Let us talk about the politics of representation in the movie ‘Katutura’. Let us unpack how Katutura as a site of resistance, poverty, violence and memory is shown in this film. Let us have regular conversations about how identities are performed in different contexts.
Who is telling the story? What is their conceptual map of Katutura as a place?
In each context, language is not only defined by its speech and voice patterns, language is a worldview. Language changes with place.
The vocabulary in this film is written and performed in fancy polished English accents. No slang, no Tura vocabularies whatsoever. In fact, I cannot recall hearing any vernacular in the film.
Watching the final product left me displaced, unable to recognise and relate to that kind of violence, drug dealing and gangsterism.
There is an imitation of blockbusters such as ‘Tsotsi’ and ‘Jerusalema’, and hence the crisis in identity of this particular ‘Katutura’.
To understand this in detail, one will have to look into the politics of the actual production process. Some important questions on professional practice in the film and cultural industries can be unearthed from this discourse.
This is not our story, I said to myself.
At least it is not the Katutura that I know.
I recognise the sub narratives. I know the blood on street pavements and the informal settlement fires, but the continuous bloody and traumatic events in this particular film are rather foreign and out of context for me. Which Katutura is this that is short of hope and optimism? Where is the fire in the hearts of the activists who work hard to build our broken communities?
Where are the heroic women? The mothers who work hard to make ends meet at the expense of absent fathers. The women in this film are performed as drunks, drug addicts and dependent on men to provide for them.
It is very visible why the movie feeds into the male super heroism and patriarchal cultures. Not only because it was produced and directed by two men who are not from Katutura, but because it is in a popular arena of materialism and celebrity culture. We already know that sex and hyper masculine violence sells.
I am also doing introspection on my own position and role as a cameo actor in the movie. I look at how the power dynamics in popular film making processes are tricky and the performer’s body is only an object in the story.
The higher your position in the production, the more you are likely to have a say and way in the ownership of the story.
There is an objectification and commercialisation of the Katutura narrative which we must problematise.
If you are from the suburbs and other affluent side of the railway, don’t miss that gap, tell that story.
Hollywood propaganda cannot be what constitutes as the Namibian film narrative.
