THE SPEAKING ARCHIVE AN INTRODUCTION TO ADJI DIEYE’S APHASIA

KATRIN BAUER

At the end of daybreak, this town sprawled-flat…

It crawls on its hands without the slightest desire to drill the sky with a stature of protest… And yet the town advances, yes it does. It even grazes every day further beyond its tide of tiled corridors, prudish shutters, gluey courtyards, dripping paintwork. – Aimé Césaire 1

In 1939, the Afro-Caribbean author, poet and politician Aimé Césaire published his seminal book-length poem titled Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (translated as Notebook of a Return to My Native Land), which reflected on the cultural identities of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour living in a colonial environment. Césaire’s complex use of architecture as a key lyrical motif in the passage quoted above and his surrealistic imagery originally stem from the author’s desire to describe universal matters of cultural belonging and his feelings of ambivalence on returning to his native Martinique in 1939, having lived in Paris for several years. While Césaire’s words refer to another place and time, his metaphorical description of an everexpanding town nonetheless continue to reverberate in my mind when I engage with Adji Dieye’s artistic interpretation of Dakar’s continuously changing cityscape.

For her most recent body of work, Aphasia (2022), which, as this essay is being written, the artist is producing in Senegal for her exhibition of the same name at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Dieye also travelled back to her place of origin, having spent most of her life in Italy and the last years in Switzerland. The photographs and video stills assembled in this book derive from Dieye’s encounter with the city of Dakar, which she revisits from an Afro-diasporic perspective – one that is to some extent similar to the myriad ways in which Césaire regards his encounter with his native island after having lived ‘as a young black colonized man thrown into the capital of the [French] empire.’2

1 Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, transl. John Berger and Anna Bostock (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), 12.

2 Françoise Vergès, ‘Martinska / Martinique: Aimé Césaire Return to My Native Land’, in Travelling Communiqué, ed. Armin Linke et al. (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2016), 26.

3 Cheikh Mbow et al., ‘Urban Sprawl Development and Flooding at Yeumbeul Suburb (Dakar-Senegal)’, African Journal of Environmental Science and Technology 2, no. 4 (April 2008): 75.

4 See ibid.

Since the Republic of Senegal gained independence from France in 1960, ‘urban development in [the country has been] portrayed as an out of control process because of the very rapid development of the metropolis capital Dakar.’3 According to Cheikh Mbow, South African climate change researcher and professor of forestry, the reason for this is the rapid growth in the city’s population, coupled with limited attempts to regulate urban areas, particularly on the outskirts of Dakar.4 The construction sites captured by Dieye that set the stage in this book’s opening sequence seem to be dormant, though, oscillating between uninhabited buildings and crude facades, empty windows and balconies surrounded by towering cranes and large fences, their muted existence determined by a certain silence. Suddenly, a figure enters the frame, absentmindedly leafing through a manuscript, mumbling sentences in broken French. Throughout the next pages, we join Dieye as she enters various sites inside and outside of Dakar, in which she sits on a rooftop, a stack of pipes or a huge mound of building sand, taking no notice of the camera directly in front of her. The sites, mostly characterised by buildings wrapped in fabric or covered in scaffolding, have not been chosen randomly by the artist: some of them represent the former territories of various indigenous ethnicities who have, since the 15th century, been repeatedly displaced and forced by Europeans to leave their ancestral lands –located where the city centre is today. This process was most pronounced when France started to establish its colonial rule over French West Africa and founded the rapidly growing city of Dakar in 1857. Centuries have passed, but now it is the Senegalese government that is selling massive tracts of land, continuously privatising and appropriating it in response to the rising demand for housing. In light of the ongoing challenges Dakar is facing in the form of ecological destruction and pollution caused by urban growth, Aphasia not only examines the political and economic dynamics of the landscape but also reconsiders it as a sociopolitical concept that ‘defines a territory [as] the basis of cultural identity’5 – that of the now displaced communities, deprived of their livelihood.

5 Marc Antrop and Veerle Van Eetvelde, ‘Territory and/or Scenery: Concepts and Prospects of Western Landscape Research’, in Current Trends in Landscape Research, ed. Lothar Mueller and Frank Eulenstein (Springer: Cham, 2019), 3.

