hassan interrogates Kidane via an interpreter is also complex. Ultimately, it is humiliating for a grown man to beg for mercy under those circumstances; the Arabic-speaking judge is foreign, callous, and unforgiving; the youth who is translating is a sell-out who learned enough Arabic to get by and who has disgraced his family in the eyes of Kidane. The scene in which the jihadist is dancing seems to me a very important moment of humanization because it reveals repressed emotion. It also refutes the radical interpretation of Islam that the jihadists are imposing and is linked to the most important moment in the film: when the jihadists, revealing what Ato Quayson at the ASA panel referred to as their “ethical deficit,” enter the mosque with shoes and guns.

One could connect these dots by examining the social value and popular appeal of the behaviors that are being censored: music, soccer, smoking, choice of clothing, choice of spouse for the attractive woman who is married against her will, and so on.

I completely agree with your point that while the Islamists are wrong, they still are human, and that violence and dogmatism can be overcome only if we are willing to listen to one another. I would add that Sissako started out intending to make a documentary about the occupation to document a slice of reality, even if only from his individual, subjective point of view. He abandoned that project because he feared for his crew’s safety and for the safety of the people brave enough to agree to appear on screen (Dowd Reference Dowd2014). But this lets us know that he was considering the options available to him as a filmmaker under a very specific set of circumstances. I think he sat with this dilemma a while and reflected on how best to represent the situation and decided to recreate the state of siege with a fictional documentary and was inspired by Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966). If you look at the film from this angle, it is brilliant, full of humanity, and very moving. It works for me as a successful and nuanced argument against extremism with broad appeal that is relevant, as the film critics have noted, to regions as far removed geographically as Afghanistan.

Alioune Sow: “I agree with Phyllis. The “soft depiction” of Islamists, which actually is difficult to trace in the film, has not really been a central element in the controversial reception of the film. In his own discussion of the film (in Reitzer Reference Reitzer2014), however, Sissako did mention several times that his directorial intention was to depart from the “clichés” about the conflict and to avoid the representation of a dehumanized and brute jihadist (see also Okeowo Reference Okeowo2015). He claimed that such a departure constituted an invitation to transcend passions and an attempt to challenge our impulsive incrimination of the occupiers. The reality of the occupation, Sissako says, is complex and its treatment in the film requires subtlety in order to stimulate alternative reflection on resistance and interrogations about the jihadists and their itineraries. The jihadist, he says, is not “simply a bad guy”; he is also “a fragile being and fragility is an element that can make anybody tip over horror” (quoted in Anderson Reference Anderson2015). In a dialogue with Jean-Christophe Ruffin (2014), Sissako explains that it was important to show that the jihadists are “des gens perdus . . . qui ont besoin de mains tendues” (lost souls to whom we should extend our hands).

Sissako’s statements on the jihadists thus clarify the filmic regime he elaborated for Timbuktu. The relative restraint in the depiction of the brutality of some of the jihadists should not be viewed as a diversion from the tragic and traumatic realities of the occupation but rather as a way to problematize our understanding of it. The depiction of the jihadists is an aspect of Sissako’s intention to film “people and not origins” and not to assign responsibility in the conflict. This is a clearly mode of filming “violence and barbarity” that differs from the “spectacular” mode that pervades American cinema (Libiot 2014). Sissako suggests that restraint in the depiction of the despicable actions of the jihadists gives less visibility to their mode of operation and, in turn, allows him to capture the ambivalence of the occupiers while emphasizing, whenever possible, potential resolution.

As Phyllis mentions, the controversy about Sissako’s supposed complacency, dubious political alliances, motives, and morality was fueled by his proximity to the Mauritanian regime and not necessarily by the depiction of the jihadists. In France, however, in venues such as Les Cahiers du Cinema and Telerama, initial doubts about the relevance of Sissako’s poetics (see, e.g., Joubert Reference Joubert2015) and calls for an urgent discussion of the occupation soon yielded to enthusiastic reviews of Sissako’s lyricism and virtuosity. But while, as I have said, the “soft depiction” of the jihadists was not central in the press reviews of the film, it did surface on social media. Members of the Malian diaspora in particular emphasized the contrast between the film’s representation of the occupation and the dramatic footage broadcast on Malian national television and the testimonies relayed by relatives displaced in Malian cities. For instance, the audience claimed that Abdelkrim’s attitude in the film does not ring true, especially since his name itself echoes that of the violent and brutal leader who negotiated hostages for Ansar Dine. Sissako’s decision to eclipse the origin of the conflict and its complex dynamics, which involved several local figures and factions and included decades of ethnic, racial, and political tensions in northern Mali, was commented upon extensively and seen as a problematic sign of his “neutrality” (see Les nouvelles de Mali 2014).

Having said that, I would suggest that the depiction of the jihadists is still a central feature of the film that needs to be examined further in order to determine Sissako’s humanistic intent. Phyllis demonstrated in her ASR essay that the film does expose the totalitarian logics of the fundamentalists. Their ferocity is conveyed by a portrayal of spaces, events, and actions that display their brutal vision of the world: the visit to the mosque, the repressive measures, the trial, the eradication of practices representing competing and deviant practices. But interestingly, these sequences are often followed by those that show the jihadists caught in moments of doubt and failure (conversations about soccer), desire (Satima and Abdlekrim), unconscious refutation (the dance at Zabou—which Sissako presents as the jihadist’s expression of remorse [see Libiot 2014]). There is no doubt that these scenes convey the jihadists’ contradictions, the lack of conviction felt by many, and their hesitancies or reluctance to replicate “à la lettre” the ideology of the fundamentalists. But while they disrupt any narrative on the totalitarian logics of the fundamentalists, it seems to me that they also problematize the “inhumanity” of the jihadists, revealing instead what may be called, to paraphrase Roy’s (Reference Roy2015) “Islamization of radicalism,” the “Islamization of dumbness” (if I may use this expression). To illustrate this further, perhaps additional commentary is needed on the hybrid group of unconvinced followers, disenfranchised young men, and frustrated middle-aged men who turn opportunistically to jihad in search for meaning in their lives or to compensate for what they often refer to as “failed social integration.”

