Re-viewing Disability in Postcolonial

West Africa
Ousmane Sembène’s Early Resistant Bodies in Xala
Julie C. Van Dam
University of Southern California
Re-viewing Disability in Postcolonial West Africa

Postcolonial Francophone sub-African literature and film is inhabited by a legion of

physically disabled characters, yet most critics see them as mere signifiers of the failure
or tragedy of the postcolonial state. While disability studies has been slowly “cripping”
the global and the postcolonial, postcolonial studies has, for the most part, turned a cold
shoulder to its crips within. Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène’s 1975 film, Xala, calls
for both a clinical unseeing of disability and a “coming out all over” of disability in Postco-
lonial Francophone Studies to recalibrate our focus toward those bodies that dwell in the
frame but somehow end up not really mattering. Through the attentive study of varying
valences and materialities of visibility, the article argues that Sembène’s film offers an early
theorization of disability as a powerful visual counter-narrative to dominant discourses of
the postcolonial nation and its hygiaesthetic body politic. Expanding on Rosemarie Garland-
Thomson’s notion of ethical staring as well as David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s “disability
as multitude,” the article teases out the ways in which this film forces the viewer not only to
stare at disabled bodies, but also to behold them and even anticipate their coming.

Introduction

The recent global turn in disability studies has brought the field into new
geopolitical and disciplinary spaces, resulting in disability studies sidling up
to and making contact, as it were, with “bodies that matter” beyond known
borders and boundaries, beyond comfort zones. As Nirmala Erevelles asked
recently, “Why do some bodies matter more than others?” (6). Pushing Judith
Butler’s study of gender simultaneously into the domain of disability and into
the global, Erevelles, along with a number of other disability studies scholars,
are rendering visible the multiple spaces and sites of crip politics that exist
and have existed for some time. Yet while disability studies has been slowly
“cripping” the global and the postcolonial, within postcolonial studies itself,
critics have, for the most part, turned a cold shoulder to their own “crips within.”
If, as Robert McRuer writes, “crip culture is coming out all over” (3), it has only
been afforded slow but steady steps out of the closet of postcolonial studies,

Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 10.2 (2016) © Liverpool University Press
ISSN 1757-6458 (print) 1757-6466 (online) doi:10.3828/jlcds.2016.17
208 Julie C. Van Dam

and especially of Francophone studies.1 Postcolonial Francophone sub-African

literature and film, for example, is inhabited by a legion of physically disabled
characters, yet to listen to the vast majority of postcolonial critics and theorists
is to see them as mere signifiers of some sort of failure or tragedy within the
postcolonial state. Due perhaps to the long history of discursive construction
and material realities of the unhealthy or defective African body up and against
the French universalist norm, disability as anything other than metaphor seems
nearly unseen by most critics/viewers. Ato Quayson, one of the few postcolonial
critics to look disability squarely in the eye, has posited that disability in postco-
lonial writing generates what he terms an aesthetic nervousness whereby the
dominant protocols of representation are “short-circuited” within the text, and
writers unwittingly align disabled characters with docility, containment, or
silence, among other qualities (2010). While Quayson never mentions the role
that critics themselves play in the theatre of aesthetic nervousness, it is clear
from the corpus of postcolonial criticism that they too view disability through
lenses that obscure or even disallow a frank, sustained analysis. In tandem with
Quayson, other postcolonial critics have recently called for a major paradigm
shift in approaches to literature and film. Kenneth Harrow, in particular, argues
that in their desire to prove the historicity and authenticity of Francophone
African cinema, postcolonial critics have essentially fixed it into a predictable
set of meanings about Africa, African culture, and politics (2007). Adopting a
postmodern theoretical framework, Harrow considers the importance of what
is not in the frame, writing that “it is in the occluded, off-frame, unspoken
moments or gestures that we must look for the ethical position” (9). While his
approach to the “ins and outs” of the frame is productive, I would argue that
we must not only consider what is left out of the frame—for example, historical
contradictions or dissonances of gender/sexuality—but also consider what is
indeed in the frame but almost always clinically “prostheticized” by critics:
disability. I say prostheticized because, as Mitchell and Snyder would contend,
these critical narratives assuage the discomfort of disability by effectively
covering over and thus “removing the unsightly from view” (Narrative 8). If we
are to heed Ann Laura Stoler’s call to critically address “imperial debris” (2013),
we cannot cover over the resistant presence of those often viewed by political
and critical eyes alike to be the embodiment of ruination.
Indeed, to look to Senegalese writer and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène
and his masterful 1975 film, Xala, is to see an early African text that theorizes

