The mirror and the tomb: Africa, museums, and memory

African Arts, Autumn, 2001 by Francoise Lionnet

In Michel Tournier's 1987 novel La Goutte d' or (The Golden Droplet), Idris, a Berber shepherd, leaves Tabelbala, his Saharan oasis, in search of a snapshot of himself taken by a blond Parisian female tourist. His journey north to Paris produces a series of encounters that lead to a progressive loss of innocence, his handsome features being appropriated time and time again by a visual culture, quite unlike his own, that puts a premium on images. On the road, his first experience of radical depersonalization occurs in a nearby village. As he wanders through the streets looking for food, he walks past an exclusive resort hotel from whose outskirts he is banished without ceremony; eventually he finds himself "at the door of the Saharan Museum, an offshoot of the Arid Zones Laboratory funded by the French National Center for Scientific Research" (or CNRS) (p. 65). Slipping unnoticed into a group of senior citizens on a tour, Idris enters the museum and discovers to his astonishment that utensils and objects used daily by his fellow oasis dwellers are part of a scientific exhibit that describes their habitat, beliefs, and customs:

   Idris opened his eyes wide. All these objects, of unreal cleanliness,
   frozen in their eternal essences, intangible, mummified, had surrounded his
   childhood and adolescence. Less than forty-eight hours before, he had eaten
   from that dish, watched his mother using that grinder (p. 67).

These simple and familiar objects are suddenly transformed into symbols. Behind the glass of the display case, the mortar and pestle, the grinder, the pitchers, and the leather bottles suddenly arrest the "native" viewer's attention, produce a sense of wonder and defamiliarization. Idris is fascinated, captivated by the seeming uniqueness of a perfectly ordinary kitchen utensil, now transformed into its remarkable and "eternal essence," frozen in time. He experiences a sense of estrangement and wonder that shatters his usual frame of reference, reshapes his world, makes him see it anew as though for the very first time. Yet, listening to the tour guide explain his people's cultural codes and rules for living, he discovers self-consciousness and alienation in its purest form. The guide turns the oasis dwellers' existence into an exotic scenario, while the museum presents the material elements of their lives and the photographed faces of their women "covered with ritual paintings" (p. 68) to the attentive scrutiny of this group of foreign visitors. Spontaneous or ritual activities of ordinary life are now transformed into formulaic knowledge, mouthed pleasantly and humorously by a tour guide who remakes Idris's world in front of his astonished eyes:

   Idris listened attentively to a speech whose every phrase, every word,
   concerned him.... "Here, mesdames et messieurs, you will look in vain for
   the head of a dog, the silhouette of a camel, a scarab, and especially for
   a man or a woman. No; Saharan jewels are nonrepresentational. They are
   abstract geometrical forms whose value lies in signs, not images. Here are
   solid-silver crosses, crescents, stars, rosettes.... The anklets are
   supposed to prevent the demons of the earth from climbing up a person's
   legs and invading the whole body" (pp. 65, 68).

As Idris takes in the lessons being dispensed to the group, including the ones about the "supernatural or superstitious aspects of his religion, he "had the impression that he was being forcibly removed from himself, as if his soul had suddenly left his body and was observing him from outside with astonishment" (p. 68). As the visitors leave, Idris lingers behind in order to approach the display case, still fascinated and full of wonder. But as he approaches, he sees his own reflection in the glass, and now becomes, like the other objects, an item within this ethnographic collection. Tournier concludes the scene with this extraordinary comment:

   Finally, as he was moving away from the glass, he saw the reflection of a
   head of unruly hair and a thin, vulnerable, anxious face; it was himself,
   his evanescent presence in this taxidermist's version of the Sahara (p.
   68).

The display is thus both a mirror and a tomb: Idris's features and culture are no sooner reflected back to him than they are split off from each other. His presence is but an ephemeral, "evanescent," and transparent human one, superimposed onto an ossified culture, represented under glass by inanimate, soulless objects which have only stereotypical meanings.

This early episode of the novel captures brilliantly, and in the form of an entertaining narrative, what has since become theorized as the problematic relationship of the "native" spectator to the traditional anthropological museum exhibit. Tournier's story sums up the politics of representation within a discipline that concentrates on "typical" or "authentic" cultural artifacts in order to synthesize a given culture's "heritage." Postmodern anthropologists (Clifford 1988; Clifford & Marcus 1986; Karp 1991) have since exposed the limits of such museum practices and articulated the complex links between spectatorship, subjectivity, and ethnographic authority and desire. For Tournier the ethnographic approach turns human subjects into dead animal specimens, similar to those prepared by taxi-dermists for a natural history display. A gently patronizing attitude is thus encouraged by the museum, and temporal as well as spatial distance is firmly established between the modern viewers and the objectified "traditional" culture. Tournier uses the following exchange between the guide and one of the pensioners to recapitulate the problem: