African Video Movies and Global Desires. Carmela Garritano
literate in English, whose members, like the doctor himself, are able to decipher and appreciate the university degrees that verify his modernity and civility. When the audience first encounters the doctor in his home, he is sculpting an abstract human form. His wife enters his studio, explaining that she has been doing the monthly accounts and has noted a few discrepancies. Their affectionately playful exchange seems to be modeling the companionate marriage for audiences. She embraces her husband and gently scolds him for not charging his clients more money for his services, and he responds, earnestly, “If I turned them away because of their poverty, it would be on my conscience. If they don’t pay me when they can afford to, that’s on their conscience.”
Anne McClintock, among others, has written extensively on the gendered character of the nation-state, arguing that “nations have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference” (1997, 89). The conjugal family functions as the primary institution for naturalizing the historical and ideological configuration of the nation and reproducing gender difference. Significantly, it is Kumasenu, a boy who grows to be a man, whose emergent subjectivity allegorizes the emergent nationalism the film intends to produce. The film asserts this explicitly with the authority of the narrator’s voice. Since taking Kumasenu into his home, Dr. Tamakloe has struggled to sculpt the boy’s face. “As a sculptor, he saw in it the youth of his country, swiftly emerging from its ancient tranquility into the confusion of the present age. In Kumasenu he saw a boy on a bridge, uncertainly and unhappily making his way from one world to another.” Much as Tamakloe shapes wood into human form, the film shapes Kumasenu into a citizen.
Kumasenu’s journey into citizenship is defined not only by the spaces he crosses, moving from the village to the city, but by severing all ties to his extended family. Cousin Agboh signifies, most obviously, the corruption of the city, but he also represents the dangerous bonds that link Kumasenu to the village and his lineage. In every instance, Kumasenu’s blind admiration for Agboh leads him to break laws and act against the interests of the nation. While Kumasenu is living happily in the Tamakloe household, Agboh suddenly appears, flanked by a group of young thugs, and he convinces Kumasenu that the police have been hunting for him because they believe that he stole the storekeeper’s money. He threatens to turn Kumasenu over to the police if he does not unlock the door to the doctor’s examination room, where the doctor keeps the drugs which Agboh and his friends intend to steal. Kumasenu refuses and, for this, receives a brutal beating from Agboh and his gang. On a subsequent evening, when Mrs. Tamakloe is out of town and the doctor on a house call, Agboh and the gang of boys manage to break into the doctor’s surgery. The narrator solemnly proclaims, “At that moment, Kumasenu became of age. The child became a man.” Kumasenu alerts the police and, after a long chase and struggle, apprehends Agboh. The narrator concludes: “Kumasenu the hunted had become Kumasenu the hunter.” Within the logic of the film, the admiration of the young boy for his delinquent cousin must be displaced in order for the boy to enter manhood and become a member of the Tamakloe family. Only when he comes to know Agboh for what he is, the narrator surmises, “an enemy of all those who observe the simple laws that allow men to work and enjoy their lives without fear,” can he defeat his cousin in an act of physical violence that validates his manhood and his place in modern Ghana.
The mention of work merits consideration. Agboh is described as an enemy because he is an inherently transitional figure. Transitional between the village and the city, he himself represents a type of character that is improperly assimilated. He is a “monster” precisely because he is anomalous. He cannot work as a fisherman, nor does he work in the city. And yet his anomalousness, disclosed as it is in the form of criminal impulses, also speaks to an ethical domain. What Agboh represents for Kumasenu, then, is the claim of an improperly constituted ethical dimension, since Agboh is no Robin Hood, but merely a thug and a scoundrel. Thus with this disavowal, what Kumasenu displays is the capacity to transcend this improperly constituted ethical dimension and to embrace the modern.
