Was I British in My Past Life?
She was meeting a man she had recently and abruptly swiped right on. She was in a state of complete indifference. Not only that, but her tarot reader told her, it would be a relationship with a special woman that would heal her emotionally for the rest of her life.
When she arrived at the corner, he was there, a painfully pale but gentle face. They had exchanged just six messages the night before. His anxiety was visible to her. It was at once disconcerting and weirdly attractive. He immediately reminded her of men she had known years before. A little bit of Josh, her expatriate English heartbreak. A little bit of Marcus, her in-country volatile neighbour who sometimes held her hand during panic attacks. A little bit of Conor, the painfully emotional Irish man who felt obligated to his girlfriend of 10 years but still cheated on her. A little bit of Drew, her posh, dry-humoured and slightly unhygienic friends with benefits (and first man to make her cum).
If you were to ‘jump up and down and move it all around. Shake your head to the sound, and put your hands on the ground. Take one step left and one step right, one to the front and one to the side. Clap your hands once and clap your hands twice.’ You’d see they were all from the British Isles!
In her freshly drunken haze, she thought it imperative to message the group chat, “I love the UK folk!”
Later, while whizzing out an unworthy old-fashioned, she pondered, could she have been British in her past life?
She recalled donning Union Jack printed nails for an entire month in year.7. Her favourite film was ‘Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging’– she had rewatched it over twenty times and could recite the script word for word. She felt seen by ‘Bend it Like Beckham’ and envious of Jesminder. Her friends were stunned that a pessimist like her would be leader of the Malaysian Directioners after bagging on every heartthrob that came before (sorry Justin). They found it peculiar when she claimed she had found enlightenment after listening to the silky smooth cadence of YouTube’s Brit Crew daily. Her body clock had rewinded by 8 hours all through high school. And, it was pretentious if not terribly uncool when she tried to emulate Effy Stonem for a fair few years. These days, people wonder why she sounds a little… “British”. How could she explain that she once returned to school after a summer of binging ‘Mad Fat Diary’ with a scouser accent?
At 18, following six vision boards and a thousand squealing cries, she arrived at her new sort-of home in the North End of London. She had driven for one hour from the airport and flown fourteen hours from her home in Kuala Lumpur to arrive with a stunned, hunted relief. She had come to London for a 3-year-long university course at a revered arts institute. With a lack of focus, multiple mishaps, and scarce future planning (thanks for nothing Eckhart Tolle), she was forced to move back home. Finally, she made her way to the most culturally similar alternative that would offer her a visa– Melbourne, Australia.
Here, she especially missed the flat vowels and clipped endings of a typical northern accent amidst the nasal drawls and sighing “naurs”. The dry humour she had grown to love from age ten was quickly replaced with hijinks and ‘Shoeys’. And, most people had opted for meth in their adolescent rebellion instead of coke.
So when he spoke to her, she tried to keep herself from closing her eyes and drifting into a deep slumber. It would be much too embarrassing to admit her YouTube history was glutted with “Scottish accent ASMRs”.
“Aye,” he said and she giggled.
The day after their date, she took a quiz titled “We Know For Certain What Nationality You Were In A Past Life!” on playbuzz.com. The first three tries told her she was Russian.
The website was clearly a farce. She contemplated spitting in a tube for 23andMe but preferred swallowing and wasn’t too sure about all the DNA stealing controversies.
Instead, she watched Touki Bouki, a film she first heard about in February when she attended a screening of short films, ‘Mandem’ and ‘Road’ at ACMI.
*
Touki Bouki is a 1973 avant-garde Senegalese film directed by Djibril Mambéty. It is touted as being Martin Scorsese’s ‘favourite international film’ (whatever the fuck that means). Now a staple of Art House cinema, Touki Bouki even featured in Beyoncé and Jay Z’s On The Run II tour video. However, Mambéty’s niece, filmmaker Mati Diop, was left unimpressed, telling newspaper Libération, “It looks like it’s an art director who brought them the image, and no one has been concerned about what artistic and political story is behind it.”
Set on the outskirts of Senegal’s capital city, Dakar, Touki Bouki follows two young lovers, Mory, a cowherd country boy who drives a motorcycle mounted with a zebu skull and Dogon cross, and Anta, a university student with a barely veiled contempt for her elders’ traditions. The two bond over a distaste for their village surroundings and fantasise about escaping to Paris, for a delirious taste of ‘paradise’. They embark on a series of petty crimes á la Bonnie and Clyde until Mory hits the jackpot.
