Juju Factory — Ghosts of Postcolonialism

Image Credit: Mubi

(Co-written by Tien Nguyen and Charles Misonne)

The longer I live, the more it seems to me that an almost unbearably large portion of my life will be spent attempting to piece together the unknowable and the nonsensical. Even attempting to tackle the closest portion of life that is my own identity and how “I” relates to “everyone else” manifests itself as an almost spiritual challenge — a reckoning of how something that feels so intangible can interact with and haunt the physical spaces that we exist in. As an artist and an aspiring filmmaker, there is then a taunting sort of need that comes out of this challenge to express and explore that reckoning. This is the place that it appears Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda seems to have found himself in the making of his 2007 film, Juju Factory.

Juju Factory, for all that it is and contains, finds itself to be the greatest cinematic puzzle ever faced by both Tien and Charles. A confusion that — for Tien — started upon initial capture by the idea of the Congo and Belgium’s ghosts that is presented in the description of the film and, quite honestly, continues to baffle us. Tien Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American who doesn’t speak a word of French and knows even less about Belgium. This is all despite having a dad that grew up there for the majority of his childhood and still attempts to speak French to her. All to say that there were immediate issues for her understanding of a film that follows a Congolese man living in Brussels that is also only available online in French with no English subtitles.

All of the English translations of the lines as well as all understandings of the film’s content and context were thanks to and directly from Charles Misonne, who is the one Belgian person that Tien knows in New York City. Due to the atonal nature of the film, the writing of this article utterly petrified Charles for many days after his first viewing of Juju Factory, and the very thought of writing about it had tormented him so much that he could not bring himself to write the very sentences you are reading. Charles decided to go out in his home city of Brussels, and to his horror found himself dwelling in the backdrop of the film he was attempting to escape. The erratic symbolism, the vague references — Juju Factory isn't an easy subject to grasp. The film was more at the image of a Lovecraftian creature who cannot meet one’s gaze lest they turn the viewer mad, rather than of a riddle. 

Juju Factory can not pretend to be an epic movie by any means. Shot on a consumer grade camera with an extremely tight budget, its cinematography seems aimless and at times not dissimilar to the cityscape cutaways of a reality television show. At first, taking the movie very literally, it had seemed to be an almost neorealist depiction of a Congolese man having to face the relationship between the country he lives in and the country he is from while living in Brussels. Admittedly, the film’s tone is mostly goofy and even melodramatic at points. There is no shortage of silly characters or moments that feel like dream sequences. However, the sheer amount of almost surreal symbolism and the glimmers of the pure expression of Bakupa-Kanyinda’s idea in the film was too much for us to stop its existence as a traditional piece of postcolonial media. They certainly haunted us enough that, on our last day of being in New York City before we left college for the summer, we sat inside of Bobst library just to think through what there even is to say about this film. Even then, it felt impossible to interpret it fully analytically.

The film interrupts itself at one point with a two minute extract from an interview with a Belgian veteran who explains that he disposed of the body of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of Congo, after his joint effort assassination in 1961 by the CIA and the Belgian colonial police.

Amidst wives cheating and conflict over the content of Kongo Congo’s book — a writer and our main character living in the predominantly African Mantogé district of Brussels — is Kongo refusing to let his landlord sell a photograph of an African artwork during his eviction process, stating “You can seize everything. Seize me and expose me in the Tervuren museum if you want but not her.” To Kongo, his own dignity and personhood means less to him than a photograph of an artwork that he refers to as the African Mona Lisa — so much so that he would rather be exposed in the human zoo of the Tervuren.

The African characters consistently insist upon their own Belgian-ness to the white characters around them.

Kongo’s editor, the main antagonist, is a Congolese man named Joseph Désiré. Which is the same birth name of Joseph Désiré Mobutu, the dictator of Congo (then Zair) from 1971 to 1997. In another moment, Désiré prays to a statue of Leopold the II, the former sole owner of the Congo Free State, for guidance and addresses him in the terms of the Catholic God. In the end, his position in the publishing company is overtaken by a white woman who was his secretary and we are left with the fact that even his publishing company is not really his own — that no matter what the European hegemony can take what is his away in one fell swoop even if he engages with what their goal appears to be for the suppression of his own people.

