DVD
Review: Timbuktu—Jihad for Dummies
A
gazelle zigzags through the landscape while macho maniacs fire at it
with guns. That represents fragile systems under attack. Remember
'Bambi Meets Godzilla'? The same macho maniacs then destroy cultural
artifacts as a matter of (religious) course, anything a threat to the
doctrines and dictates of dogma. People are corralled and cajoled
into concentration camps of convenience for the sake of religion
without reason and even less rhyme: neither cigarettes, music, nor
football—God forbid alcohol—are allowed.
I
think everybody has at least some vague recollection of the events
that occurred in northern Mali in 2012, when Arab jihadis
basically co-opted the desert nomadic Tuaregs' long wished-for dreams
of an Azawad homeland, using them in their quest for a fundamentalist
Islamist state, then basically hanging the Tuaregs out to dry before
the central Bamako government—with French help—regained control.
It
wasn't pretty, of course—fundamentalist jihad rarely is—and
many people got hurt, many with little margin for error. Of course
it's the Tuaregs themselves who got hurt most, and the movie makes
that clear, albeit in a subtle way. They are closest culturally to
the Arab jihadis, what with their common Semitic (yes) origins
and speech, yet their lifestyles are almost diametrically opposed,
freedom opposed to control.
This
is a theme common to the movie and the society: diversity, freedom
and control; and the fact that so many languages are spoken and so
few know the lingua franca—French (sure I'll take the pun).
Black Bambara speakers rule from the distant capital in Bamako, and
they also head up the social hierarchy, in which nomadic Tuaregs are
largely left out. This is a theme of the movie, too, as much or more
than the fundamentalist interlopers who've found their way to the
ancient centers of Islamic learning in Timbuktu.
The
plot is simple but the touch is deft: desert-dwelling cattle-herding
Kidane accidentally lets his shepherd get too close to a fisherman's
net, which results in a cow being killed. When Kidane sets out to
avenge the insult, the fisherman himself is killed and Kidane is
arrested and jailed. The plot at that point becomes rather
predictable and almost superfluous, bride theft cultural destruction
and sharia law, more important being the subtleties and ironies of
the jihadist occupation, much of which is quite humorous and
symbolic, to wit:
Prohibited
from playing football (soccer), players improvise without a ball—men
without balls! Get it? The effect is sublime. Another of the running jokes is how badly the Tuaregs speak Arabic, and even
their English is better, this in a country that is nominally
French-speaking. Ouch! And a feature common to primitive desert life are not-so-primitive
cell-phones, keeping families constantly in touch, though the
society is fragmented linguistically. Then real
imams and mullahs try to explain some religion to
these pious horny macho zealots who shoot their guns instead of
shooting their wad—priceless.
Director
Abderahmane Sissako deserves much credit for dealing with the roles
realistically, roles which could easily be caricatured and
propagandized for political purposes. The jihadist absurdities are
subtle and nuanced without skewering Islam in the process. Of
course one of the more detestable absurdities about international
jihad, especially in Mali, is its prohibition of music, this
in one of the world's musical gold mines.
A
special treat for us world music junkies is the appearance of
Fatoumata Diawara as 'la chanteuse' in a scene exhibiting such
debauchery (heh heh), she resplendent in robes and musical riches,
bathed in smiles sunlight and kisses, musical souls meeting in
corners and niches past midnight, so as to hide what they're doing...
The
movie had a few surprises for me, and may be guilty of some cultural
fudging for cinematic effect, e.g. using desert Tuaregs in the role
of cattle-herders, when to my knowledge that's more the Fulani
lifestyle. In fact there were no camels until the end, something
the Sahara is quite well-known for, that and the old trade routes
that used Timbuktu as origin and destination. Tamashek (Tuareg) is
not even listed as one of the film's languages, as hard to fin in
the credits as it was for Kidane in the film itself.
The
settting is in Mali, but the film is Mauritanian, their entry in the
Oscar foreign-language film category. The Thai entry was made by a
Korean with a theme of homosexuality, so WTF? This is a worthy
contender.
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