1. See, for example, Quayson; Flaugh; Nack Ngue; and Barker. The metaphor of the closet here refers
to Siebers’s disability-informed application of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet
(2008).
 Re-viewing Disability in Postcolonial West Africa 209

disability as a potent visual counter-narrative to such prostheticizing impulses—

impulses that dwell both in postcolonial studies and in Senegal itself. Set in
the immediate postcolonial period of 1960s Senegal, Xala is a masterful satire
of neocolonial greed and its production of disabilities. Despite the country’s
ostensibly socialist government, elite politicians and businessmen maintained
the capitalist colonial models that had institutionalized avarice, misogyny,
ableism, and what I term hygiaesthetics, an ontology that privileges the hygien-
ically and aesthetically orderly subject/site. The film’s protagonist, El Hadji
Abdelkader Beye, is an elite and wealthy import–export businessman who,
upon taking a third (very young) wife, is struck with xala, or impotence (the
term xala is Wolof). Throughout the rest of the film, he desperately, comically,
seeks a cure, only to find relief at the hands of a group of disabled beggars
(or at least this is what he is led to believe). In critical readings, it is most
often El Hadji’s sexual dysfunction that attracts much of the attention, with
disabled beggars playing the role of El Hadji’s unwitting “debris” (see Shohat
and Stam). El Hadji thus signifies the impotent postcolonial nation-state, and
the disabled beggars, his dross. If Laura Mulvey is right to align El Hadji’s
failure (and Sembene’s vision of the neocolonial regime) with an unrecognized
wound, her sustained metaphorization of this wound renders impossible any
sort of consideration of the physical wounds and/or bodily impairments of
other characters. Yet Sembène’s camera—patient, attentive, and forthright—
insists on privileging the various articulations of the bodies and abilities of his
characters, up and against national imperatives for orderly citizens and public
spaces free of any suggestion otherwise. To be sure, the film underscores the
shifting meanings of disability in a postcolonial Senegalese context where
distinctly cultural ideas of sexual disability (El Hadji’s xala) are bound up with
the neocolonial abuses that result in physical disabilities.
Although Sembène had already made a number of successful films, Xala
was one of the very few narratives that saw both print and screen, written first
as a novel in 1973 and adapted to the screen only two years later. Already a
well-known and respected writer of French-language novels and short stories,
Sembène had turned to cinema in the 1960s in order to reach a larger audience
in his home country where the vast majority—the multitudes—speak Wolof,
not French. In the case of Xala, however, the cinematic form seems especially
compelling, as it is the film that makes visible and viewable a variety of
dissonant and resistant postcolonial African bodies and subjectivities. With
an attentive eye, one can see that Sembène’s film articulates and materializes a
specifically African theory of disability, one that engages with both local and
imported ideas of bodily, sexual, aesthetic, and hygienic particularities. Vastly
210 Julie C. Van Dam

predating any grassroots or political calls for “une législation des handicapés”
(only made law in 2010), Xala visualizes a critical theory of disability as that
which has the responsibility and power to undermine exclusionary models of
the postcolonial elite body politic. Sembène’s film visualized and foreshadowed
a suite of physically and mentally disabled characters in Senegalese literature
(especially female characters) who spoke vociferously against narrow views of
ability, beauty, and sexuality (see Nack Ngue).
Thus, through the attentive study of varying valences and materialities
of visibility, and consideration of what is possible in the spaces of contact, I
argue that Sembène’s film theorizes disability as a powerful visual and visceral
counter-narrative to dominant discourses of the postcolonial nation and its
hygiaesthetic-able body politic. Visibility, after all, is not simply the fact of
being visible, but it is also “the degree to which something impinges on public
awareness” (OED). For example, the problematic visibility of disabled bodies
in the urban spaces of Senegal has a long history. In Xala, these denizens
are quite literally put back into the frame.2 To watch this film is to watch—
over and over—Sembène’s disabled characters make their way through and
mark their place in the world, with their uncommon contours and gaits and
with their starkly un-aestheticized bodies. Using non-actors to portray the
disabled, exceptionally rare in film, Sembène puts his characters in constant
motion and in regular view (see Davis and Siebers). This makes sense, since
their participation in society is inherently mobile and visible. They quite
literally live by their mobility and their visibility, whether by soliciting alms
in various neighborhoods or by returning to the city (again and again)
after having been forcibly removed by the authorities. Through exceptionally
long shots of disabled ambulation, strategic framing of both disabled and
able-bodied characters, and perspectival shifts to privilege the view of the
disabled character, Sembène insists on the embodied, emergent presence of
disabled beggars, seemingly daring the viewer to stare.3
To be sure, Sembène’s Xala refuses a clinical unseeing and demands a
“coming out all over” of disability to recalibrate our focus towards those bodies
that dwell within the frame but somehow end up not really mattering to our
understandings of the postcolonial, its past and its present. Sembène’s interest

