two: the ocean remembers
Sweet dears,
Have you seen or heard of Mati Diop’s Atlantiques (Atlantics)? It’s streaming on Netflix. I watched it for the first time one quiet weekend in early December, cocooned in my fleece blanket, hot with anticipation, curled on the worn-out couch in front of the TV. The few reviews I skimmed described it as a supernatural love story set in Dakar, a Grand Prix winner at Cannes, the debut feature from the niece of the late Djibril Diop Mambéty, director of the visionary classic Touki Bouki. Beyond that, I didn’t know what to expect.
Atlantiques centers on Ada, a seventeen-year-old girl engaged to marry the wealthy Omar via arranged marriage, though she has already given her heart to Souleiman, a construction worker. The young lovers must steal moments together: canoodling in an abandoned house, making plans to meet at the beachside bar managed by Ada’s friend, Dior, their nightly tradition. Mariama, Ada’s conservative friend, admonishes her recklessness—she’s been acting different ever since hanging out with “sluts” like Dior and Fanta. Under her criticism lies a plea. Marrying Omar secures Ada’s economic future. Why do anything to jeopardize that stability? Her parents echo a similar rationale, with her mother reminding, “Hold on to that place. Times are tough.” Ada feels no spark for Omar. Their scenes together are stilted and drained of intimacy. He comes off as entitled and shallow, as unreachable as the tower hovering over their suburb.
With Souleiman, Ada tastes another mode of existing, one unconcerned with financial survival or social status. Her soul-baring smile upon seeing him took me back to my own teen years, when a dewy look from a crush could undo my sense of logic or self. I will risk everything for you. She burrows into the curve of his sweaty neck, brushes down his spongy fro, teases him for looking at the sea instead of her. When Souleiman does look at Ada, I can feel the unbearable weight of his desire, like losing yourself under a wave, tumbling, before the exhilarating gulp of air.
I must warn you—this letter will be scattered. I can’t discuss Atlantiques tidily. There’s too much to say. The ghostly returns. Fatima Al Qadiri’s astral score, which she describes as “digital dust.” Claire Mathon’s liminal gaze. The omniscient sea. My drafts refused to stay the course, the sentences getting lost in detail (the film expands upon themes explored in a 2009 short of the same name) or running after a bewitching detour (cinema as séance, “…itself a medium of psychic transferral – spectral light beamed through celluloid…” via Luke Goodsell). The stalling began bothering me. One night, unable to sleep and too tired to get up, I tried to work out the piece in my head. Suddenly my drowsy attempts at editing were replaced by a flood of images: the tower, the window, the fires, the fever, the ocean.
The Tower
In the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, The Tower is number sixteen. At the peak of a jagged, quartz-like rock sits an impressively built, glowing-grey structure reaching for the dark heavens. The card depicts the Tower in a moment of disaster. A zigzagging lightning bolt has struck the top of the building, causing a fury of flames. Two figures, including someone with a crown, leap from the window. They plummet headfirst towards the unknown, arms outstretched. It’s a horrific sight—the fire, the plunge, the desperation. Common interpretations for the card include destruction, upheaval, sudden change, rude awakenings.
A twisting, futuristic tower haunts Atlantiques. Built along the Atlantic coast and floating like a mirage in the desert’s haze, Muejiza Tower promises luxury, modernity, and financial prowess. But the laborers of the building site, all men from the Dakar suburb overlooked by the eerie structure, haven’t been paid in over three months. They are unable to support their families or keep up with expenses of living. (In order to avoid debt collectors, Souleiman, tender and proud, must wait until night to return home). The beginning shots place us within the boiling point, as the laborers crowd the tiny construction office demanding the wages they are owed. The supervisors make empty excuses for the delays, dodging true accountability:
“We’re working, just like you. What’s happening here isn’t our fault.”
Souleiman and his friends decide to take matters into their own hands. They will cross the Atlantic, traveling by pirogue to Spain, in search of better job prospects. Have they already made up their minds on the jeep ride home? Some men chat, others stare off into the distance, a landscape coated in shimmering dust. They speed farther away from the tower, turning their attention to the infinite sea. Murmuring waves gather, emboldened by Al Qadiri’s oscillating beats, and for seconds the waters seem to sing a lament from deep below, before a cut reveals the men chanting.One shuts his eyes and slowly rubs his forehead. The camera settles upon Souleiman’s profile. He doesn’t chant. His gaze is elsewhere. He seems to be concentrating on his breathing. The sea is misty and alluring, a blur of foam. We are close enough to see the gleam of Souleiman’s gold necklace. He tries to join in their call-and-response but cannot commit to the words. A friend caresses his head. He yells out one line. Worry clouds his eyes.
In the distance, the tower swirls like a wave.
The Window
In the wee hours of a marmalade-hazy night, Ada slips out her bedroom window. She walks along the curve of the beach, attended by the thrashing waves and her girlfriends’ carefree cackling. The sea sounds hungry. At Dior’s she is greeted by propulsive R&B and a chorus of waiting women. Weeping. Panicked. Disbelieving. Plastered to cell phones that ring, ring until going to voicemail. The green neon strobe lights speckle their figures, accentuating the blue undertones of their skin. The dark of the club isn’t that different from the bottom of the ocean. Or the void.
This should be a night of flirting and drinking and dancing. But their men have gone out to sea.
