#Silas Taunyane Monyatsi

[whileiamdying]

This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection: Staying Power

By Zakes Mda ESSAYS. — JAN 24, 2023

The story of Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2020) unfolds through poetry. The poetry of images and words—the interplay of light and shadow, and the lyricism of the narration. It ensnares us right from the opening shots, of a horse going through an aesthetically beautiful yet obviously traumatic experience at the hands of blanketed Basotho men and women. The action is made more haunting by the application of a Wong Kar Wai–esque step-printing technique—which blurs and then sharpens and then smears the image over the excitement of the perpetrators and the resistance of the victim.

The film is set and was filmed in Lesotho, a former British protectorate that is now an independent kingdom, which is geographically completely surrounded by South Africa and therefore highly dependent on South African goods and services. A great percentage of Lesotho citizens work in the mines, farms, and homes of South Africa, and Lesotho also relies heavily on their remittances. For its part, however, South Africa needs the water that is piped to it from Lesotho, where huge dams have been constructed. Many Lesotho villages have been displaced to make way for the construction of these dams. At the heart of This Is Not a Burial is just such a displacement. The story focuses on the bereft eighty-year-old widow Mantoa, an accidental hero who finds herself becoming a catalyst for her community’s resilience.

The setting of the film’s opening is bleak. We are in a run-down tavern. The notes of a lone lesiba instrument fill the air—if we can talk of air in this environment, which looks stuffy despite the fact that the space is sparsely populated, its denizens all sitting or standing by themselves, each perhaps contemplating the social pain caused by a lack of connection with others, each body weighed down by loneliness at worst, solitude at best. Perhaps we’ll learn which as the movie proceeds. Loneliness is imposed on one; solitude is a choice. Solitude is the state of being alone without being lonely.

Solitude is also the stuff of magical-realist fiction. And This Is Not a Burial has strong elements of that narrative mode, not because it exudes a sense of the supernatural but because, in it, the strange and the unusual exist in the same context as objective reality, without being disconcerting. For example, in one scene, as Mantoa (Mary Twala Mhlongo, who was seventy-nine years old at the time of shooting) sits among the ashes and debris of her burned-down house, a group of sheep appears, and the animals rally around her, giving her solace.

In the opening, the aloneness of the denizens of the tavern, even in the midst of company, is also haunting: a man stands alone against the wall drinking a quart of beer directly from the bottle and nodding absently to the music; two lovers sit on a bench with their backs to each other; another lone man smokes a cigarette and blows a cloud of smoke; a woman dances alone, languidly flapping her arms like a drunken bird to the music of the lesiba. Indeed, everything is languid and lonesome here, including the music. A lesiba is a mouth-resonated wind instrument played by the Basotho and the Khoikhoi peoples, with a flattened quill attached to a string stretched over a long stick. Its notes are often accompanied by guttural grunts made by the player. In this scene, these sounds enhance the ethereality of the ambience.

The lesiba player here is also the film’s narrator. He is portrayed by the well-known South African actor Jerry Mofokeng Wa Makhetha. He gives a virtuoso performance without moving an inch throughout the movie. Only his face, as seen in the tavern, and his elegiac voice carry the gravitas of the narration. His pace is slow and deliberate. He introduces us to Mantoa’s village: the old people called it Phula ea Meokho, which literally means the Valley of Tears but is translated as Plains of Weeping in the movie for, I think, poetic reasons. When French missionaries came to Lesotho in the 1830s, they renamed the village Nasaretha, after the biblical Nazareth. The narrator tells us, “They say in Nasaretha, if you place your ear to the ground, you can still hear the cries and whispers of those who perished under the flood, their spirits hallowing from the deep.”

From this, it becomes clear that setting is very important in This Is Not a Burial. The landscape itself tells the story. It is a character in its own right, not just a place where the story happens because a story must happen somewhere. It even speaks and cries for what the villagers have lost and what they are about to lose.

When the story begins, after the lesiba player’s long but engaging narration, we learn that the Lesotho government intends to flood the valley and build a large dam as part of a program of “progress” and “development”—or so the villagers are told by the bureaucrats who hold meetings to convince them of the wisdom of the decision. The reality is that South Africa needs the “white gold,” as water is affectionately called, for its thirsty cities and industries. The villagers are going to be moved to Motimposo, on the outskirts of the capital city of Maseru, a place that is already crowded with mostly unemployed people. This means, of course, that the villagers will have to abandon their rural lifestyle: their fields, their horses, their cattle, and, most important, the merino sheep from whose wool they earn a livelihood, after their exciting annual sheep-
shearing competitions. But most painfully, they will have to desert the graves of their forebears. That will be an abomination of the first order. Basotho venerate their ancestors. Ancestors are the intercessors between the living and the Great Creator, Molimo. Imagine what misfortune must befall ungrateful men and women who abandon their ancestors to be drowned in a human-made lake that covers the only home they ever knew! No wonder there is resistance to the forced removal.

That resistance is led by Mantoa, who has lost all her relatives, most recently a son who was expected home for Christmas from the gold mine where he worked but who perished underground with the rest of the miners. Only his corpse arrives home, and we witness a colorful funeral attended by men and women in Basotho blankets, predominantly of a rich blue. Mantoa is concerned about what will happen to the graves if the village is flooded. Politicians tell her, “It’s your call what you do with your graves . . . The ministry will provide assistance to those who choose to move their graves.”