2. In 1979, Senegalese author Fall would also restore disabled beggars to the narrative in La Grève
des Battù, which imagines a successful beggars’ revolt against the elite who push them out of town
in the aim of “cleaning up the city.”
3. If cinematic spectatorship has been theorized as voyeuristic by Mulvey and others, the screen is
also a site which not only permits the normally censured stare (“Don’t stare!”), but beckons it. See
Chivers and Markotić.
 Re-viewing Disability in Postcolonial West Africa 211

might align with Mitchell and Snyder’s as developed in “Disability as Multitude:

Reworking the Non-Productive Body,” which productively pushes Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri’s idea of the multitude into the domain of disabled
bodies, subjectivities, and collectivities. Here, far from standing in as the debris
of late capitalism, these bodies form an alternative, even paradigmatic, model
of politicized resistance to governing discourses of consumption, labor, and
nation. If Sembène never explicitly articulated a crip alliance, Xala, along with
many of his other works, offers a scathing critique of a host of sociocultural
and political abuses that bear upon the body in undeniable ways, among them
neocolonial politics, capitalism’s exploitations, racism, patriarchal abuses, and
misogynistic cultural practices. His camera means to make us consider this
multitude of disabled subjects as a potent material and political presence to be
reckoned with—and to behold.

“An unpleasant spectacle to behold”

Given the lasting consequences of colonial thought and action upon the African
Other, as well as the often conflicting postcolonial imperatives of national
health, nationhood, economics, and citizenry, the fleshiness of the body is
never far from the screen in African cinematic and literary texts. Yet with the
exception of recent interventions in postcolonial studies by Quayson, as well
as Christian Flaugh and Clare Barker, the fact of disability has been glaringly
overlooked. In the postcolonial Francophone context, as Flaugh convincingly
argues, competing sociocultural norms of bodily abilities “operate” in powerful
and often material ways on visibly non-normative bodies and identities. To be
sure, visible difference often contends with the principles of French universalism
and laïcité (secularism)—principles that insist on a body politic stripped of its
possible religious, cultural, or personal affiliations and resulting in a “model”
that is visibly Franco-French (white), male, able-bodied, and in all other ways
“fit” (see also Nack Ngue 143–64). If in postcolonial Senegal, the emphasis on
an external, visible neutrality is less religious and cultural than corporeal and
hygienic, French ideas of the “neutral body” are nevertheless operational there.
Senegal’s first president upon its independence in 1960, the celebrated
Negritude poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, is lauded for making the country a
driving literary and cinematic force in Francophone Africa. However, the
presence or visibility of disability in Senegalese literature and film is no doubt
haunted by the specters of the policies of his regime—policies that ensured the
invisibility of a number of persons deemed socially, economically, politically,
212 Julie C. Van Dam