6 Though the French ruled Senegal for almost 300 years, the country remained a multilingual country with up to 36 languages spoken, the most widespread being Wolof, the native language of the Wolof people (40% of the population), which is also used by Senegalese as a second language.

Languages as carriers of cultures and inherent gates to memory are an essential part of our lives. Often taken for granted, they offer ways to express ourselves – as individuals, nations or cultures. Therefore, language is not only informative but is also regarded as one of the most important instruments in shaping our understanding of identity. Precisely because of its formative power, language has also been used as the coloniser’s means to ‘civilise’. All over the world, a key strategy of colonial domination was to dismantle people’s different sources of spirituality and deep wisdom about their existence. Colonisation was therefore not just about controlling land and its resources but also about controlling people’s ways of speaking and passing on their knowledge and cultural heritage. In this context, it is important to remember that even after the country’s decolonisation, French remains Senegal’s official language.6 A seemingly neutral language, French continues to operate as a lingua franca, a language of business, politics and education in Senegal, holding on to the space on the country’s history shelves that it gained by gradually replacing vernacular tongues throughout the last century.

What is to be done when the present is shaped by seemingly neutral institutional narratives of the past? Although this book cannot reproduce Aphasia’s possible auditory character, the following passages intend to carefully explore what cannot be captured photographically – its polyphonic soundscape. That said, the title makes apparent that the absence of language is at the conceptual heart of this richly nuanced project: The term ‘aphasia’ (deriving from the ancient Greek word αφασία for ‘speechlessness’) describes a cognitive language disorder in which individuals are often unable to remember or communicate words. In Dieye’s work, however, the term –appropriated and transferred into a cultural context – manifests itself in the form of a speech-based performance, in which Dieye inscribes herself into the urban space by reading from presidential speeches, written in French, that have been delivered to the public since Senegal’s independence in 1960. In citing these addresses, the artist finds herself confronted with a certain speechlessness: she attempts to express herself in the official language imposed by a former colonial power that only parts of the population can actually understand in its institutional form. As the urban settings of the videobased work continue to change, so does the sound of the artist’s voice, whose tone audibly changes several times until it is no longer the artist’s own voice reading the sentences out loud but rather multiple voices of friends and people with a similar background that Dieye added during post-production. In this way, Aphasia makes use of language as a polyphonic tool to uncover submerged Afro-diasporan and Senegalese voices while reimagining the country’s eclectic cultural identity since its independence in the 1960s. Aphasia therefore unearths larger cultural and political structures in Senegal’s ‘post’-colonial identity, showing how the growing influence of modernism in West Africa has shaped the country’s heterogeneous use of languages and urban identity. Senegal’s ambition and desire, since independence, to reclaim its various cultures and identities thus constitute the foundation of the artist’s analysis. In the process, Aphasia not only explores the role of an imposed colonial language and its connection to Senegal’s nation-building, it also focuses on the importance of oral storytelling as an alternative knowledge system while engaging with the artist’s biographical background. As with many commissioned artworks, Dieye’s artistic process turned out to be fragile, requiring her to be patient and persevere. The conditions under which she operated in the Archives nationales du Sénégal (the National Archives of Senegal) over the past few months were shaped by weeks of extensive research in which she examined archival material that was instrumental in the building of Senegal’s national history, both during and ‘after’ its colonial period. Right from the start, Dieye engaged with the idea of collaboration as an important part of this work – not only to counter the national archive with the oral storytelling of her relatives living near Dakar but also to put forward a multitude of dialects as a means to reconsider the country’s present and complex heritage. After our exchanges over the last several months during her production phase, it is important to mention that Dieye has never been interested in a one-eyed approach to renegotiating the past. In line with Mark Sealy’s argument that the ‘idea of decolonizing is about the plurality of epistemologies…, rather than the…Western academic trope telling us the way that it should be’,7 we should regard Aphasia as an ‘eclectic linguistic experimentation that stretches the…monolingual frame of the French language’,8 where ‘words become images and images become words’.9

7 Mark Sealy, Photography: Race, Rights and Representation (London: Lawrence Wishart, 2022), 17.

8 Jane Hiddleston, ‘Languages of Return: Aimé Césaire and Dany Laferrière’, Studies in Travel Writing 22, no. 2 (2018): 3–4.