Similar struggles against the negative impacts of large dams, particularly the mass displacement of poor communities and the loss of land, have been waged all over the world. These mammoth constructions are always accompanied by human-rights violations, especially against Indigenous communities, in such far-ranging countries as Brazil, the United States, India, and the Philippines. Mantoa takes a bus to the local administrative center to make an appeal against the dam to a minister, but she is shunned by the bureaucrats there. Her resistance next takes the form of weeping and screaming, to the extent that people from the village come to her home, thinking there has been another death. The village elders decide that she is mad. Mantoa’s resistance is fueled by her wish to be buried in Nasaretha, next to the graves of her kin. She rallies the support of her compatriots, who insist, “We are staying here!”

The village is self-sufficient, though its resources are meager. This is a valley of death, yet it is also a healing valley, where flowers and herbs that cure different ailments grow in abundance. Mantoa yearns to sleep and never wake up again. Yet she continues to help the sick get well with herbs from the mountain and valley, and to engage in life-sustaining activities in communion with the rest of society, winnowing corn and washing clothes in the river even while yearning for death. At one point, she tells the village pastor, “There is no meaning to my husband’s death . . . Yes, that’s grief.” She arranges her own funeral—let the dead bury their own dead, the narrator rejoins—giving instructions on how and when it should be carried out, who should sing Sesotho traditional music there, and what kind of coffin should be used.

She spends her time listening to obituaries on the radio. She warms the batteries of her radio in the sun on the windowsill to prolong their life. It is a telling symbolic act. She shows a flicker of a smile as she waltzes alone in the room, in the arms of an imaginary lover. The narrator admonishes her: “Lament, old widow. Weep. Weep. For death has forgotten you.”

She wears perpetual mourning clothes even as she visits neighbors, giving them life by helping those who are sick; she spends the late afternoons preparing the site at the graveyard for her own grave. When the villagers refuse to dig her grave, she digs it herself.

But for now, we leave her there, digging. We go back to what we started with: how exquisitely this movie has been made, and how effectively it transmits the meaning in a simple story by defying a lot of established conventions of contemporary cinema.

First of all, Lesotho cineaste Mosese—who wrote, directed, and edited the film—gives a unique kind of narration to the poetic and musical narrator, drawing very much from such Sesotho performance modes as tšomo (written in South African Sesotho orthography as tshomo), a classical oral tradition that is still in use, especially among families in rural Lesotho. The expository nature of tšomo lends itself excellently to the filmmaker’s style. He confirmed in an interview on South Africa’s Radio 702 that he sees his film as “almost a folklore narrative.”

This is truly a Lesotho movie, not only because of its setting and the fact that it was created by a Lesotho artist—born and raised in Hlotse, Lesotho, Mosese now lives and works in Berlin—who is drawing from a deeply Sesotho aesthetic. Almost all the actors—including Makhaola Ndebele, who plays the pastor; Mofokeng Wa Makhetha, whom I have already mentioned, as the narrator and player of the lesiba lamentations; and Silas Taunyane Monyatsi, the bureaucrat and politician—have Lesotho roots. This may come as a surprise to followers of the South African film and television industry, as these are familiar faces there. Of the principal cast, only the South African Twala Mhlongo is an import.

The most important convention that Mosese defies here, a choice that could have endangered the reception of his film if he had failed to handle it with panache, is that of beginning one’s film in medias res. The modern reader and viewer expects exciting action from the word go. Yet this movie starts languidly and depends not only on the lesiba and narration but also on an emotional ambience that foreshadows the texture and the tenor of the story. It is fortunate for the director that he was not dependent on South African funders; they would likely have insisted that the first thirty minutes of This Is Not a Burial be chopped off, to accord with the only formula of storytelling they know—which they often refer to as the tried-and-tested Hollywood formula. These film-development mandarins would have been riled up: “What’s exposition doing in this screenplay?”

It would have been a sad loss. It would have messed up this work of art.

Mosese also compellingly uses lingering, evocative shots of darker moments that are dependent on stillness rather than motion for their effect. These work perfectly for Twala Mhlongo’s tour-de-force performance, for her face with its graceful ravines of age, and for her whole persuasive demeanor. Long takes sometimes catch her stillness, her body imprisoned by loneliness, her face a study of pain. Quite often, the film is reminiscent of slow cinema such as that made by Theo Angelopoulos, a genre that emphasizes long, contemplative takes.

The cinematography of This Is Not a Burial is breathtaking—panoramic shots of the mountains, the mist that sometimes covers them, horses and their blanketed riders, and musicians playing another instrument of Sesotho traditional music, the accordion. The film’s long takes and uninterrupted tracking shots not only give the audience a sense of place but also convey feeling.

This movie is a fitting swan song for Twala Mhlongo, who died while it was on the festival circuit, and after its release in South Africa. Though This Is Not a Burial is about the power of grief, it is uplifting and satisfying. It is subtly about resilience. The director approaches his subject with so much compassion. Remember: the title proclaims that the film is about resurrection.

Mosese is an aspiring painter. He has also achieved painterliness through the camera. Each shot can be harvested for a still of utmost beauty. Gentle beauty against the grittiness of the story. Two hours of relentless beauty. This is not just a movie, it’s a narrative art installation.

Zakes Mda is a visiting professor in the English department of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg; a creative-writing adjunct at Johns Hopkins University; and an emeritus professor of English at Ohio University.

#Criterion #Lesotho #Cinema #Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese #Mary Twala Mhlongo #Zakes Mda #University of Johannesburg #Ohio University #Johns Hopkins University #Theo Angelopoulos #Makhaola Ndebele #Mofokeng Wa Makhetha #Silas Taunyane Monyatsi