and aesthetically “unfit.” Like numerous other geopolitical spaces, Senegal

can be understood in terms of its “ablenationalism,” for it relied upon physical
and rhetorical able-bodiedness to bolster the nation, at once economically,
politically, and socially (Snyder and Mitchell). In the case of Senegal, however,
this ablenationalism was also informed by lingering notions of colonial
hygiene, whereby specifically Western ideas of health, ability, and sexuality
had been haphazardly applied to local cultural and behavioral norms (Stoler,
“Making”). During the Senghorian regime, for example, disabled people were
aligned not only with ideas of politico-economic dependence and stagnancy,
but with more generalized notions of contamination and ordure. Due in part
to the economic potential of French tourism, Senegal embraced an ideal of
hygiaesthetic (hygienic and aestheticized) public spaces and public bodies,
making visible for itself and for outsiders an able, ordered, orderly, contained,
and “healthful” urban body politic—one worthy of courting, one worthy of
living. Those citizens seen to counter this national fiction—the physically and
mentally disabled, lepers, albinos, prostitutes, and beggars alike—came to be
identified as “social plagues” or “human obstructions,” terms directly inherited
from the colonial era (Diop 57).4 Yet it was the mere sight of these groups that
seemed to trouble the regime most. As the Minister of Public Health and
Social Affairs stated in 1970, they presented to tourists and citizens alike “an
unpleasant spectacle to behold” (qtd in Diop 76). In Foucauldian terms, these
“spectacles” were subject to a brand of Enlightenment-informed disciplinary
normalization that operated paradoxically through erasure: in the name of
nation-building and touristic development, they were forcibly removed from
the streets and dumped in isolated villages, prisons, or sites that had served
as labor camps in the colonial era (Diop 57, 76). In the postcolony, Achille
Mbembe writes, bodies “can be neutralized whenever they are thought to be
‘obstructing’ public spaces […] or constituting a threat to public order” (90).
Mbembe’s use of “obstructing” here makes implicit reference to the Senegalese
case, where public space was also neutralized because emptied of visible
difference. This emptying out included that of the “idiosyncrasy, functional
diversity, and aesthetic impropriety” that can prove so potent a force against
dominant biopolitical discourses (Mitchell and Snyder, “Disability,” 182–83).5

4. The term “social plague” (fléau social) was originally applied to any colonial subject who
threatened the progress of the empire (Diop 56). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my
own.
5. Such policies continued for fifteen years in varying forms and degrees, only officially retired in
1988 during Abdou Diouf’s presidency, 1981–2000 (Piga 153). For a more thorough account of these
policies, see chapter 4 of Nack Ngue.
 Re-viewing Disability in Postcolonial West Africa 213

To be sure, Ousmane Sembène is very much aware of the visual potency of the
non-normative, non-universal body in the public and sometimes private spaces
of urban Senegal: they wander, they penetrate previously prohibited territories,
they defy efforts to disappear them.

Xala’s Visible Multitude

With Xala, Ousmane Sembène was the first Senegalese artist to respond not
only to Senghor’s policies, but also to the general attitude of the elite postco-
lonial regime. A well-known engagé, Sembène’s commitment to a socialist
model was formed in part by his studies at Gorki Studios in Moscow (1962–63),
but primarily by his own experiences as a laborer in colonial Senegal. In an
interview with Guy Hennebelle in 1976, Sembène claimed to have worked at
least thirty-six different manual labor jobs in both Senegal and France (46).
Having grown up in relative poverty in the Casamance region of Senegal,
Sembène left the French colonial school at the age of fourteen to labor as a
dock worker in Senegal’s capital, Dakar. It was later, when he was conscripted
as a tirailleur sénégalais to fight for the French in World War II, that he was
able to see the very real collectivities that could exist within diverse groups of
colonized subjects. And in these collectivities he identified the possibility for
resistance and, ultimately, redefinition of the nation. It is not coincidental that
he addressed his films to “la multitude des gens du peuple”—“the multitude of
people of the people” (Delati 45). The multitude, he explained, “possess[es] the
solution to our problems” (Hennebelle 48).
Following the novel’s publication, the 1975 screen version of Xala was a
two-fisted sock in the eye to the able, hygiaesthetic, capitalist body politic. The
film is rightfully peopled by a multitude of disabled characters whose constant,
visible presence in the streets of Dakar is a source of anxiety for the protagonist,
El Hadji, a successful entrepreneur and esteemed member of the Chamber of
Commerce in the newly independent nation. The story begins on a day of two
celebrations: the city’s inheritance of the Chamber (and its money) from the
French and El Hadji’s third marriage to a girl still in her teens. Not coinci-
dentally, it is the night following these two fêtes that El Hadji is struck with
xala. For the rest of the film, we watch El Hadji attempt to restore his supposed
manhood, this restoration being understood as both a personal and national
imperative. Yet while El Hadji’s xala seems to be the explicit catalyst of the
film’s storyline and spatial trajectory, it is the troublesome, persistent visibility
(and vitality) of the group of disabled beggars that calls for a second look. To
214 Julie C. Van Dam