Finally, rereading some of the articles dedicated to Sissako, I also noticed a new controversy involving Lemine Ould Salem and Francois Margolin, the directors of the documentary Salafistes. This controversy emerged in Le Monde (Tilouine Reference Tilouine2015) and on RFI Afriques (Forster Reference Forster2016).

Kenneth Harrow: I was particularly interested in Alioune’s comment that

If we understand “spectacle” in the Debordian sense of a capitalist ideological construct, this comment returns us to Sissako’s responsibility in his choice of genre and style, as well as the ethics implied in their reception. Alioune’s further comment about Sissako’s apparent failure to acknowledge the significance of Abdelkerim’s name and to eclipse the origin of the conflict and its complex dynamics reminded me of a comment made on CNN (August 9, 2016) by the former director of the CIA, Michael Hayden, in response to Donald Trump’s insinuation that followers of the Second Amendment might take up the problem of dealing with Hillary Clinton: “You are not only responsible only for what you say, you are also responsible for what people hear.”

Odile Cazenave: One question that comes to me is, can we say that the film’s beauties and poetic style are so distant from the conventional African cinematic identitarian polemics? Is that necessarily so? Can’t we simply affirm that there can be no consideration of representation apart from reception, that representation does not occur in a vacuum, and that that which fills in the implied space of reception are specific responses. These are where Phyllis leads us.

Phyllis Taoua: I’m mulling over the idea of Timbuktu as a linear narrative. It is still elliptical in its editing, but it also has dramatic coherence and creates suspense unlike any of Sissako’s previous films. I would like to comment on the mosque scene to complicate two points: the jihadists’ humanity versus their ethical deficit and the representation of terrorism more generally. Thanks, Ken, for bringing in these useful quotes from Sissako re humanism. I think the ethics of spectatorship is also worth taking up given our angle on controversy.

The ethics of spectatorship, then, is made concrete, finally, in the specific context of today’s violent confrontations—in Mali as in Paris.

Odile Cazenave: Our reactions today—a year and a half post-Charlie Hebdo, six months after the events of November 13, and in the context of other events (Brussels, Normandy, the actions of Boko Haram, Jihadist fighting) that have taken place since then—have likely shaped or re-shaped our understanding of the film.

Ken Harrow: Phyllis’s description of the conversation between the woman from Niger and the woman from Mali made me think, as well, about what these responses mean as a way of reading the film, and even larger questions of ethics. My first impulse is always to dismiss any evaluation of a film that is based on its “authenticity.” I choose that word carefully because it is loaded, and often applied in identity politics as an instrument used to include and exclude, to identify those with the right to speak and judge and those who are not qualified to do so. In the academy it is generally thought, following, say, Butler (Reference Butler2012), that bearing the typical physical characteristics of a particular group does not qualify the individual to speak for the group. This is the argument Kwame Anthony Appiah made in In My Father’s House (1992) in which he, a man of mixed racial origins, seeks to counter the claims of Afrocentrists for whom origins (as in Egypt) matter enormously, and for whom speaking as an Igbo, say, or Yoruba or Hausa, qualifies one to voice authoritative opinions about one’s ethnicity.

The question of authenticity spills over to the reading of films and novels in which representation might be taken as just or not, as accurate or not, as measured against a real historical event. I don’t wish to overdo the point: performing an identity, constructing a history, is radically different from having an identity and recognizing and recounting a history, as though the identity and history in question were given, not constructed, as though “context” were not also “text,” as though Derrida got it wrong in stating “Il n’y a pas d’hors texte” (There is no outside-of-the-text).

This question is an old one, and debating it is not my point. Rather it is to indicate how we repeatedly dodge the contrary readings of the Malian woman versus the woman from Niger—who were concerned about the truth values of the film—when we seek to assess the responses/reactions/political impact of the film. If we don’t accept an argument based on authenticity, tied to given identities or histories, we risk losing the ground for political action (as Paul Gilroy puts it in The Black Atlantic [1995]), or for ethical action (as Simon Gikandi put it in his famous 2001 essay “Theory, Literature, and Moral Considerations”). Can we return to the question of politics, and with it “dispossession” and the vulnerabilities of populations in an age of militant aggression, conquest, and violence; and in that return, raise the ethical question of how a given representation can be interpreted not on the ground of its fidelity to reality but of its implication in fostering or countering the dispossession of a people, the traumatization of a people?

The answer I read in the above commentary lies in the reception of the film. We might wish to question how well Sissako represents the brutality of the jihadists, and ultimately toss out that question as not appropriate for our consideration, on the grounds that I sketched out above. But we can’t toss out the question of what kind of reception the film has had on the grounds that one person’s reactions are more legitimate than another’s. The women from Niger and Mali might be saying opposite things and still both be right. And we, in reading their reactions, having seen the film, having knowledge of the events of July 2012 when the MNLA and then Ansar Dine took over Timbuktu and instituted a militant Islamic state of rule, cannot help but measure their reactions with respect to the film’s narrative and images, and the connotations suggested by the film’s imagery and characterization. Unlike Edward Said (e.g., Said Reference Said1983), for whom “context” suggests a legible outside to the text, I want to evoke the conditions of reception for us all—for the gamut of spectators from Niger and Mali to the U.S. and Europe—so as to frame our own debate and readings of key moments.

