Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting [La Zerda ou les chants de l'oubli] (1983) — Assia Djebar + Monangambeé (1969) — Sarah Maldoror

Algeria/Angola, DCP, 59 + 17 ~ 76 mins.

Zerda and the Songs of forgetting : Algerian novelist and translator Assia Djebar changed professions to make La Zerda et les Chants de L’Oubli. Using French newsreels, the film represents the colonization of the Maghreb, rethinking the dominant narrative of this history. A furious swan song to colonial violence, the film plays with documentary form, recutting images and reconstructing history alongside a soundtrack comprised of multi-vocal chants and experimental music. Zerda employs montage in a search for truth––a truth that the colonial “killing gaze” pointedly omits or does not show. In Djebar’s cut, there is “resistance behind the mask.”

Monangambeé : ‘Monangambee!’ Spread from hut to hut, from village to village, this cry made even the bravest men in Angola shiver. ‘Monangambee’ translates to ‘white death,’ and in the past, this cry accompanied the arrival of Portuguese slave traders” (Nadia Kasji). Shot in and co-produced by newly independent Algeria, Maldoror’s film links the anti-colonial struggle of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s to the history of African enslavement, deconstructing and rethinking the legacy of colonial violence.