be sure, El Hadji’s impotence is intertwined not only with his masculinity and
politico-economic vigor, but also with his relationship to the dis-able-bodied
community of beggars whom he disavows but is ultimately compelled to
acknowledge—and, in a very visceral way—receive. As we will learn, El Hadji’s
bodily desires are impossible to extricate from past and present betrayals of the
poor and/or disabled for his own politico-economic gain.
Not surprisingly, then, it is the protagonist himself who draws the viewer’s
attention to the “troubling” presence of disabled people. The day after his failed
wedding night, El Hadji is at his office talking with the president of the Chamber
of Commerce whom he summoned in hopes of getting help for his xala. When
the president asks who could have cursed him, El Hadji slowly gets up, walks to
the window and stares ruefully at a group of disabled beggars gathered outside.
When he returns to his office, ostensibly to answer the question, he instead
barks, “Can’t we get rid of this human trash? This is not what our independence
is about!” Although the English subtitles on the film distributed by New
Yorker Films do not include El Hadji’s statement on independence, it is key
to understanding the scene for, following El Hadji’s rant, the president swiftly
gets on the phone to the local authorities to demand that the “human trash” be
removed. What this human trash represents for El Hadji and for the president
is also, of course, the debris of their own, newfangled nationalist project. When
the president demands their prompt removal, he remarks, “It’s very bad for
tourism.” That is, the sight of this debris cannot but keep away French tourists
who would find unsightly any signs of what amounts to their own imperial
debris, in Stoler’s understanding.6 El Hadji’s contention that this street scene
and these people are not “what our independence is about” is—as Sembène
intends it—layered in meaning. At first glance, El Hadji simply identifies in
this band of beggars the hindered national goals of progress, beautification,
and hygiaesthetics: for him, a newly independent country should exhibit signs
of prosperity, economic independence, and bodies that reflect these ideals. On
the contrary, the disabled beggars who ask for alms are the living embodiment
of dependence, non-productivity, and visible, possibly communicable bodily
difference; that giving alms is one of the five pillars of Islam does not occur
to El Hadji. The beggars also contradict the hygiaesthetic ideal of public and
personal spaces. El Hadji’s secretary frequently sprays disinfectant outside the
business, declaring, “That stinks!,” while El Hadji drinks only the quintes-
sential French and contestably bourgeois water, Evian water. Disgusted at the

6. Although Senegal became a tourist destination for Europeans and Americans from the early
1990s onwards, in the 1970s it was frequented mainly by the French.
 Re-viewing Disability in Postcolonial West Africa 215

view of these disabled beggars near his business, a generative site of economic
and national productivity, El Hadji identifies in them a sort of pollutive power
that disturbs order and must be abjected (see Kristeva). After all, they represent
all that he must disavow: dependence, incapacity, filth, and affliction.
It is only once El Hadji has had them expelled from the city that he commences
his long quest for a return to sexual and patriarchal normativity. With riotous
results, Sembène submits his protagonist to various treatments prescribed by
two different marabouts (traditional healers) of questionable integrity. Without
surprise, El Hadji’s xala persists, and his finances and family life begin to
suffer. While it is clear that El Hadji is agonized by his condition, Sembène is
not interested in evoking pity from the viewer. His first wife, Adja, is stoically
quiet, but their college-age daughter, Rama, calls out her father’s hypocrisy as
both a husband and a Senegalese man who is still beholden to French values.
El Hadji’s second wife, Oumy, openly imputes him for the lack of money and
sex. And finally, his young, nubile bride, Ndèye, exists in a kind of limbo that
is conveyed to the viewer through shots taken in profile or in bits and pieces.
Her ostensibly perfect, able, and consumable body is noted frequently by those
who look with incredulity upon El Hadji’s inability to perform.
Yet throughout the film, juxtaposed with El Hadji’s fruitless efforts to
reestablish his male potency and financial vigor, Sembène presents the
persistent, ambulant, productive vitality of the disabled beggars on the streets
of Dakar. Indeed, the disabled are seemingly everywhere. Never, though, do
we see them inactive and languishing on street corners. Shots of El Hadji’s or
the Chamber president’s chauffeured cars parked on the city streets always
include groups of disabled individuals; most often, they are moving briskly
on the sidewalks or streets, whether by walking, crawling, sliding, or pulling
themselves along. Sembène’s camera lingers on these men moving about the
town. And after yet another long shot of a man walking quickly on his knees
on the sidewalk, the viewer expects a follow-up shot revealing his destination.
But none comes. This perpetual advance of disabled men through the city and
across the screen denies the viewer a satisfying end to their trajectory—that
is, until the very end of the film. The lack of such follow-up shots underscores
the persistent movement and unyielding resistance of “human obstructions”
to the will of the nation-state. However, the most remarkable scene of such
movement and resistance comes while El Hadji is being lectured by his second
wife, Oumy, about finding a cure for his impotence. Her turn is coming up,
and, as she reminds her husband, “You know me, I’m always ready.” In this
scene especially, El Hadji’s health issues and static, sexual impotence are linked
to the distinct potency, mobility, and active desire of disabled people, and of
216 Julie C. Van Dam

