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A Haunting
By Bedatri D. Choudhury

Dahomey
Dir. Mati Diop, France/Senegal/Benin, MUBI

In 1898, the Lumière brothers were likely the first filmmakers to capture the Eiffel Tower when they made the short Panorama During the Ascent of the Eiffel Tower. Ever since, the Tower has been a stand-in for Paris and its grandeur on film. But this isn’t the case with Mati Diop’s Berlinale Golden Bear-winning documentary, Dahomey. The succinct 67-minute film begins with a shot of an unnamed Parisian streetside where a dozen or so plastic replicas of the Eiffel Tower blink against the darkness of the night, modest tchotchkes that can fit into one’s palm. In Diop’s world, grandeur and majesty are instead reserved for a collection of artifacts that form the basis of her documentary.

Between 1892-94, the French army invaded the West African kingdom of Dahomey and plundered the heavily militarized and prosperous kingdom, looting—among other riches—its ornate objects of daily use which then ended up as historical artifacts in Paris’ Musée du quai Branly. Dahomey documents the process of repatriation (and its aftermath) as 26 of these artifacts are returned to their original home, Dahomey, now a part of modern-day Benin. From the sidewalks of Paris, the film moves to the inert halls of a museum where officials in white coats touch, tie, wrap, and box the artifacts for their very belated journey.

Among them are ceremonial thrones that depict kings and their slaves and anthropomorphic statues, one of a shackled man holding his right arm up in the air, almost in defiance of his enslaved present. Collectively, the artifacts are embodied by a voiceover by Haitian author Makenzy Orcel. Diop, who co-wrote the voiceover with Orcel, uses these poetic interludes to give voice to these statues and objects that have stood, for centuries, in silence, in foreign lands. It is in these musings that the dry and bureaucratic process of handing over artifacts between countries finds artistic realization. The dilemma that lies ahead for the artifacts, as the booming voice tells us, is the conundrum of moving from a place where they are not recognized to a place that has changed beyond any recognition.

Once the artifacts reach Benin, they’re greeted by jubilant crowds dancing and singing. Construction workers, who will perhaps never make it to Palais de la Marina—Benin’s presidential residence that will house the 26 pieces—take photos of the trucks bringing in the artwork. Young girls ceremonially wash the ground to welcome them. The homecoming that has been pending for centuries is celebrated and relished. Shots of Beninese dignitaries arriving in their finery to witness the repatriated pieces are intercut with scenes from a town hall where students of local universities argue what this return of artifacts means to them. In the most captivating parts of the documentary, filmed in a quiet vérité, students bring forth issues of colonialism, hegemony, jingoism, class, world politics, and heritage.

While some believe that going to the museum to see the artifacts is an act of patriotism in itself, others argue that Benin is still walking a road paved by its French colonizers. Some say that the entire process of returning these is a part of France’s PR machinery, designed to make the colonizing country look benevolent and generous. Museums have long engaged in unethical practices—violence, theft, and power. For all their sterility and inert order, museums in former colonizing countries are full of things that rightfully don’t belong there. And often when it’s time for objects to be returned to where they come from, those lands have metamorphosed into complex, messy, spaces themselves.

In 2020, Benin, with its Human Development Index of 0.520, ranked 163th of 189 countries, signaling high rates of poverty in a country 65% of whose population is under the age of 25. A student in Diop’s film marvels at the marketing costs the government has undertaken to publicize the return of the artifacts: “like there are no empty bellies in the country.” Despite it all, the kingdom of Dahomey which existed for centuries before Benin was born, is the rightful home of these statues, thrones, drinking vessels, and memorial structures. The erstwhile land of plenty that was pillaged by the West.

Sinukas are tall metal structures that Dahomey’s Fon people built to memorialize their dead, believing they were portals between the world of the living and the ancestors. In a museum, they become inert objects of wonder behind glass walls barred from any kind of touch. A throne lies empty, only to be glanced at. What are now considered artifacts were once intended to be used and broken. Is steering away from the origin, one wonders, really the way to create a sense of history?

Diop lets these questions hang in the air instead of trying to provide answers. In a post-screening discussion at New York Film Festival, she said this process of making a film with centuries-old objects didn’t feel like she was facing the past; instead it was an “extremely present feeling” of dealing with contemporary politics—the knotty, messy whole of it. The idea of the film, she said, came to her in 2017 when the subject of restitution was invoked in the news. It was the first time she had heard the word. It is an interesting term, especially when compared to repatriation—both words that are often used interchangeably when talking about returning artifacts acquired through colonial looting. With repatriation, it is implied that objects are returned to a nation-state at the behest of its government, while restitution signals the return of an object to a community or a tribe.

In Dahomey, where its namesake country no longer exists in its original form and a community pretty much means all of a new nation’s citizens, the question of who receives the artifacts becomes contentious. Their return and its associated fanfare is rightly questioned by the Beninese youth born into a postcolonial nation but whose futures are still defined by the legacy of colonialism. In Spectres of Marx, French philosopher Jacques Derrida talks of the idea of “hauntology”—where ideas of the past haunt the present, reminding everyone of a future that couldn’t be attained.

The Beninese museum artifacts are inherently hauntological, and Diop accentuates their supernatural quality with her use of the otherworldly voiceover, complemented by a musical score that verges on the fantastical and fairytale-like. The space that lies in between those worlds is not liminal—it is the present, which Diop, a Senegalese French filmmaker, inhabits through her life and art.

The film, Diop said, “tries to imagine history in the first person . . . I realized my imagination too had become colonized. But my imagination should have no limits.” The artifacts, therefore, are actors living out the tale of their own return, even though it’s difficult to distinguish the destination from the origin. What could’ve been a space of confusion becomes dream-like in Diop’s world. To build a future, she infers, we must dream and hope our way out of the ghostly binds that limit us even in their absence.