What might be our own decryption of the key moments in the film? We might consider as key moments the killing of Amadou (or is it of GPS?); the shooting of the loving couple Kidane and Satima; and the dance of the jihadist at the home of the Haitian woman. What do these three scenes have in common? My interest does not lie in questions of verisimilitude, and so when the larger issue arises—of whether the Islamist warriors accurately represent a true Islam, or are hypocritical—I want to ignore any assessment of whether they represent real Muslims or poor Muslims. What would be accomplished in debating that? Though it is implied by many scenes, like those concerning the propaganda video, the jihadists’ discussion of football, Abdelkerim’s smoking and flirting, and so on, I find these implications about the qualities of good Muslims, or their hypocrisy, to be the weakest element of the film. They are relatively distant from the Sissako I have come to esteem, the filmmaker who presents issues of great social and political importance without descending to the level of a polemicist who pronounces the truth in magisterial fashion. The long speeches in Bamako (2006), for example, may be historically true (though probably not entirely so, in fact), but my attention is drawn to Chaka and Melé, whose story holds much more truth for me. The same goes for the drama of Kidane and Satima. Kidane has to die, their idyllic family cannot continue, something has to be the cause. Will it be evil and hypocritical soldiers of God, or will it descend, rather, like the moonlight in Christopher Okigbo’s poem “Love Apart”: “And we are now shadows/ That cling to each other/ But kiss the air only.”

Why do they have to die? Okigbo says it is because love ascends with the moon, and that love feeds on “solitary stems.” In her earlier ASR review Phyllis was right to focus on the blood that leaks out of GPS’s nostrils as he is dying. The children, Toya and Issan, come running, fearful over what has happened; a duty to protect the cattle has failed. The children’s faith in their fathers, in their order, in the beauty of the tent, the music, the harmony of life and love, is lost. The “solitary stems” emerge after Kidane kills Amadou. (Now the narrative will shift gears, from the patriarch’s failure to defend the patrimony to the separate path of the ideal lovers.) In fact, the cause of death is not really murder but apparently an accident that could have killed either one of the protagonists, and we, the audience, have no idea who is going to die. Neither do we desire revenge at that point. We have become afraid of what is going to happen ever since Kidane took out his pistol and ignored Satima’s words to leave it home, ever since he chose to act according to some masculinist notion of duty rather than the musician’s chords of love.

Kidane learns from Issan that the cow, GPS, was killed by Amadou after getting entangled again in the fisherman’s nets. Kidane says, “But all of this . . . has to stop.” Satima looks at him seriously. His face is veiled, as he continues, in the reverse shot, “Humiliation must come to an end.” We understand the words from the broader contexts—the immediate personal conflict, the nomads versus sedentary fishermen, the Tuareg cattlemen versus the Bozo fishermen; and then the more extended, but underlying meaning—the humiliation of being conquered by so-called pure Islamic warriors from the north, coming to bring jihad to Timbuktu, the black African Islamic center of learning, medieval mosques, and libraries. This is the gist of his statement and the film, and its conflicts. How do we see this?

On the one hand, when the blood comes spurting out of GPS’s nostril, we are prepared for the need for payment in blood—not only because of the affront that this represents in the context of this cultural milieu, but also what we expect within the framework of Sissako’s body of work. Florent Couao-Zotti (Reference Couao-Zotti2015) provides the following résumé of the stylistic elements in Sissako’s toolkit, all of which we expect to emerge at this key moment:

In this case everything (except perhaps for the hope) is perceptible in what follows. Kidane descends to the river, engages Amadou in a hand-to-hand combat, and then, as they both struggle to maintain their balance in the water, a shot is heard and both fall. There are no subtitles, and none are needed. Two men arguing, fighting, wrestling, and then falling in the water—the one encumbered by his flowing robes (Kidane), the other apparently with the upper hand in the fight (Amadou, although he shouldn’t have speared the animal). There is silence as they lie there, suspended in time before the rupture, with the audible murmuring of the water. How can we not translate this as contrary to the violence wreaked upon the people of Timbuktu by the barbus, the bearded men with guns, who have all the answers to anyone’s objections.

The answer to the humiliation, which Satima wanted to evade by flight, has turned into a revenge killing, the manner of justice worked out by indigenous peoples since time immemorial. Not the answers provided by sharia law before the Islamist judge, or that of the postcolonial-styled Western judiciary, but between the two families seeking compensation for loss. As Kidane struggles to his feet, the camera draws back to an astounding long shot, following Couao-Zotti’s description of the signature elements: the compelling long shot with deadly silence now marking the scene as Kidane crosses the screen from left to right, wading through the last moments of his life into some new spaces of infinity. (Infinity, because Sissako will not settle for less at these moments, as in the final scenes of Bamako when Chaka must be buried and Melé’s loss will have taken on those tragic proportions.)

There is no escaping that moment by defining it as beautiful, spectacular, scenic, astounding, cinematic, or poetic—that is, by doing anything other than feeling the full effect of the scene. It encapsulates what the poetic, inarticulate, or better, the empty space of the infinite occupies in Sissako’s grammar of cinema.

When Kidane and Satima die, when the jihadist dances chez the mad Haitian women, these are the logical extensions of that shot that has set the scene for our response to the jihadist conquest. We are in the world of more than the tragic subjects of a militant force that brings Islam into the picture; there is none of the world of the pedestrian global struggle over militant Islam, none of the concrete Malian history of Tuareg versus Bozo fisherman; none of the specific qualities of a history that would currently be defined as both local as well as global—none of any of this that can encompass the impact of that shot. Like all poetry, it is invested in shadows that “kiss the air only.”

Enough of that: how can we not also relate this to Ansar Dine, the MNLA, the history of postindependence Tuareg displacement and dispossession, the precolonial history of slavery and mastery, of the noble desert, the “blue men,” and everything from actuality to tourist clichés? Instead of denying any and all of these elements that very much inform the responses of thousands of viewers of this film, I prefer to move more in the direction of engaging with what I see before my eyes, forgetting nothing of the true and the false, and insisting that what impact that shot will have on me will come first from what Sissako will have put on the screen, and which will then be invested in all that I can muster in my response.

Odile Cazenave: All of these questions and responses, I think, help explain the complexity of Sissako’s choices in Timbuktu, including in his representation of jihadism.