course, also of Oumy. Oumy’s reprimand renders El Hadji silent. When she
finally leaves, Sembène captures El Hadji’s shamed gaze. His eyes, however,
look not towards the door whence Oumy departs but off to the side, screen
right. Sembène cuts from this close-up of El Hadji’s gaze to a wide shot of the
disabled beggars approaching from the same direction. They are making their
way across the sand and back into the city after having been removed by the
police at El Hadji’s command. The two shots edited together force El Hadji to
quite literally look upon those disabled, the very same he helped to expel from
the city. The scene of the return, consisting of a series of long shots, lasts four
minutes, as Sembène’s patient camera seems to invite the viewer to stare at the
disabled beggars as they advance, in a variety of ways, with a variety of aides,
both technological and human. Yet forced to follow their movements for this
extended period, the viewer remarks not pitiable bodies struggling to traverse
the sands, but instead the speed and dexterity of their movements, the clarity
of their intention, and the banality of their return (for we know it is a common
occurrence). In one shot in particular, Sembène’s camera is positioned at the
base of a sand dune; as we watch, the beggars make their way towards us,
coming ever closer, seemingly intending to make contact, visual and otherwise.
The visual contact we make with the stareable subject seems to have been
part of Sembène’s plan all along. As stated earlier, Xala was one of Sembène’s
only literary and cinematic narratives. The divergences between the two
genres merit a closer look given their limits, especially in the moments when
disabled beggars make their presence known. In the novel, it is clear that
Sembène intended for the beggars to trouble El Hadji’s visual and aural fields.
Most often, this is thanks to the regular presence of the blind beggar, Gorgui,
who is stationed just outside El Hadji’s import–export business and whose
religious songs punctuate the city soundscape, much to El Hadji’s irritation.
In the film, however, Sembène clearly exploits film’s capacity to reveal, over
and over again, various visible embodiments of disability that are manifest
not just in the El Hadji’s world, but in the larger cityscape and, of course, in
the spectator’s world. In the film, Gorgui, along with a host of other visibly
disabled characters, populate the screen and occupy multiple public spaces that
are simply not present in the novel. The novel’s narrator mentions El Hadji’s
frequent calls to the authorities to round up the beggars and expel them from
Dakar (55). Yet in the film, Sembène chooses not only to visualize this violent
raid and deportation, but also to render visible the beggars’ long, determined
return to the city center. Not surprisingly, these two scenes figured among
eight others that the government required Sembène to censor before the film’s
official release (Hennebelle). Like these two scenes, the other censored scenes
 Re-viewing Disability in Postcolonial West Africa 217

