Mati Diop plies her guilt trade.
Mati Diop’s “fantasy-documentary” Dahomey helps us sift through cultural exploitation by Hollywood, Broadway, and other centers of political instruction. Theodor Adorno, of the Marxist Frankfurt School, called this “the culture industry,” and 42-year-old Diop is its latest proponent.
In Dahomey, Diop addresses the restitution of 26 artworks housed in the Musée du Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac in Paris. After a campaign for repatriation, these artifacts were returned in 2021 to their place of origin in the African nation of Benin. Diop’s title, Dahomey, uses the country’s mythic name to invoke the history of the Kingdom of Dahomey that is so resonant in Africana studies but that now refers to Diop’s combined artful and reportorial approach.
She reports on the actual restitution process of packaging and shipping the valuable items but uses actors to “voice” the narration. It’s as if the ancient art pieces are themselves literally speaking — on their own behalf and to us — discussing what it means to be taken, traded, repossessed, colonized.
Those terms derive from academic critical theory, with its emphasis on appropriation and indoctrination. On her path to film-industry renown, Diop was a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. A native of Paris, she began her professional career as an actress portraying one of the black French-Senegalese citizens in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum (2008), and then she applied that chic to directing, shrewdly choosing the documentary form to prove her feminist-intellectual bona fides.
It is Diop’s academic background that makes Dahomey a more creditable venture in the diasporic art craze that we are currently witnessing — whether the public debacle of the Met Gala, the trashy horror film Sinner, or the equally trashy adaptation of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson.
There’s genuine creativity in Diop’s “fantasy-documentary,” starting with her image of the dark, churning Seine. “These artifacts were among thousands looted by French colonial troops during the invasion of 1892,” we’re informed. “From then, 139 years of captivity are coming to an end.” Diop conveys this transition through vacant corridors, black-lens security cameras, guard-booth windows, and white noise in the emptiness of the museum after visiting hours.
The treasures speak in Fon, Benin’s native language:
I journeyed so long in my mind, but it was so dark in this foreign place, I lost myself in dreams . . . cut off from the land of my birth. As if I were dead. There are thousands of us in this night. We all bear the same scars. Uprooted, ripped out. The spoils of massive plundering.
Statues are shown tagged and wrapped before shipment, sealed in wooden crates, drilled shut as if in reverse enslavement, and soon to be carted away by a white crew wearing Covid masks.
Diop plays the guilt game. Museum gatekeepers and transporters are her true cosmopolitan peers. Her theme itself is an abstraction. The return of the artifacts but not the people suggests deportation, a reversal of the “colonialization” that is itself a fetish term for academics. Cutting from transport to close-ups of the almond-eyed, broad-lipped carvings and masks immediately evokes Picasso’s transcultural inspiration that ignited Western modernism.
Proposing that the artifacts belong where their makers live now is sensible, but the problem at the heart of Dahomey is its presumption of guilt without resolution or remedy. Documenting guilt simply stirs more guilt.
Because Diop works as an artist rather than an anthropologist, Dahomey neglects the Kingdom of Dahomey’s history in the African wars that made it a key port in the slave trade. Diop takes a surprising turn when the objets d’art arrive in Benin and the response from young black students is angry and perplexed: “During my childhood I grew up with Disney and Tom and Jerry, but none focused on Benin or our cultural heritage. So I grew up completely ignorant of my culture kept overseas for years. “
Fact is: The students argue with the complications of the culture industry’s bourgeois race hustle. Their skepticism contrasts with our own gatekeepers — from Nikole Hannah-Jones, who led the creation of the 1619 Project, to Anna Wintour, who designed the recent Met Gala on black dandyism (so far, the New York Times has published at least five articles promoting that show, extending the 1619 Project’s noxious exploitation).
“We are still stuck in patterns mapped out by the colonizers,” Diop’s students complain. “We need mobilization in Africa. It’s the materialization of bygone revolts.” The issue of identity is not just a fad but becomes a fact of self-determination — in this context, Dahomey’s flaws are instructive for this moment when race and gender exploitation runs rampant and unchecked.