Within the narrative, Kumasenu’s attraction to the sexualized character Adobia, whom the narrator describes as “a friend to many men but faithful to none,” must also be sanctioned in order for him to become a son and citizen. Neither a mother nor a wife, she too is improperly assimilated into urban life, her independence equated with sexual promiscuity.26 The film coordinates a comparison between the two female figures, presented as polarities of the Mother Africa trope, the good mother and the bad prostitute (Stratton 1994). Kumasenu must leave one in order to find the other. Indeed, when Kumasenu meets the doctor and his wife, the narrator comments that he “found new friends to take the place of Adobia.” Grace Tamakloe epitomizes maternal affection and devotion to her husband, never appearing before the camera without the doctor, Kumasenu, or her daughter Ama at her side. Nor is she sexualized by the spectator’s gaze. Upon seeing Kumasenu when he first enters her home and hearing his story, “her heart ached.” She asks her husband, “If our Ama, at that boy’s age, were alone and friendless, and fell among thieves, and a man came by who could help her, what would you expect of that man?” It is her heartfelt, motherly appeal that convinces the doctor to assist the boy and guide him toward manhood. In Nationalisms and Sexualities, the authors suggest that the fraternity of the nation enacts an “idealization of motherhood” and “the exclusion of all non-reproductively oriented sexualities from the discourse of the nation” (Parker et al. 1992, 6). The narrative treatment of Grace and Adobia verifies this conclusion. The film suggests that the stability of the new nation depends on the stability of the family unit, and the security of the family, in turn, relies on a woman who fulfills her “natural” duty as mother, producing and caring for children, instead of seeking economic independence or sexual pleasure.
The film visualizes Adobia, from her first presentation, as an object of Kumasenu’s desire. Seen from Kumasenu’s point of view, she is an erotic spectacle on display. Theories of film spectacle, perhaps most commonly associated with Tom Gunning’s work on early cinema and its attractions (1995) and Laura Mulvey’s feminist film theory (1989), activate the idea of spectacle to describe those moments in cinema when the novelty, scale, or intensity of an onscreen image momentarily disrupts the spectator’s engagement with character psychology or narrative. Exhibitionist and soliciting “a highly conscious awareness of the film image engaging the spectator’s attention” (Gunning 1995, 121), the cinematic spectacle offers the pleasure of plentitude, of visually consuming an unconcealed and fascinating attraction. Mulvey deploys the language of spectacle to theorize the eroticized and fetishistic portrayal of woman, which, she argues, represents the primary spectacular investment of classic Hollywood cinema. An image “displayed,” the woman as erotic object functions as the focal point where “the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined” (Mulvey 1989, 19). It is the female form, then, that assures “the active power of the erotic look” (20). I want to suggest that in The Boy Kumasenu, the suturing of the film’s spectator to the African male subject through the spectacle of Adobia is intended to humanize Kumasenu and demonstrate his coming into subjectivity. The film asserts his agency through the active and erotic look he casts on Adobia, so this articulation of masculine desire and subjectivity produces, as Mulvey (1989) first explained, a gendered division of labor. Adobia remains the passive object whose purpose is to demonstrate Kumasenu’s agency.
The most pronounced enunciation of gendered spectacle occurs in the film’s one musical number. In this segment, Kumasenu tags along when Adobia goes to a local dance club to meet Yeboah. There, Kumasenu watches Adobia and Yeboah as they slow dance and she sings a love song. Adobia’s song, seemingly meant for Yeboah alone, flows beyond the confines of narrative, crossing over into extra-diegetic space. Foregrounded on the soundtrack, it silences the film’s voice-over narration and directly engages the film’s theatrical audience. It becomes like a musical performance, incorporating and modifying aspects of the 1930s Hollywood musical number, which loosely follows the standard arrangement of the musical attraction as described by Pierre-Emmanuel Jaques (2006):
The camera is on the spectator’s side or backstage, making the theatrical location of the singing and dancing number quite clear. Having made us aware of this special demarcation, the camera makes its way into the space of the number itself, literally breaking apart the diegetic universe. The number area is specially organized and built for the film spectators only. (282)
Filmed