revealed both directly and indirectly how capitalist desires undergird social,
cultural, bodily, and especially political desires. Those scenes critical of the
government’s role in producing and relying upon non-productive bodies to
ensure and bolster its own “health” had to be, quite literally, excised and
obscured. But this official disappearing, this unseeing, was handily undone
by Sembène: in advance of the film’s screening, numerous flyers were printed
and posted all over Dakar detailing the censored scenes (Gugler 137). These
flyers, if not the visual corollary of his political critique, willfully and radically
illuminate that which had been eclipsed. Both material (tactile and visible)
and discursive (meaningful and legible), the flyers rendered even more present
those censored scenes.
But of course, the censored scenes are always already present in the city itself,
that is, outside of its cinematic representation. Sembène’s use of non-actors
means that these characters are quite literally in the flesh, roaming around the
city off-camera, off-stage. Their screen presence is nearly palpable; at points,
they shuffle toward the camera (and us), exposing us to their bodily utterances
and expressions. While Sembène’s film is a fictionalized portrait of postco-
lonial society, it means to evoke the specific material, quotidian realities of
these worlds. Sembène is interested neither in creating a spectacle of disability
nor in veiling it from view. His disabled characters beckon a different kind
of looking. The stare was once theorized by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson as
a gesture which can “[sculpt] the disabled subject into a grotesque spectacle”
(Extraordinary 26). More recently, Garland-Thomson has complicated the
rhetoric of the stare, which can be “a communicative gesture” (Staring 185).
If it is the stareable site that calls our attention, the ways in which it moves
before us can command a vision beyond that of “grotesque spectacle.” In
the act of staring, she argues, contrary to what we might want to think, the
starer is “not master of the encounter” (Staring 23): staring can be other than
a unilateral meaning-making act. Staring subjects the starer to the will of the
stareable subject/site and the stareable subject can likewise invoke in the starer
a beholding—an ethical stare—one that is collaborative, open, and generous.
In Garland-Thomson’s words, “We become ethical starers by being conscious
in the presence of something that compels our intense attention” (Staring 188).
Ousmane Sembène’s patient, frank, and critical lens invites this sort of ethical
staring, this beholding. By moving the camera at times into the gazes of the
disabled characters, Sembène allows them to stare back toward the viewers, to
make contact with them. These moments of visual intimacy flirt with bodily
intimacy and speak to Sembène’s larger interest in inaugurating a new vision
of collective humanity.
218 Julie C. Van Dam
“FIN”

The end of the film warrants more attention than prior critics have ever afforded
it, arguably, with good reason. It is notoriously difficult to watch and viewers
are inevitably forewarned: “It. is. gross.” But it is also the most compelling
moment of beholding staged in the film. That it occurs in the intimacy of El
Hadji’s home, now filled to the brim with disabled beggars, makes it a partic-
ularly rich scene to dissect. After losing both his second and third wives to
his financial and sexual failures, El Hadji returns to his only remaining wife,
Adja, and the home they share. Outside, he finds armed men waiting to take
over the property; inside, he finds a large group of disabled beggars awaiting
his return, merrily helping themselves to his food and soda (but comically
rejecting the Evian). It is here that we learn who struck El Hadji with his
xala: the blind beggar, Gorgui, who also happens to be a distant relative once
betrayed and cheated by El Hadji in their home village long before the latter’s
rise to prominence. Gorgui is not the only one whom El Hadji has defrauded,
for in order to pay for his wedding to his third wife, El Hadji embezzled money
by selling rice intended for poor villagers. According to Gorgui and the rest of
the beggars, El Hadji must come to terms with multiple betrayals motivated
by egotism, greed, as well as his own hygiaesthetic desires. Sembène stages a
paradoxal cleansing by—and communion with—the very citizens El Hadji had
abjected—those ever-present disabled beggars. It is their potency to re-enter
the community and claim their place that ultimately suggests a potential for
national and cultural healing—and, if El Hadji is lucky, sexual healing too.
To be relieved of the curse, the beggar tells El Hadji that he must strip naked
so that the others may all spit on him. Adja and daughter Rama look on in
horror. For the viewer, too, the scene is remarkable, dominated as it is by the
loud, guttural noises produced by the beggars and the abundance of the spit
itself: thick, white, viscous. The camera pans around El Hadji’s body, reinforcing
the everywhere-ness, the utter inescapability of this cloying bodily discharge.
The movement of the camera also forces the viewer to gaze, uncomfortably,
upon the new abjected object. On the one hand, the act of spitting is akin to
a vomiting and r-ejection of what El Hadji has literally and metaphorically
fed them: spoiled goods. The scene might represent El Hadji’s indictment.
Indeed, Sembène explained that this scene means to enact the vomiting of the
nouvelle bourgeoisie itself (Hennebelle 48). In this ultimate gesture of disgust
and noncompliance, these bodies not only leak but cast out their bodily fluids
upon El Hadji, the one who had so steadfastly disavowed their fleshy presence.
To be sure, El Hadji has seen them as an indistinguishable mass of bodily
 Re-viewing Disability in Postcolonial West Africa 219