Particularly interesting to me is the question of linear versus nonlinear narrative and how these elements work in this film. I do find that on the surface there is a sense of chance, of random choice, just as in La Vie sur terre (Life on Earth, 1999) and, for example, the beautiful scene of the young woman at the post office trying to make a phone call. ^{Footnote 3} Yet as Phyllis and Ken suggest, there is an elaborate constructed notion of chance in the film that tends, in the end, to humanize the jihadists. On the other hand, one could object to his emphasis, first and foremost, on their lack of intelligence (as pointed out by Alioune’s “Islamization of dumbness”).

Phyllis Taoua: I would like to take up one of Odile’s observation about how the conflict among the fisherman, Amadou, and Kidane is important but not frequently commented on. I went back and looked at the sequence of scenes involving this murder. A few things are striking: the scene when Amadou kills GPS is filmed with extreme close-ups of blood running down the cow’s nostrils; this violence is against an animal and recalls the opening scene of the gazelle being hunted. When Kidane confronts Amadou about the loss of his cow killed for getting caught in fishing nets, the scene is not filmed in the same way. Sissako presents Kidane’s act of killing as an accident, not as vicious or gory. The banality and quotidian nature of this territorial dispute between a nomad and a fisherman anchors this minor conflict in the social fabric of the Sahel in a way that contrasts with the epic conflict initiated by the Arabic-speaking Islamists and their foreign agenda. The accidental nature of Kidane’s act and then the accidental shooting of Kidane and Satima—killed because the authorities mistakenly thought they were trying to flee, when they were just going to hug each other—gives the narrative a tragic human dimension that is more literary than journalistic or documentary-like. I interpret this narrative thread as a complex commentary on human nature and our capacity for violence against animals and against one another. Sissako’s editing very carefully embeds this minor narrative development in the main narrative by alternating the scenes, creating juxtapositions and tensions that layer the central question of our human capacity to commit violent acts and to resist them. For me, as a viewer, the cumulative effect of these juxtapositions makes me see the Islamists as extreme, unwilling to compromise, authoritarian.

Alioune Sow: I would like to start by addressing Ken’s comment about the Western sensibility and cinematic poetic style. Then I will make a few remarks about the film’s reception and finally turn to several sequences.

When it comes to Timbuktu, it might be argued that the Western audience has been sensitive to a film considered poetic and visually accomplished in its engagement with African realities, thus circumventing the reproduction of images and scenarios that are commonly attached to the continent and its afflictions (see Diawara Reference Diawara2015). However, such reception is not unusual, and Timbuktu is not an exception. We should remember Souleymane Cissé’s Yeleen (1989), which was acclaimed in Cannes for its unexpected aesthetics and praised for its poetry and “esotericism,” or Finye (1982), a poetic rendering of the resistance to the military in Mali during the eighties.

Such poetic filmmaking is a central feature of West African cinema and denotes a particular African sensibility. If we delve into the history of African cinema, it could even be argued that Sissako expands the aesthetics and cinematic language found in, say, Cissé’s Den Muso (1975) and Waati (1995), Sissoko’s Genesis (1999), Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1991) and Hyènes (Hyenas, 1992), Mahamat Saleh Haroun’s Un homme qui crie (A Screaming Man, 2011) and Daratt (Dry Season, 2007)—all works that could be described as “poetic.” Since La Vie sur terre, with, as Odile mentioned, its emphatic sequences dedicated to the conception of time, Sissako has cemented his reputation as a director who renews African cinematic language by successfully combining “humanism and poetic language” to stimulate reflexivity, shed light on crucial and contemporary issues, and ultimately challenge the audience’s views of the continent. Sissako has repeatedly explained his cinematography in terms of his determination to counter the “spectacular way” in which the continent has been filmed for many years—a point of view perfectly illustrated in his criticism of the portrayal of suffering in Raymond Depardon’s Afrique comment ça va avec la douleur? (Africa, How Are You with Pain, 1996; see Barlet Reference Barlet1998).

By bringing in other directors as examples into our discussion, I aim to emphasize that a strand exists in the West African productions—one could even say Sahelian productions—that is defined by a lyrical cinematic language in which poetry and humanism go hand in hand to provide a subtle depiction of postcolonial West African realities. This strand is a strong reminder of how central poetic language is to filmmaking in the Sahel, a feature certainly inherited from the poetics of the epic and storytelling that embodies the spiritual mode of addressing and interrogating African realities in the region. This language should be examined further to better situate Timbuktu and to provide insights into its cinematic peculiarities (including, as we mentioned, nonlinearity, visualism, image construction and meaning, the Sahelian landscape). Having said that, while directors such as Cissé, Diop, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, or even recently Alain Gomis (Tey, 2012) have escaped criticism, why is it that some of the audience has been unsettled by Timbuktu’s language? I will venture some answers.

First, by depicting the occupation of Timbuktu, Sissako made a movie that is deemed political and has prompted a heated discussion on his representation of the occupation and the conflict that originated it. As opposed to the films listed above, Timbuktu is set against the background of a conflict that has fragmented the country, has involved multiple forces (some of them contradictory), and was generated by the complex power relations that have shaped Mali’s northern territories and for which responsibility is shared but not always admitted. The film has suffered from the malaise existing in France and in Mali about the Tuareg issue. It has also suffered from the ambivalence about the conflict and the passionate debate about its raison d’être, its historicity, and politics, which have tested both the Malian and French imaginaries. It would have been naive to think that the frustrations and tensions that had accumulated since the first Tuareg rebellion in 1963 would not have caught up with a film that depicts the consequences of the separatists’ actions and alliances with the jihadists. All these elements have had an impact on the positionality of the film.