9 Sealy, Photography, 4.

10 Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 4.

Having tended in earlier works to operate specifically in and around the medium of photography as a means to deconstruct institutional narratives, Dieye is now moving, with Aphasia, towards a more cross-disciplinary practice, in which she makes use of language as a collaborative medium. By redirecting our gaze, she alerts us to the fact that mere photographic documentation, as presented in this book, is unable to show the artist’s transdisciplinary strategy (manifested in the exhibition space). Any process of looking at pictures requires us to accept the concealing and limited nature of photography, which we first encounter as an accumulation of surfaces challenging us to listen to the quietness hidden behind each image. Yet, ‘quiet is not an absence of articulation’ and should not be mistaken for it.10 To call out these limitations of the photographic is of the utmost importance in comprehending Dieye’s decision further down the line, which is to occupy images with spoken words in order to give them voices of their own. Her artistic endeavour is thus representative of a variety of contemporary artists, such as Simnikiwe Buhlungu or Silvia Rosi, who negotiate their diasporic position and address both the alienation and belonging caused by language as a recurring theme. By reclaiming different public spaces in Dakar with her own body, Dieye inserts herself into the urban scenery to carve out potential histories and give voice to them in a polyphonic recounting of the past through oral storytelling. The inclusion of traditional Wolof chants, as depicted in the intimate portraits on pages 54–55 and 62–63 showing the gesturing hands of Dieye’s aunts, opens up a broader space of negotiation beyond the confines of the traditional archive, allowing alternative narratives to be passed down. For Dieye, bringing together French and Wolof as intrinsically different languages both spoken in Senegal is a means to reconfigure the vocabulary that influenced Senegal’s nation-building and to air voices that have hitherto been omitted from the archive.

With one eye on the past, as well as on the coming decades, Dieye’s photographic study of Dakar’s rapidly expanding urban environment also invites us to engage visually with and actively listen to the amplifying ‘deeper

11 Nicola Brandt, Landscapes between Then and Now: Recent Histories in Southern African Photography, Performance and Video Art (London: Routledge, 2020), xix.

12 Sealy, Photography, 4.

13 Campt, Listening to Images, 52.

14 truths and subjectivities’ of the diasporic and native community the artist is closely connected to because of her own background.11 Although Aphasia takes the loss of language as its conceptual starting point, it unfolds into a soundscape that gives agency and voice to both the Afro-diasporic community and the artist’s Senegalese kin, whom we see chanting, ultimately emerging as a polyphonic canon and therefore allowing Black identities and spiritualities to express themselves as living archives.

Just as images can transmit cultural knowledge, so can the written and spoken word fuel memory and root a people’s sense of themselves in a place.12 By going a step beyond the photographic and exploring the potential of the linguistic as an artistic tool, Dieye proposes a deeply nuanced reconsideration of the country’s present state, bringing to the surface not just images but also plural voices of self-representation. Following the Black feminist visual theorist Tina Campt, one could say that ‘these images require us to do more than just see stasis…, for they capture unvisible [sic] forms of motion.’13 With her critical restaging of Senegal’s notion of modernity through the insertion of herself into the landscape and appropriation of the words of former presidents (whose politics mostly excluded the interests of the native population), Dieye examines the shaping of Senegal’s national identity. It is because of Aphasia’s polyphony that imperial phrases start to lose their lasting conviction and become porous over time. By embodying a speaking archive as a Senegalese diasporic person, Dieye decentralises her authorship as an artist by including her own community as a participatory vehicle for her reconstruction of the archive.

Although the artist restricts herself to mainly speaking in French, captions are not necessary to understand that Aphasia constitutes a critical enquiry into the linguistic establishment of a nation-state, explicitly formulated and renewed through a contemporary lens. In this sense, Dieye’s activation of archival texts – with polyphonic action – also works as a listening practice that is meant to render the language of the coloniser inconsistent and artificial. Counter-hegemonic positions like hers, defined by means of archival investigations and refusing any form of translation, show us that the recounting of history cannot be achieved through the (visual) deconstruction of imperial archives alone: rather, they remind us ‘what an actual epistemic decolonization in, and of, the present must include – a relentless politics…of critical memory and thoughtful acts of systemic reparation’ articulated through language, by means, that is, of the spoken word.14