On paper, Mambéty’s storyline seems direct, even simple but the production is incredibly layered. He offers an experimental and discontinuous approach that blends foggy dreamscapes with jaggedy sounds to depict the complex and potent recurring postcolonial dream (nightmare) of migrating elsewhere, usually to colonist land. He chops up Josephine Baker’s ‘Paris Paris,’ with indigenous music (played on a Peul flute, particularly by the nomadic Fula people) to convey Mory and Anta’s disillusioned utopian desire for ‘freedom’.
Josephine Baker famously renounced her American citizenship for a French one. Musicologist Alexander Fisher wrote, Mambéty’s purposeful use of Baker’s 'Paris, Paris' serves to remove the Black American Baker from her Eurocentric habitat in which she was exoticised for both, her gender and race (that space being ‘utopian’ Paris, where she mostly appeared as a nude erotic dancer). Touki Bouki repositions her within an African context while deploying Western sound capturing/editing techniques. This, Fisher claims, breaks down the prevailing divisions between African and Western music to form a cultural bridge, establishing a line that connects Fula’s forced migration on slave boats to the U.S. and Baker’s migration from the U.S. to Europe. Here, Baker’s voice is reclaimed for an African audience, thereby completing a triangular journey that demarcates 'the ‘Black Atlantic’.
The Black Atlantic coined by Paul Gilroy, describes the Atlantic world as being deeply shaped by slavery and the slave trade. Between 1492 and 1820 about two-thirds of the people who crossed the Atlantic to the Americas were African. Gilroy argues the violently brutal migration process played a key role in the development of Black consciousness across America and Europe. Here, the Black consciousness is ambivalent, it does not just reject white culture but actively engages with it; re-crossing the Atlantic creatively and lending itself to the formation of modernism. In his view, the Black Atlantic describes a transatlantic culture that is African, American, Caribbean and British all at once.
In a dream, Mory stands on top of a car decked with stars and stripes of the American flag and sings a griot (tribal West African storytelling) song, while the scene cuts to shots of cheering children in the streets of Colobane, making it seem as if they are following the car down an empty and dusty country road. Mory is naked, a nod to the film’s name, which translates to “Journey of The Hyena”. In one of his last interviews with N. Frank Ukadike, Mambéty says, “The hyena is an African animal… The hyena comes out only at night; he is afraid of daylight, like the hero of Touki Bouki… The hyena has no sense of shame, but it represents nudity, which is the shame of human beings.”
When the time comes for them to finally depart for Paris, Mory psyches himself out, leaving Anta to sail away alone. As the film comes to a close, Mory realises he has been spiritually upbraided by his Grandma. She calls on him to remain in Colobane to face the aftermath of colonialism and to create new stories for a modern and independent Senegal.
Like Mory, Mambéty stayed in Colobane, the deprived neighbourhood and setting of all his films. Influenced by Ya Dikone, an icon of resistance and rebellion in Senegal, Mambéty refused to migrate to France to find work or study cinema. Instead, he attended a local theatre college before getting kicked out and producing Touki Bouki with a mere US$30,000 budget and a lack of camera equipment.
Touki Bouki depicts migration dreams in postcolonial communities as one that exists more as a feeling than an actual locality. These places we long for do not exist outside of our minds, and just like a lot of things in life, are mere manifestations of perceptive illusions. ‘Elsewhere’ is just another story told to soothe our cripplingly confused souls.
*
The next morning, she wakes up in hot flushes. She digs through her side table drawer like a blind man searching for his cane till she realises, she is still wearing her ‘Keep Calm And Carry On’ sleeping mask.
Removing it, she stands up and walks over to the mirror. A protruding gut with curly grey hairs circling pink nipples. Short stout legs and a sushi-roll-sized penis. Thick floppy arms and bitten fingernails. She moves slowly, first brushing the horse-shoe patterned hairs poking out on either side of her forehead. Working downward, she strokes her nose and pulls on a straggler at the very edge of her left nostril. She admires it before placing it in her pyjama pocket. Swinging her fingers up swiftly into her mouth, she starts to lick them up and down before placing them on her Spotted Dick.
Finished. She walks downstairs and puts the kettle on.
‘Nothing like a good ol’ builder’s tea mate,’ she says grinning.