We all agree that identification and representation have been the key notions in the reception of Timbuktu. Perhaps for the first time in the history of African cinema, a film has attracted critical attention because it contains topics familiar to the majority and seems to carry significance for overlapping and interrelated events that go well beyond its initial subject. At the same time, the film defied the expectations of the majority by not addressing the issues and questions the way the audience had anticipated. In that sense, it would not be an exaggeration to talk about Timbuktu as a political event. Appealing to multiple audiences, Timbuktu captured the imagination as it relates to what Raymond Williams (Reference Williams and Orrom1954, Reference Williams1961) called “the structures of feeling” of the last two decades, bringing into the conversation the anxieties and uncertainties, as Odile and Phyllis mentioned, caused by the failure of the Arab spring, the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the unexpected collapse of Malian democracy, and the French military presence in Mali (including its celebration in Bamako and its disapproval in Paris). Sissako, unintentionally, contributed to the contentious reception of the film with his statement at the Césars’ ceremony on the humanist values and ideals that, according to him, only France has been trying to defend on the continent and how the universalism that came out of it should be embraced. Critics of “Françafrique” did not like the discourse and were determined to uncover Sissako’s alleged political contradictions. Nothing illustrates better the complex positionality of the film than the moment at the press conference in Cannes when Sissako was unable to hold back his tears in front of journalists questioning the genesis of the film and its oblique approach to the conflict and occupation.

Second, I disagree with critics who claim that Sissako released a biased film that omits several crucial specifics of the conflict that shaped the occupation. One only has to look closely at certain scenes to notice how Sissako incorporates such issues. Take, for example, the scenes in which Kidane and Satima converse in the harmonious setting of the tent and lament the political and social changes engendered by the arrival of the jihadists and the disruption caused to their way of life and environment. Satima expresses “nostalgia” for the peaceful and cohesive community of the recent past and complains about her solitude. When she talks about her desires and sense of home and expresses worries about the fate of the family, her facial expressions show melancholy, anxiety, and pain. The conversation seems to suggest that the comfort of the tent, the cattle breeding, and the music are part of a way of life built on a desire for stability and peace—achieved, perhaps, after compromises, repudiation, and changes. In the conversation the yearning for stability and peace can be discerned in the characters’ visible distress at seeing their mode of living devastated by the arrival of the jihadists: “You are scared. I am scared too,” says Kidane.

Some critics have been quick to read these scenes as a sign of Sissako’s idealistic representation of the “Tuareg way of life.” For these critics, the depiction of the Tuareg family, the tent and its delightful arrangement, the gentle musician, the child fostering (Issan), and the moral rectitude of the herdsman are regarded as suspiciously opposed to the unrest of the fisherman, who is depicted as a frustrated, quasi-dehumanized, violent character who lacks any perspicacity. For those critics, the issue is the stereotypical representation of the “bon Touareg” (the “good Tuareg”) (Cessou Reference Cessou2014; Sellier Reference Sellier2015; Metaoui Reference Métaoui2014) in a “tale for Westerners” derived from the romanticized perception of the Tuaregs and the mythology of the “blue men” circulating in the Western and French imaginary (Bourgeot Reference Bourgeot2014). Unconvinced by Sissako’s statements (“these Tuaregs are a normal couple, a symbol of people who live in peace”; quoted in Rochebrune 2014), critics focused on his revision of the event that inspired Kidane’s story and that was crucial, according to Sissako, to the construction of the film. In the story on which the film is based, a Bozo fisherman who was accused of killing a cow was assassinated by a Tuareg herdsman who was also a rebel and an Ansar Dine sympathizer (see, e.g., Salem Reference Salem2012). Despite the director’s ambition to avoid binaries and impulsive incrimination, critics lament that the event in the movie has been oversimplified and depoliticized.

I would argue that it is possible to read the incriminating scenes in another way by drawing from the knowledge of the historical context and the conflict that led to the occupation, and by reading carefully a series of multivalent hints and signs that can be found in multiple sequences. In fact, Sissako uses the couple Kidane and Satima not only to distance himself from the clichés and stereotypes he has been accused of reproducing, but also to raise pertinent questions about the conflict and the occupation.

Let’s start with the conversation between Kidane and Satima regarding the retaliation against Amadou. When Kidane unwraps his gun as he prepares to go and talk to Amadou, the words exchanged underscore Satima’s pragmatism but also point to aspects of Kidane’s personality, unknown to us until that moment. These words offer a glimpse into a past when Kidane’s temperament may have been different, more determined, to the point that the decision he is now making induces discomfort and requires justification.“I’ve had that weapon since you met me,” says Kidane. And Satima answers, “Toya wasn’t born when I met you.” Satima’s tone and the temporal distinction she is pointing to suggest that a change in Kidane may have occurred since the time they first met. The gun he is unwrapping could well be an object reminiscent of the post-rebellion moment, a disorderly period (see Lecocq Reference Lecocq, Baud and Rutten2004) in which AK-47s had disappeared but insecurity was augmented, in which factions proliferated and a gun was considered necessary for self-defense. This interpretation is gradually confirmed by further elements in the film, such as the closing moments of the same scene when Kidane deploys a belligerent rhetoric (“Come what may. But all of this has to stop. Humiliation must come to an end”) that speaks to a sense of pride and a combative spirit, in sharp contrast to the composed and refrained demeanor that we have seen since the opening of the film.

This is perhaps where Kidane’s story gets situated within the larger conflict. It may indeed indicate that Kidane may not have always been just a herdsman and musician cut off from the dynamics of the conflict and the context that led to the occupation. While this interpretation is never explicit in the film, Kidane could well be a representative of the post-rebellion generation, consisting of those who have laid down their weapons and adhered to new modes of living after the peace treaties. Other details such as Kidane’s turban and his guitar are also markers of former fighters’ responses to the changes of the post-rebellion Tamasheq society. Drawing on Baz Lecocq’s (Reference Lecocq2010) study of the Tuareg rebellions, the apparent “careless way” Kidane wears his turban may be part of a generational expression of “discontent,” the “despair of Tamasheq society” and “a rebellious state of mind” (2010:249). Perhaps more significantly, Kidane’s guitar illustrates the role of music and poetry in negotiating and translating the realities of the transition. Kidane’s guitar speaks to the imaginary of the rebellion and the narratives of Tamasheq’s internal conflicts, which bands such as Tinariwen and, to a certain extent, Kel Assouf when they celebrate the rebel Mano Dayak, have attempted to communicate. The guitar, as Lecocq demonstrates, has been central in the articulation of the changes brought to the Tamasheq world, including the development of the “al-guitara” music, a “desert blues” that recalls the “revolution” and “the rebellion” (2010:253) but also the inner conflicts and divisions.