The window appears jarringly, at crucial slipping points. It’s how Ada escapes the pressures of presenting as a “good” girl and wife. And, as the film embraces the fantastical and mystic, the window doubles as a portal to the otherside. (In one scene, Ada jolts upright in her bed, frightened to consciousness following a nightmare. The lace curtain billows towards her before it is sucked back to the window by an inhaling breeze. As if someone is there at the threshold).
Again, I am thinking deeply about windows. It’s becoming an important symbol of escape to me. “Just like him, I had broken the window, and jumped into the abyss,” remarks the unnamed narrator of Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest, a doctor at a coastal sanitarium. The “him” refers to an unruly patient who jumped out of the hospital’s window, preferring consumption by ocean torrents. I feel like the narrator, fixating on “the mercurial light coming through the rectangular window,” wondering, with attraction and repulsion, what lies beyond the frames.
The Fires
After the men go out to sea, a string of arsons plague the suburb. On Ada and Omar’s wedding night, their immaculately white nuptial bed catches fire. In the aftermath, the satin surface resembles charred earth. Another incident occurs at the mansion of Mr. NDiaye, the developer responsible for wage theft. The police get involved, with Detective Issa leading the investigation. If only he could interrogate the fire itself. He’d hear not one voice, but a collective anger breaking and remixing the conventions of narrative and genre.
I gravitate towards the fury in the flames. By targeting markers of patriarchy and capitalism, the fires speak a desire to see “your codes burning,” as Dolores Dorantes writes in Estilo/Style. Both the film and poetry collection reverberate with the energy of the prematurely departed, those caught in the crossfires of economic exploitation and greed. In Estilo/Style, nosotras, a seething chorus of ghost-girls, confronts you, the totalitarian forces dooming them to death:
“Give us a bottle and let’s be done with your world. Light us up and the fire will spread like a plague. We arrive at your office. At your machine. At your teacher’s chair. At the world that is no longer a world.”
The lines bring me back to the toppled crown from The Tower card, which is usually interpreted as the implosion of retrograde beliefs or traditions. Isn’t that the ultimate fantasy: to burn all tyrannical systems to ashes. To shout: We are done with your world! A world of automation and bottom-lines. Where cruelty and stagnancy thrive. A world no longer a world.
My own babeling anger, teary and feral, charges forward, desperate to jump through the screen.
The Fever
The women left behind—Fanta, Mariama, Thérèse—come down with a strange affliction. They writhe in bed while an imam prays over their damp forms, warding against djinn. Even Issa fumbles the case as he struggles with unexplained fainting spells and anxious sweats. The fever worsens as the overripe red sun returns to the netherworld, thinning the veil.
Under the palm of twilight, the women take to the streets, barefoot and milky-eyed, proceeding like a gang of zombies to NDiaye’s manor. Breaking into his chic abode, they demand the wages owed. They are women possessed, shattering the screen between living and dead.
Avery Gordon writes, “To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it.” She defines the ghostly as those terrible absences (erased, unseen, disappeared) cracking the placid surface of the present-day, the injustices we claim to be firmly “in the past,” that nonetheless massage all aspects of self and environment. Atlantiques presents a palimpsest of lost, specific to Dakar while also conjuring larger and smaller ripples of colonial dispossession. “Every time you look at the top of the tower, you’ll think of our unburied bodies at the bottom of the ocean.” This line, uttered by Thérèse, pierces my heart. I write it down in my notebook, my pen slow and dragging. It feels essential to our (non)engagement with the past. We shut the window and turn our backs, willfully misreading the ghost as an intruder or assailant, mistaking the trail of blood for our own. We try hard to forget, but the ocean remembers every stain.
The Ocean
I tell this story often. When I was four and saw the ocean for the first time, I screamed. My sun is in Sagittarius, a fire sign, so perhaps I was afraid the water would extinguish me. Also, I was terrified of anything and everything at that age (God, the dark, Homie the Clown, home invasions, E.T., snakes, ducks, large dogs, ALF…). Once, a year or two ago, recalling the memory and laughing hysterically, my mother offered, “Maybe the scream was a past life remembering.”
A ghost coming to surface.
Diop’s characters can’t escape the hum of the gurgling waters or the whispering sea spray. Mathon captures the capricious nature of the ocean, one second ejecting froth and steam, and then, a few shots later, glittering like a finely-cracked mirror. I love the unexpected colors: taupe and cornflower blue and washed-out coral. “We tried to film it as though it were a planet unto itself, an inhuman planet (going there means dying),” Mathon remarks in an interview. I keep returning to the parenthetical aside, going there means dying. The phrase reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from The Iliac Crest:
“You need the ocean for this: To stop believing in reality. To ask yourself impossible questions. To not know. To cease knowing. To become intoxicated by the smell. To close your eyes. To stop believing in reality.”
Basking in the celestial qualities, I pause every ocean shot and stare until my eyes twitch. The silvery moonlit one. The white static. Ceaseless motion, a song that never ends. Waves crash and deliver messages from spirit. Despite a bone-shaking fear of drowning, I fight the urge to dive headfirst through the screen, arms out stretched, into the vortex of the sea.
Happy Pisces Season,
Allison
Mentions:
The Iliac Crest by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Sarah Booker
Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination by Avery F. Gordon
Playlist:
Body Double - Fatima Al Qadiri
Yelwa Procession - Fatima Al Qadiri
Souleiman’s Theme - Fatima Al Qadiri