Follow in the footsteps of systemic racism, try to understand its foundations, its roots. We can think of it that way. This documentary by director Ava DuVernay raises questions about realities that have always hurt. Inspired by the Pulitzer-winning 2020 bestseller "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents" by African-American journalist Isabel Wilkerson, it reveals the unsuspected similarities between the unofficial social stratification of American society in which the group dominant accords with its privileges and seeks to keep its territoriality, and those of Hindu societies - polluted by the question of the untouchables - and Black African societies such as Nigeria and Senegal.
Even if some criticize its didactic approach, this documentary is like a wall of lamentations against the inequalities which have torn the modern and contemporary world apart. Ranging from racial segregation in America to social stratification in India and Black Africa, director Ava DuVernay dusts off the archives, dialogues with "shameful memories" - allow the expression - collects the melted pains, mutedly retraces the paths of resilience of damaged communities, through the voice of Aunjanue Ellis Taylor - embodying the character of the journalist - whose stage presence is imposing.
The approach is lyrical, on the borders of sensitivity, intertwined in sounds which seem to reflect on the wounds of the past and also those of the present. The music in this documentary is like a soul that prowls around the places of yesteryear to resurface as an act of awakening. Wilkerson is at times in a fictional parenthesis, in which her feelings of love, her family life, her complicity with a loving husband, appear on film as if to show that deep down, it is she who has the profile of the person capable of rekindling the embers of the refusal of forgetting. She is this shadow that prowls around libraries full of laws and thoughts that only corrupt consciences have warmed up with the most cynical archives that today's world would be reluctant to (re)read if it did not sneer at them all at once. more.
ORIGIN, these are the tears of Wilkerson who sees her world turned upside down when, coming out of the bathroom, she discovers lying, the inert body of her husband, a brilliant white mathematician, spread out on the carpet. Her mother is also sickly under the weight of age, and won't last long. The picture is very gray, but cannot prevent him from speaking about the Origins in front of an informed assembly. The exchanges with his cousin on these questions are also quite captivating. The words of each and every person bring back images of the Klu Klux Klan, of Nazism with its corollary of deportation of Jews, of slaves in captivity, of racial segregation through a filmic reconstruction. The documentary uses both the photographic and audiovisual archives to support Wilkerson's approach.
Relevance also calls for movement towards the source. Wilkerson will go to India, a country where caste beliefs run deep. In immersion, it comes closer to the bland reality anchored in the subconscious of Hindus. The image of this little boy, sitting on the floor at the back of the class, because he is not allowed to follow his lesson sitting on the benches, is disturbing.
This documentary can be presented as the true "audiovisual answer" to "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents". And that posterity awaits in a welcoming posture.
Bassirou NIANG
