Children of White Men

USUPBEYLİ Y.

Gendered Memories of War and Political Violence, İstanbul, Turkey, 25 - 27 April 2014, pp.16-17

  • Publication Type: Conference Paper / Full Text
  • City: İstanbul
  • Country: Turkey
  • Page Numbers: pp.16-17
  • Akdeniz University Affiliated: No

Abstract

Contemporary French women filmmakers in their autobiographical documentaries, often return to their family to delve into their past, as a kind of quest for identity. These autobiographical films of course concern the privacy /intimacy of the filmmaker who feels the need to disclose a subject which is at first sight personal, therefore not likely to appeal to a wide audience. But personal history is always in relation to collective History. These films, by revealing the family to be an impediment to any full or complete constitutive rendering of one’s self as a subject in history, obviously don’t fit the classic model of Western autobiography, as it was defined according to some classical texts, notably of Rousseau and Goethe. They can rather be considered as examples of the autoethnographic impulse, wherein cultural concerns are explored or displayed through the representation of the self. Catherine Russell asserts that “*a+utobiography becomes autoethnography at the point where the film –or videomaker understands his or her personal history to be implicated in larger social formations and historical processes”. As examples of autoethnographic cinema, Russell takes the experimental autobiographical works emerged in the 1980s and 1990s in USA. Since we would like to talk about the documentary films, we adopt the concept of “domestic ethnography” that Michael Renov coined in his article “Domestic Ethnography and the Construction of the ‘Other’ Self”. Renov explains the concept and its use as “a vehicle of self-examination, a means through which to construct self-knowledge through recourse to the familial other”. It is a practice in which autobiographical self-examination adds to the concern of the ethnographer to document the lives of others. As case study, we will analyse Les Enfants du Blanc (Children of the White Men, FranceBurkina Faso, 2000) of Saray Bouyain, daughter of a French mother and a Burkinabe father, in which she explores her mixed-race roots. The film reveals a family secret but also shows us a forgotten aspect of the civilizing effects of colonization. Born in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Bouyain’s grand mother is the offspring of the meeting of a French colonial and an African girl. Like the mother of Bouyain’s grand mother, many Burkinase girls were requisitioned by the French army during the first decade of the twentieth century to become women of the French lieutenants. The children born from these unions, generally abandoned by their French fathers, were placed into specially created orphanages. The fate of these indigenous women and their children is almost absent from the history books. Through the testimony of her grand mother Sarah Bouyain discovers the singular destiny of this mulatto minority to which she belongs to and reconstructs the puzzle of her heritage. Postmemory is a useful characterization of the transitive autobiographical aspect of Children of the White Men. Bouyain binds herself to a memory not her own yet integral to the formation of her own identity. “Postmemory characterizes”, Hirsch states, “the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that they can neither understand nor recreate”. Sarah Bouyain not only treats personal and family memory as historical, but also treats history as personal. Children of the White Men thus, can be considered as an exemplary of the crisis 17 of definition and categorization that plagues documentary, autobiography and identity, opening the borders of autobiography to an expansive definition of an historical subjectivity.