Bakupa-Kanyinda delivers us into Juju Factory with newspaper visuals of the Montogé district changing in its identity and perception and dialogue over it that tells us, “We finally have arrived in the entrails of our illusions. There reigns the ghost of our invented dreams, impoverished dreams, suicided dreams.” Words which suggest a deeply internal aspect of where we exist now in the world. Where we are arriving is the innermost part of our illusions and, tangentially, ourselves. While there may be an external force to our own invention or to the killing of our dreams, there is also the deeply internal aspect. 

Juju Factory at first had seemed to be an allegory, as many of the aforementioned elements pointed toward some sort of parallel with the real life Congo crisis and Congolese colonization by Belgium. But the movie even blurs this route.  Once again, all of this takes place in moments between a 97 minute, breakneck speed plot about a man who wants to write about his own life experience as a Congolese-Belgian man while his editor wants him to write what is essentially a travelogue while their personal lives deteriorate in an over the top manner. There is a distinctly slice of life nature to the literal plot — a sort of passivity that one can not help but feel is because this conflict, to Bakupa-Kanyinda, is merely a fact of life. It is within extraordinary moments (these scenes) that Juju Factory delivers on the promise of its beginning lines and takes us to the end of the road for our illusions about identity — especially in revealing the truth of just how much identity can find conflict within one body.

These extraordinary moments can be contained almost entirely inside of the characters themselves. Kongo’s assessment of his own identity’s value against an African artwork and his outburst of need to protect it comes solely from within himself — it feels of a struggle to maintain the most African parts of himself while living on the land that has removed his body from that context. In bearing the name of the ruler that was known for suppressing political dissent and separating the Congo from its name in order to promote a nationalistic ideology, it is almost poetic that Désiré finds himself in opposition to Kongo’s need to authentically represent his lived experience as a Congolese-Belgian man because he wants to skew the representation of the Mantogé district positive to pander to the white man. This idea of the personal murder of our own dreams could refer to the internal conflict within ourselves. Or it could refer to the larger part of our personal identity that extends to who we can be grouped with. Désiré’s actions that position him as complicit to the oppressions of a postcolonial Belgium and his insistence that he is Belgian are the strongest evidence of this internal struggle in Juju Factory referring to both.

Then Désiré’s wife announces that she is pregnant with another man’s child and he ends the film going off to become a politician in Africa and we find ourselves at a loss once again about what to make of Juju Factory.

Frankly, it is understandable that Bakupa-Kanyinda found a conflict so completely internal to reflect in everything in such a way that it comes out as an explosion. When finally giving into the need to understand yourself through the expression of it, reflecting upon the ultimate unknowable of one’s identity in art presents with it a completely new challenge in holding back. As easy as it is to want to place every related experience into a work of art in hopes of making sense of it, you run the risk of pouring out more of yourself than you know what to do with. There are never any less pieces to deal with when you spread them out. Perhaps that is why the isolated portions where the struggles of identity and history focus themselves stick so powerfully as visuals and moments within Juju Factory. The characters are not meant to alter our understanding of colonial history, but colonial history is meant to alter our understanding of the characters. Juju Factory then positions itself as a study of the immigrant, the colonized, and, more simply and broadly, of man existing in a place where history has slowly, and temporarily, ended its course in the present. 

At its heart, Juju Factory is a film confused. But it is just as much a failing of the film to communicate itself properly as it is a folly on our part as humans to think that everything emotional can be understandable— that, for both the artist and the viewer, as much of a puzzle as this film and the life that it tries to communicate is, there really is no bigger picture that it is all meant to add up to. Perhaps it is an illusion that it can all add up to one image. Perhaps, when your body both exists in and belongs to the land of your oppressor, the image becomes double exposed. Instead of viewing the film as a puzzle, we can look at it and find that what we interpreted as an enigma is in reality an intricate object full of bizarre pieces that are not meant to be solved but merely gazed at. Kongo loses his identity in a foreign country. He finds himself in a land that prevents him from adapting to it, while also attempting to erase his original identity. The film leaves us with an impossible question; how do we find the in between, the clarity, in being Congolese-Belgian? In being anything contradictory to itself?