The Essential Workers of Khady Sylla’s Cinema
In 1999 the West African country of Senegal was at a monumental crossroads between the past and future cultures of cinema. Even legendary film directors like Ousmane Sembéne and Djibril Diop Mambéy must have taken notice as they were being confronted by the digital revolution in imagemaking. As the new decade approached, video cameras became less expensive and more accessible to the public. This meant that even amateur video enthusiasts who did not previously have the resources or equipment to make a film finally could. One person who benefited from this revolution was novelist Khady Sylla. Sylla, a French educated philosopher and writer, was living in her hometown of Dakar and enjoying the success of her 1992 book, Le Jeu de la Mer. Filmmaker Jean Rouch contemplated adapting the book for the big screen and approached Sylla. It was through Sylla’s brief screenwriting collaboration with Rouch that Sylla’s interest in creating cinema was sparked. When the project didn’t pan out, Sylla, using only a camcorder, turned the focus of her lens on the lives of working people, especially those who we today consider essential workers.
In our current pandemic-affected world, public transportation drivers have become frontline essential workers. If you google search the words “bus drivers” you will find several stories about driver shortages as many drivers balk at the vaccine requirements both in the U.S. and abroad. While these drivers are in today’s headline news, it is hard to find a tale which personalizes them. Yet Sylla’s first feature film, Colobane Express does so masterfully. Released in 1999, the documentary Colobane Express follows driver Pape Touré and his apprentice N’diassé N’doye on their daily travels picking up passengers in Dakar. These drivers worked for the RTYE Transportation company which provided a 24-hour van service and employed close to 100 people.
We find ourselves constantly sympathizing with N’doye as he is yelled at and physically abused by the passengers. One such scene plays like a tawdry episode from the Real Housewives as N’doye is struck by a woman after she choked on a piece of food when the van hit a pothole. After beating N’doye for her own choking, the woman ran from the van calling N’doye “the devil’’ as she exited. A priest who witnessed her outrageous behavior swooped in with holy water to get the “devil” from the van out of her body. We find ourselves rather surprised by Touré’s passivity during the incident which easily could have turned violent. As the film progressed, Touré’s full character came into the frame. We saw that Touré, even as an experienced driver, was actually in constant fear for his own safety. Therefore, his apprentices received no on-the-job protection while training as he routinely turned his head in the face of danger.
The danger portrayed in Colobane Express is still inherent in the work of public transportation drivers today, but it is amplified by the health risks of the pandemic. In July of 2021, Senegal’s national bus company announced that it would suspend service within Dakar because of the Delta variant surge. While the decision was met with both praise and disappointment, it was primarily viewed as a public health victory as the country ticked towards a 36% positivity rate. Once service resumed, masking on public transit became mandatory for the safety of the passengers and drivers. When considering the physical and health risks taken by these drivers, one must also think about the wages made by these workers. According to salaryexplorer.com, the average monthly salary of a bus/van driver in Senegal is 109,000 XOF (West African Franc), which is the equivalent of $190; less than $50 per week.
With the outrageous predicaments that Touré and N’doye get tangled up in, it is easy to become enthralled with simply the characters and plot lines of Colobane Express, but it was the editing of this picture which laid the groundwork for Sylla’s later work. Edited by Cécile Fernandez, the tone of Colobane Express swung back and forth between that of direct cinema and a 1980s studio picture. Particularly around the half hour mark, there was a montage set to the music of Souleymane Faye as passengers boarded the van. Faye’s song, “Grand Ass”, originally released in 1997, carried the equivalent energy of The Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance” in the opening scene in Beverly Hills Cop. Both songs made the frames of their film larger, and made the audience self-aware of the fabrication of cinema. This montage worked in juxtaposition to the rest of the film which was rather quiet and slower in its cuts. Fernandez, who began her career as a sound designer in France, only collaborated with Sylla on this one project before leaving the business permanently. While, Colobane Express was a fruitful first feature, it is Sylla’s 2008 film The Silent Monologue which encapsulates the filmmaker’s voice and vision.
“We are a minority, but Spartacus is with us” said a mysterious voice-over in the first 5 minutes of The Silent Monologue. While making reference to the widely lauded Stanley Kubrick film which was written by the blacklisted scribe Dalton Trumbo, we saw images of female domestic workers sweeping outside their employers’ homes at dawn. These melancholy moving images were then intercut with a character named Amy who guided the audience into the inner lives of these women. The film’s editor, Emmanuelle Baude, used this stylized approach to create a hybrid film which weaved between the fictional Amy and the interviews of real domestic workers. In pre-production Sylla spent close to 6 months interviewing off-camera maids, housekeepers and cleaners to make sure that the script of her film accurately portrayed the women we saw on screen. In the film Sylla used two narrators to guide the viewer through the horrors we saw on and off screen. The first narrator, performed by Ndeye Fatou Diop, told us Amy’s story. We also heard the director’s voice as our second narrator who provided a global view of domestic labor.
As with Sylla’s drivers, her domestic characters also experienced hardships similar to those faced by today’s workers. Over the last year and half, domestic workers have been among the hardest hit by conditions of employment and exposure to COVID-19 during the pandemic. According to the United Nations, domestic workers globally saw a 50% decrease in hours worked. Within the US, according to the National Domestic Workers Alliance, that number is closer to 90% of jobs lost. The National Domestic Workers Alliance issued a 6 Months of COVID report which shows that about half of all domestic workers do not have any access to healthcare. In the same report, we see that 48% of domestic workers use the hospital or clinics to access care rather than a primary care physician. This means that during the height of the coronavirus, unless they worked for a generous employer, domestic laborers could not get quality healthcare.
Sylla’s The Silent Monologue also speaks to the subjugation of women who are forced into this type of labor and do not have any worker protections. For instance, we saw an interview with a maid who explained how she was forced to quit school in 3rd grade and became a nanny. For privacy reasons we never found out her name as she described that she had been raped by her boss, but she wasn’t able to report it to law enforcement for fear of losing her only source of income. Sylla and her co-director Charlie Van Damme summed up this horror with a voice-over that asserted the following: “Why does the emancipation of some result in the servitude of others?” This brilliant line links the film to Marxist Feminism.
Marxist Feminists believe that the fight for women’s liberation is tied to the struggle of injustices carried out by capitalism. In 1972, scholars and activists Silvia Frederic, Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Brigitte Galtier started the Wages for Housework campaign which advocated for domestic laborers having a livable wage and adequate healthcare benefits. In The Silent Monologue, we saw another interview with a young maid who only made 30 Euros a year, the equivalent of $34. The maid explained her struggle while living in this poverty. As a member of the working-poor, she used half of her annual income on rent and food and the remaining went to support her extended family. This left no money for an education, something she knew would have led to a better life. This theme recurred in October of 2021, when Maid was released on Netflix. This series from Molly Smith Metzler is, in many ways, a $10 million cousin to The Silent Monologue. While Sylla did not have anywhere close to this Hollywood budget, she used her own voice at the very end of the hybrid film to say, “this [lives and labor of domestic workers] could happen anywhere.”
Sylla passed away in 2013 at the age of 46 while working on her final film, Une Simple Parole. Even though her last film is unavailable in North America, there has never been a more perfect time to view her work. Although, Sylla still remains largely an unknown filmmaker outside of her home country, I do hope that you seek out her works. In light of COVID-19, her films take on new meaning and help the viewer better understand the daily trials and tribulations of our essential workers.
The Silent Monologue and Colobane Express are available on DVD from ArtMattan Productions . Both films can be screened for institutions and streamed via africanfilm.com .