Of course, this is not to imply that all Tuaregs are rebels, but to suggest that against this backdrop, and considering that Kidane’s life takes place at the interstices between the rebellion, the recent conflict, and the occupation by the jihadists, the claim that Kidane may well have been a former combatant who decided to break away from the armed struggle of the recent past for the sake of his wife and his daughter is not farfetched.

We may also turn to another sequence that challenges critics’ assertions that Sissako’s approach to the occupation is simplistic: the scene in which Kidane is interrogated by Abu Hassan following his arrest for the murder of Amadou. The pathos of the scene derives from Kidane’s composure in the recognition of his tragic fate and the increasing awareness of his mistake and isolation, which will dramatically impact his family. Tears appear on his face during the confrontation with the Tuareg translator when Kidane questions the identity of his interlocutor and his complicity with the jihadists. These tears, revealing a combination of regret, frustration, and anger, express Kidane’s despair, and again, the tragic realization that the future of his family has been compromised, not only by his own action but also by those of his fellow Tuaregs. The unconvincing denial of the translator, who remains hidden behind his turban, confirms the fears expressed earlier by both Kidance and Satima—that the Tuareg militantism has radically shifted, that its cultural nationalism has assumed new modalities, and that these have led to further divisions between communities, unexpected loyalties to foreign forces, and alliances with the jihadists. “What is your business with these people?” Kidane asks the translator, receiving unconvincing answers.

At this point, as spectators, we are still puzzled by Kidane’s behavior, and we are struggling to make sense of the drama that has engulfed him. For the sake of clarity, we need to go back to an earlier scene that allows us to link Kidane’s action to the greater context of the occupation—the episode in the Islamic tribunal during the interrogation of the young soccer player just before the remarkable “soccer game without a ball.” During the interrogation, which takes place in a classroom, the angle of the camera is wide enough to allow us to read part of the sentences and words written on the blackboard right behind the judges. These sentences are significant. They are taken from the first paragraph of a short story titled “L’autre village” written in 2011 by the Mauritanian journalist and writer Abdel Vetah Ould Mohamed. I don’t recall having read anything about this particular narrative in any of the commentaries of the film. ^{Footnote 4}

“L’autre village” tells the story of an octogenarian Tuareg, who, every Friday, leaves his tent to go to the village cemetery to pay tribute to deceased relatives and companions and devotes the rest of his days to the study of the Koran and the reading of epic poetry in the company of his daughter, who shares his passions. The crux of the narrative is dedicated to the daughter’s reading of “La guerre d’El Bessouss,” an epic poem about the pre-Islamic war that opposed two tribes and lasted forty years. The war, the epic tells us, started when King Kouleyb discovered one of El Bessouss’s camels grazing on his land without authorization and killed the animal immediately. To seek revenge, El Bessouss sought advice from her nephew, Jessass, who, in retaliation, decided to assassinate the King, engendering the war. The narrative ends with the octogenarian supplementing the daughter’s reading by adding the story of the poet Ibn Oubad, who attempted to pacify the two tribes and realized that his neutrality and efforts did not pay off when his own son was killed by the king’s brother.

There are evident connections among the “El Bessouss” narrative, Kidane’s tragic fate, and the larger context of the occupation. The lessons to be taken from the epic poem are explicit: the central features of the conflict were vengeance and retaliation, which generated unexpected victims and martyrs and indeed, the most significant memories of an era. One thinks here of René Girard’s comments in La violence et le sacré: “Vengeance constitutes an infinite, interminable process. Each time that it arises at some place or other in the community, it tends to extend itself and to take over the whole of the social body” (1972:28; my translation). ^{Footnote 5} The story of “El Bessouss” resonates with the contemporary crisis that has brought havoc to the northern territories of Mali, a conflict that has been fueled by the logics of retaliation and retribution between the Malian state and the separatists and tribal power struggles.

King Kouleyb’s action is a prototypical example of the tragedy that engulfs Kidane. It enables us to see Kidane, in Aristotelian terms, as a tragic character whose sudden desire for vengeance determines the fate of the most cherished individuals in his life. While he has successfully broken away from the logics of vengeance and retaliation that had perhaps dominated his past during the postrebellion moment, he now initiates his own misfortune—in Aristotelian terms, his hamartia—by embracing them again when he learns about the killing of GPS. The images suggest that the killing of Amadou was accidental, but Kidane’s downfall is established when Kidane decides to carry the gun. There is a brief moment in one of the scenes preceding the killing that suggests that Kidane feels uneasy about his decision and is aware of his mistake. Satima, behind a transparent curtain, looks at Kidane walking toward the river. Kidane slows down, hesitates, almost stops, and then disappears.

One final comment on the story of “El Bessouss”: The fact that the sentences have been left on the blackboard by the jihadists suggests that the text, obviously part of a classroom exercise, is a relevant tool for envisaging and exploring alternative readings of the past. The forgotten epic, resuscitated by a contemporary observer, helps us to explore new possibilities, transcend divisions, and make reconciliation plausible. This process, the film suggests, has been brutally interrupted by the arrival of the jihadists.

Third, critics have been arguing that Timbuktu does not provide a comprehensive contextualization of the occupation of Timbuktu. But in fact the film itself, through the depiction of characters mobilized and involved in diverse acts of resistance, is a meditation on the occupation and the plausibility of the resolution of the conflict. Carefully distributed in the film, these acts of resistance are led by the youth, and the mothers and daughters whose actions counter, and emphasize the inanity of, the destructive venture of the jihadists. Resistance, the film suggests, is inevitable. It is omnipresent and takes many forms, and can be spoken in different languages, but never by force. It can take the form of the audacious confrontation of the fishmonger with the jihadists in front of a baffled crowd, the unpredictable but brave acts of the madwoman, the subtle defiance of the young soccer player in front of the judges, the lyrical disobedience that comes from the imaginative soccer game, or the scrupulous Koranic exegesis of the Imam. Sites of resistance can be found in banal spaces such as the room where the youth gather to play music. The room’s seductive atmosphere, the comforting decor, the vibrant colors and patterned cloth contrast sharply with the austerity of the outside world occupied by the jihadists. Resistance, the film suggests, can be found in the display of affection, complicity, and intimacy among the youth, just as laughter, smiles, loving gazes, and body movements constitute its language. None of the acts of resistance are singled out or overrepresented. To the contrary, they seem complementary, shown in sequences that alternate between failed resistance (the dramatic image of Safia’s trembling body after her first night with the jihadist Abu Jaffar), the violent repercussions of resistance (the singer’s bent body during the whipping), and the images of hope that resistance can provide (the soccer game, or the singer lying in bed and rehearsing her song).

What marks Timbuktu is the delicate equilibrium that gives depth to Sissako’s engagement with and representation of resistance, carefully structured around tragedy, despair, and hopefulness. (For a brilliant study, in another context, of this tension between tragedy and hope contained in art, see Utley Reference Utley2000). One final point: In the film’s engagement with resistance, an important role is played by the music of Amine Bouhafa, which combines several styles to punctuate the narration. At the beginning of the film we hear different pieces, which are initially disconnected. But as the movie unfolds some of the pieces are gradually associated with one another. For example, the typical Mande song initially performed by the youth in his room is incorporated at the end into North African melodies to generate the symbolic “Timbuktu Fasso” song (“The Country of Timbuktu”) performed by Fatoumata Diawara, with the words “Maliba don do be se”: “the grand Mali will be achieved.”

Phyllis Taoua: The opening sequence of Timbuktu represents a departure from Sissako’s previous work in terms of the tone—we have the startling, percussive noise of an automatic machine-gun being fired at a gazelle fleeing across the soft sands of the Sahara. But the narrative function of these introductory images dramatizing an essential element of the story to come reminds us of Life on Earth and Bamako. This hunting sequence, which appears before the title, works as a symbolic prologue that lets us know this is a film about violence, and a specific kind of predatory violence that is calculated and implacable. The sound of machine gun fire continues on the soundtrack as the title is announced, and then Sissako shifts the militants’ target from a tired gazelle to Dogon cultural artifacts, which have been placed in the sand as if for shooting practice. These opening sequences that frame the narrative explicitly establish a vital connection between the loss of life and the destruction of culture.

I would like to take up Ken’s question about how Sissako chose to represent the perpetration of violence in Timbuktu. First, we must consider the conditions of possibility for this violence that are established when radical Islamic militants in pickup trucks, flying black and white flags, descend on the town and impose their foreign occupation of Timbuktu in northern Mali. Next, we must consider the rationale that is given for the violent imposition of this specific interpretation of Islam that claims to be a modern form of jihad and sharply contradicts the beliefs of the local Muslim population, including the imam. Then, we can reflect on the various perpetrators of this violence, who are in fact a motley crew. We have vulgar foreigners like the apparently Algerian Abdelkrim, who smokes in secret and flirts with a married woman. There are a number of local recruits, like the earnest Tuareg driver Omar, who teaches Abdelkrim how to drive a manual transmission 4 x 4 in the sand and wants his boss to be honest about what he knows and doesn’t. We have young men who obviously joined the cause for opportunistic reasons as they sit around talking about soccer, which is forbidden, and fail to muster any enthusiasm when asked to promote their jihadist cause by appearing in a propaganda video. We have the older Arabic-speaking Abu Hassan, who listens with callous indifference to Kidane’s emotional appeal to see his daughter before he dies. We also have the Tuareg translator who mediates between Abu Hassan and Kidane, whom Kidane recognizes and considers a traitor who has sold out to a foreign ideology. We have one jihadist who lays down his weapon and spontaneously breaks into a dance in the privacy of Zabou’s courtyard at the same time as two lovers in the town square are being stoned to death. Finally, we have groups of men who are prepared to kill nonbelievers: they appear in clusters in the back of pickup trucks wielding AK-47s; they participate in the public execution of the two lovers by stoning; and, they assemble in the end to witness Kidane’s execution in retribution for shooting Amadou.

The tableau of militant jihadists that Sissako presents is characterized by an absence of ethical coherence and an illusion of unity. The survival of this violent political regime depends in part on the lucrative opportunity leaders are able to extend to recruits, which has the effect of dividing ethnic and national communities. The jihadists who have occupied Timbuktu are also characterized by their vulgar, petty, mean-spirited interpretation of Islam: vulgar because they brazenly transgress the sharia law they claim to uphold and enforce; petty because they ask old men to roll up their pants and require fishmongers to put on gloves; mean-spirited because of their shallow interest in debate, reason, and justice. The jihadists’ ethical deficit is most forcefully established when a few of them enter the mosque in the name of jihad wearing boots and wielding machine guns, a scene that is depicted as an outrageous intrusion into the sacred realm of ablutions, prayer, and peaceful meditation. The local imam responds to this intrusion by saying, “Here, in Timbuktu, he who dedicates himself to religion uses his head, not his weapons.” This dialogue between the jihadists and the imam underscores the critical distinction between the tradition of Islam in Timbuktu—a center from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries of Islamic learning that had been nourished by debate and scholarship—and the modern perpetration of violence in the name of jihad, which is represented as absurd, unilateral, and bloodthirsty. While Sissako does not include scenes showing these modern jihadists destroying ancient manuscripts, historic mosques, and mausoleums built as shrines to the city’s founding fathers, the hostility toward the traditional culture that was displayed during the occupation is conveyed symbolically and through dialogue. The narrative does not participate in a spectacular or monolithic representation of savagery with scenes of rape and beheadings in Hollywood style; instead the film offers a complex representation of the dishonest, contradictory, imperfect, but ultimately human, perpetration of politically motivated violence in the name of Islam.

