Reading Shaun de Waal’s review of Zulu Love Letter (”Woman on the Verge” August 5) left me wondering just which Zulu Love Letter he had watched. The review is a superficial dismissal of the film; his narrow critical vision does gross injustice to such a rich and layered film.
In De Waal’s exasperation that the movie’s ”past events relate inevitably to apartheid-era brutality — so far so standard for a South African story nowadays”, perhaps, lies the crux of why Zulu Love Letter is, in his view, not the film of the week. Certain facets of our history continue to be shrouded in social amnesia and an interrogation of the past is dangerous because it ruptures our sanitised sense of our history. Zulu Love Letter is uncomfortable in its graphic peeling-away of the dry crust of the present over the wounds of the past, laying bare the septic depths of unhealed scars. Worse still, such films nudge us into the disturbing realisation that not everyone has moved on, and for many, the past and its traumas still haunt their present moments.
De Waal’s barb at what he terms ”soap-opera style shouting and weeping” illustrates yet another failure to appreciate the film’s deliberate lingering on various instances of pain and guilt. This subverts our well-choreographed ritual glimpses into our history and forces us to meditate on our own unacknowledged complicities.
The reviewer’s failure to engage with the issues raised in the film is at best disappointing. It is lost on him that the film adopts an apparently jumbled narrative structure to force us to actively reflect on it. Similarly, it rejects closure, questioning as it does precisely this false sense of resolution of the past.
The problem, however, goes beyond a mere misinterpretation of Zulu Love Letter. The review’s failure to meaningfully engage with the film suggests a severe case of cultural illiteracy, manifest in the reading of local film using interpretative tools distilled from a predominantly Western filmic diet.
There is a serious dissonance between the reviewer’s critical vision and the film, which may account for the blanket dismissal of the film without engaging with the issues it raises and the aesthetic choices it makes. There appears to be a pattern to this, as in the recent past, three other films — uCarmen eKhayelitsha, In My Country and Drum — received equally scathing reviews. Film reviewers need to be more discerning of the dissimilarities between African and Western cinematic practice.
The danger in using Eurocentric critical templates in reading local film echoes similar concerns in other disciplines and experiences. In democratic governance, beauty and art, Africa continues to find itself struggling for affirmation and legitimacy on the basis of standards alien to Africa.
One acknowledges the regrettable continued dominance of Western canons, but the challenge for film critics lies in a willingness to leave the comfort zones of familiar filmic practices, and venture into the depths of the nascent aesthetic trends and cinematic practices across the continent.
Grace Musila is a doctoral student of African Literature at Wits University
Right to Reply
Shaun de Waal
Dear Grace,
We watched the same film. Different people can, and do, see different things in different works of art, and it is a sign of something rich in Zulu Love Letter that it can evoke such different responses. That one may have different views, whether publicly ideological or personally emotional, is part of the scope of a pluralistic society, and I welcome yours: I’m glad others are finding more in the movie than I did. I wish it had lived up to my expectations.
There is no ”misinterpretation”; only your interpretation and my interpretation. You do not offer an alternative interpretation to mine. We agree that Zulu Love Letter is about unresolved aspects of the past that continue to haunt many people today; I said so in my review. We seem to disagree, however, on how effectively it communicates that message, or whether it works as a story. After all, it is a movie, not a treatise. For me, aspects of the narrative were jumbled and, for a movie dealing with ”truth”, it was muddled as to the ontological status of fiction.
If you read my review again, you will see that I do not object to lack of closure in Zulu Love Letter but, on the contrary, to the ”forced” closure that brings its various plotlines to an end: the ex’s death, the escape and emotional return of Mangi, the funeral service, the final solemn ”love letter” ritual … None of those things felt like a rejection of closure to me.
You speak of ”Eurocentric” critical assumptions. Yet your valorisation of lack of closure comes straight from the canons of European modernism and post modernism. If you mean that I like European movies and not African ones, on what do you base that assumption? I agree with you that we see far too few African movies on our screens, but you have no idea what I’ve seen or not seen in the past, or, clearly, what I like or don’t. Or is ”Eurocentric” simply code for the fact that I’m white, and your implication that that disables me from sympathising with black suffering or understanding African aesthetics? I am, I admit, resistant to essentialisms of this nature, but I’d love to know what is specifically African about the movie’s aesthetic as you describe it.
By the way, I designated Zulu Love Letter ”Not quite the movie of the week”; I acknowledged what I thought was good in it, though perhaps not at sufficient length for someone seeking only affirmation and not analysis. I did not review uCarmen (that was a black woman, Khubu Meth); I would regard In My Country as a more Western than African film (British director, French and American stars …); and I was not ”scathing” about Drum: I said what I thought was good and what was bad. Are you saying all those films are wonderful because they are ”African”? Besides, compared with the negative comments on Drum and, for that matter, Zulu Love Letter, by black colleagues such as Ryan Fortune, I’m practically an imbongi.
Yours,
Shaun