and cultural impurity as well as economic rot. This new “treatment” makes
a mockery of his hygiaesthetic imperative and ultimately rejects it. While
Sembène’s novel devotes lengthy passages to developing the individual person-
alities, speech patterns, and bodily states of the disabled beggars in El Hadji’s
home, the film provides a visual and aural humanscape composed of differing
mobilities, bodily articulations, energies, and utterances. Sembène’s camera,
like those of other filmmakers focused on the question of disability, is attentive
to “the lived intricacies of embodiment.” By rendering such lived intricacies
visible, his camera provides “alternatives to normalization efforts aimed at
homogenizing social outsiders” (Snyder and Mitchell 113). El Hadji’s home
has become the quintessential common area: the private space that has been
wonderfully, forcibly recast into a new kind of public space open to all sorts of
“inappropriate” articulations, expressions, and exchanges.
The spittle also bears a striking resemblance to the semen that El Hadji he
himself has failed to produce. The film concludes with a 24-second freeze-
frame of his torso cloaked in saliva, the potent salive of the disabled, the blind,
the beggars, the human “debris.” In this final shot, El Hadji is seemingly
reinscribed in the world of dominant bodily and sexual masculine norms. If
he submits, Gorgui tells him, he will be once again potent, virile, able, elite.
The narrative thus concludes in what might resemble a “heteronormative
epiphany,” as McRuer understands it, wherein the openly out heterosexual
individual experiences a “sense of subjective wholeness, however illusory,”
that is necessarily an able-bodied one (13). However, if El Hadji’s return to
heteronormative able-bodiedness was ensured by his submission to this act, the
film refuses such a linear (and satisfying) ending: there is no happy dance, and
certainly no “happy ending.” We never know whether El Hadji is cured, never
see him totter off to the bedroom, smiling fiendishly, cheerless wife in tow.
Sembène directs our attention elsewhere. We are meant to behold something
else. This ongoing act of coming together, or making contact, is manifested
visually by the physical marking of the body with the disabled beggars’ spittle.
There is a naming and claiming of his body as one of theirs. His neocolonial
consumerist body, full of the French language, full of Evian, is undone by the
hawking and spraying of the viscous bodily fluid that looks so much like that
of another. His is the body that submits to receiving the spittle-semen of the
multitudes of other-bodied members of the body politic. This act of submission
is a necessary one. Taking on/in and donning the intimate, potent bodily fluids
of the other, El Hadji becomes quite literally a new man forced to renounce the
hygiaesthetic ideal and become the portrait of a collective, “cripped” humanity.
Sembène’s African theory of disability is one that is inherently and necessarily
220 Julie C. Van Dam

visible, visceral, and resistant to dominant ideas of the postcolonial nation and
its hygiaesthetic-able body politic.
The multitude, coming out all over El Hadji’s body, is also coming out all over
the scene(s)—filmic, urban, and political alike. As we watch the freeze-frame
upon which the film concludes, the sounds of the beggars’ spitting continues,
but as a voice-over. The viewer is forced to ponder not the sticky remains of the
act of resistance, but one that is ongoing. The various guttural, hawking bodily
expressions speak over the immobilized camera as well as the large red “FIN”
[END] printed on the film, seeming to defy conclusion. Even the apparatuses
of cinema seem unable to shut them up. As Mitchell and Snyder note, “multiple
forms of embodiment that cannot be universalized, even within ‘condition’
groups, rely on their insurrectional force on the non-transcendental nature
of their difference” (“Disability” 188). And insurrectional it is. Beholding this
gesture of bodily and political resistance (multiple, collective, discordant),
the viewer is in turn captivated by the multitude that refuses to go away. And
so we wait. We await the END of the aural soundscape, but we also await
the(ir) return to the frame and to the scene, perhaps to reclaim it as their
own, perhaps to open it up to other collectivities, but always to exceed it. Even
Sembène knows that cinema can only do so much: it is not cinema, but the
multitude who have the solutions.

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