Next, I would like to return to Odile’s observation that the scene in which Kidane accidentally shoots Amadou is important and yet has received relatively little critical commentary. This pivotal scene operates as a subtle shift in the main narrative of jihadist occupation by placing the dispute between the pastoralist family and the fisherman in the foreground. The circumstances of the conflict are relatively simple, but Kidane’s reaction and its consequences are complicated and contribute to the layers in this narrative concerning the perpetration of violence. Kidane’s character is principally defined by his relationship to his Tuareg family and their way of life. He is married to Satima, the mother of their daughter, Toya, and is the custodial parent of his nephew, Issan.

This Tuareg patriarch suffers a series of affronts to his ability to protect his family and their property, before and after his arrest: Amadou mistreats his nephew when the boy lets the cattle into the river for water; his favorite cow is killed when she gets stuck in the fisherman’s nets; his wife is exposed to the gaze of men during his absence; his daughter feels bereft and abandoned while he is in jail. The various affronts that lead up to the conflict with Amadou help us understand why Kidane says, “All of this has to stop. Humiliation must come to an end.”

As the conflict unfolds, Satima becomes the voice of reason, echoing the imam, when she urges her husband to talk to Amadou and to leave his gun at home. My reading of the film differs from Alioune’s in this regard. I interpret the character of Kidane as an artist and not a former rebel. During an earlier conversation between Toya and Issan we learn that the boy’s father died because he was a warrior and Toya’s father is still alive because he is a musician. This theme, of the distinction between warriors and artists, is further elaborated in a later sequence where the editing establishes a transition between young people singing in town and Kidane playing his guitar, while Toya and Satima are singing in the tent. The transition creates an implicit thematic association between the enjoyment of music and the desire for personal liberty, and suggests that Kidane has more in common with these youths than with the occupiers. The pistol Kidane owns bears no resemblance to weapons used in the armed combat that was happening in northern Mali at the time, where AK-47s are most common. What is more, Kidane handles the hand gun awkwardly, and someone with previous military experience would have likely dealt with the confrontation with Adamou differently. Acting out of anger and frustration, Kidane betrays his life-sustaining role as a singer and artist and disregards his wife’s sage advice when he confronts Amadou and accidentally shoots him during the struggle in the river. This secondary narrative intersects with the main narrative when Kidane’s inability to compensate Amadou’s family with forty cows, and the fisherman’s family’s refusal to forgive him, lead the jihadists in charge of the tribunal to decide to execute Kidane in the town square. As this third link in the chain of violent actions—Amadou has killed GPS, Kidane has killed Amadou—is about to be set in place, Kidane makes one last request: to see his daughter’s face before he dies. Kidane’s paternal longing then becomes the focal point of the narrative, and the dramatic culmination of this interpersonal conflict is reached when Toya and Issan are seen running into the occupied city of Timbuktu after Kidane and Satima have both been killed.

Our discussion of music and musicians sent me back to the soundtrack of Timbuktu, which features an original score by the Tunisian composer Amine Bouhafa. In the credits Sissako cites excerpts from three songs: “Ya Allahoo,” by Khalifa Ould Eide and Dimi Mint Aba (Mauritanian singers); “Tiyota,” by Toulou Kiki (a Tuareg singer and actress from Agadez, Niger, who plays Satima); and “Tomboctou Faso” by Fatoumata Diawara, which the woman sings while being flogged. During the idyllic scene in which the Tuareg family enjoys music with the moon overhead, Kidane plays the guitar, and Satima and Toya sing the beginning of “Tiyota”—a popular love song in Tamashek. This scene directly precedes the one in which Amadou kills GPS. It seems to me that if Sissako had wanted to link Kidane to the secular nationalist Azawad movement, having them sing an anthem here would have been a great choice. Kidane obviously shares no sympathies with Ansar Dine. Incidentally, the actor who plays Kidane was known as a musician in the group Tamikrest before being cast in the role of Kidane.

If we look more closely at some of Sissako’s aesthetic choices, can we, as Ken asks,

In this regard we may consider how Sissako uses a panoramic long shot in the pivotal scene that lingers on Amadou as he thrashes about in the river before succumbing to his wound, and then on Kidane, who slowly staggers all the way across the river to the other bank before exiting the frame. The camera pulls back from a mid-range shot of the place of Amadou’s death to offer a stunning view of both sides of the river and the surrounding landscape. The beautifully composed frame of the two of them is saturated with emotion and insists on a moment of quiet, sustained reflection on the tragic loss of human life. As Ken discussed, the choices in this scene fit with Florent Couao-Zotti’s (Reference Couao-Zotti2015) summary of the stylistic elements in Sissako’s toolkit. In addition to this use of panoramic shots—of which we have less intense versions in Life on Earth and Heremakono (Waiting for Happiness, 2002)—Sissako departs from his usual repertoire in two significant ways in Timbuktu. He creates suspense by carefully crafting his narrative not in a strictly chronological manner, but with more of a sustained sense of narrative coherence than in the allusive poetic qualities of his previous films. He also offers a series of scenes that establish the ethical deficit of the jihadists in terms that are far less ambiguous than in any of his previous work. The way he orchestrates the confrontation between the army of men who impose their radical appropriation of Islam with its ideological rigidness and the defiant humanity of ordinary citizens is arguably the strongest aspect of the film. Sissako also weaves in three separate encounters in the mosque between the imam and the occupying forces with an uncharacteristic use of dialogue to develop an ethical frame for the narrative.

In conclusion, let me add that I have been having a delayed response to the Okigbo intertext, “Love Apart,” that Ken introduced to call our attention to the importance of love in the film. Kidane’s arrest at the halfway point in the film’s narrative, splitting up the couple of Kidane and Satima during the second half of the story, defines the rest of drama. Upon further reflection, it seems to me that the filmmaker’s choice to separate the lovers at the center of his story intersects with the tragic event that Sissako has explained as the genesis of his film:

While Timbuktu opens and closes with the motif of hunting and the sound of machine gun fire, at the center of this narrative is an affirmation of our shared humanity and our capacity to love one another, and an appeal to protect these liberties.