Tuesday night Babacar and I went to Metrograph to watch Io Capitano, the odyssey of two young boys who leave Dakar to reach Europe. The film was directed by Matteo Garrone, inspired by the true story of Mamadou Kouassi Pli Adama who made the journey from the Ivory Coast and served as one of the script consultants. They were both in attendance alongside the two leads, Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall, all campaigning hard now that they’ve secured one of the five Oscar nominations for Best International Feature Film.
Babacar made an equally perilous journey, arriving in New York six months ago from Senegal. During the film, he kept interjecting - recognizing an actor from Dakar, remembering a friend of his who was also forced to captain the boat with zero experience. Afterwards, in pure Italian fashion, Matteo invited us to join the team for dinner. Babacar and Mamadou swapped stories - smuggler prices have only kept skyrocketing since both of them arrived.
The route Mamadou took through the Sahara was harrowing, it’s a miracle he survived at all. It took him three years, including a period where he was enslaved in Libya. Babacar said that route has become nearly impossible today. Mamadou now lives in Caserta, near Naples, helping new arrivals share their stories and acting as a cultural mediator between them and the authorities. In the last nine years, over 27,000 people have died making the journey but even the survivors, if they make it, have to go to harrowing lengths to establish themselves. He said Italy was deeply racist when he arrived and has only gotten worse in the sixteen years he’s lived there.
While the film was having tremendous success across Italy, Matteo was rightfully skeptical that it would lead to any lasting change. A special screening was held in Belgium where hundreds of EU parliament members watched the film as part of an impact campaign specifically geared towards policy makers. Mere weeks later, even more draconian migration and asylum laws were passed. Migrants can’t vote and that’s the only thing politicians care about, human rights be damned. It reminded me of Candace’s most recent Stuyvesant Cove Park newsletter where she wrote: “It's why I ultimately struggle with the alleged ‘power of the lens’. Evoking empathy is great and all, but witnessing and feeling are just a small step on the path to action.”
Where Matteo feels the most good might come from are the screenings they’re planning in April across West Africa. They’ll be taking a caravan to show the film outdoors to villages who wouldn’t otherwise have access (including Babacar’s which happens to be the same as one of the leads). He knows it won’t stop people from leaving their homes for other shores, but hopefully it will at least give them a glimpse of how hard the road ahead will be.
I asked Mamadou if he could go back to Côte d'Ivoire, would he even want to? He said no, he’d feel like a stranger there now too after all this time. He doesn’t feel like he’s from Italy but he doesn’t feel like he’s from Côte d'Ivoire anymore either. Babacar lamented that Senegal was getting worse and worse. It’s one of the rare African countries to have never experienced a military coup but the future is uncertain as two-term (and therefore no longer eligible) President Macky just postponed elections indefinitely.
In the meantime, bearing witness is something worth holding on to. Sarah Aziza asks the same question in her most recent essay: “Bear witness, we say, yet three months into a livestreamed genocide, we must ask—what does all this looking do?”
Yet I have been pondering not the English, prosecutorial witness, but the Arabic. In this, our, language, the verb to witness comes from the root شهد . This is also the source of the much-maligned word شهيد, shaheed, which means, literally, witnesser, but is often translated as martyr. It is a word with many folds of meaning and history. It carries connotations not only of seeing, but of presence and proximity. To be a witness is to make contact, to be touched, and to bear the marks of this touch.
Tess Ingram from UNICEF spoke to NPR about the two-week period where she witnessed women giving birth in Gaza, mothers “leaving hours after having a serious caesarean operation, with a newborn baby, back to the streets in many cases”. About 20,000 babies have been born since October 7.
Witness the new despicable ways of murdering people in the United States. In Alabama, Kenneth Smith was executed, the first death row inmate known to die by nitrogen gas. In a joint statement, Smith and his spiritual advisor the Rev. Jeff Hood said: “The eyes of the world are on this impending moral apocalypse. Our prayer is that people will not turn their heads. We simply cannot normalize the suffocation of each other.”
Robin McDowell and Margie Mason were the reporters behind the two-year long AP investigation that found US prison labor is the hidden workforce tied to hundreds of the world's most popular food brands. “Some prisoners work on the same plantation soil where slaves harvested cotton, tobacco and sugarcane more than 150 years ago, with some present-day images looking eerily similar to the past. In Louisiana, which has one of the country’s highest incarceration rates, men working on the ‘farm line’ still stoop over crops stretching far into the distance.”
Greta Rybus has been documenting hot springs from around the world, and as someone who is happiest when soaking in hot water, I cannot wait to get my hands on her new book. One story in particular stood out: Henry Basson was forcibly removed from Riemvasmaak in the 1970s during apartheid so the government could build a military site. He was relocated with his family and the other Black residents to northern Namibia. In the 1990s, when Namibia gained independence and Mandela was elected President of South Africa, Riemvasmaak became one of South Africa’s first repatriated lands. Basson returned and is now the manager of the hot springs.
Hanif Abdurraqib writes about how Tracey Chapman’s “Fast Car” first blew up in 1998. She performed three songs at the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute, held at Wembley Stadium in London. Later in the concert, Stevie Wonder couldn’t take the stage because he had forgotten to pack his Synclavier. The show organizers asked Chapman to fill in and she jumped on stage, with only an acoustic guitar and a mic to play “Fast Car” to 75,000 people. Her album had been out for a few months already but after her Wembley performance, her song jumped to the Top 10 in the US and Top 5 in the UK.
French feminists saw what happened in the US and now the French National Assembly has passed a bill that, if approved by the Senate, would make France the first country in the world to include the right to abortion in its constitution. This (hopefully forthcoming) historical victory would be directly borne from the US Supreme Court ruling that abortion is not a right guaranteed in ours.
Another way of looking - this phenomenal new poem “Aerial View” by Jericho Brown (where the title of this post is from.)
Ezra Klein’s latest interview with Rhaina Cohen had Mike and me hooked for obvious reasons. Cohen’s book The Other Significant Others is about people creating more forms of relationships than we have words for. Klein says: “How do we open the relational apertures of our lives? How do we imagine many other possibilities for parenting, for aging, for intimacy, for friendship, for romance than what we have right now? Because the idea that what we have right now is a working norm and everything else should be understood as some deviation is wrong. It is factually untrue.” Rachel texted us after listening to the episode, “So happy that you all are invariables in our lives.”
Witness Belgian electronic musician Stromae work around Tiny Desk’s rule of “no preset sounds”, backed by three members of the Bulgarian women’s choir Yasna Voices!
Till next time,
ASK
Exquisite, moving, and deeply thoughtful writing. I'm thinking back to Rachid Bouchareb's film, Little Senegal, and I wish I could see the reaction of the Senegalese community in NYC to Io Capitano.