This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection

This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is the perfect afro-existentialist film, not because of the existential interstice implied in its title, but because of how it paints mystical and metaphysical pictures about the different types of death.

Written by Anthony Saduwa

Mar 30, 2023

Mary Twala Mhlongo in This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection. DEKANALOG

‘European surrealism is empirical African surrealism is mystical and metaphysical,’ Léopold Sédar Senghor once wrote. Poet, African surrealist, and the first president of Senegal, Senghor was trying to say that the existence of African thought, expressed intellectually, countered Western tropes of reality. It also combined with the essence of African narratives, mystical and metaphysical, giving rise to the Afro-existential and the Afrosurreal.

Frida Kahlo, the legendary Mexican surrealist painter, echoed Senghor when she averred that, ‘Afro-surrealism sees that all “others” who create from their actual, lived experiences, are surrealist.’

I’m a bit more cautious than that. It’s 2023, and art by the ‘others’ are more Westernized than Frida could’ve predicted. But now and then my eyes are averted to the sort of work pioneers of Afro-surrealism championed.

ANGUISH THROUGH AN EXISTENTIALIST LENS

This Is Not A Burial, It’s A Ressurection, a drama directed by Jeremiah Lemohang Mosese and set in Lesotho, was recommended to me by a dear friend, Gahee, who lives in South Korea. I watched the film exactly one year ago, somewhere in Rwanda, as the first of an epic triple feature that included Ahmet Uluçay’s Boats Out of Watermelon Rinds (2004) and Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939). Existentialist and surrealist tropes are woven together in Mosese’s arthouse tragedy.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, existentialist thought took root, and seized the intellectual consciousness of Europe. Ostensibly, Existentialism explores the problem of existence itself. It is, therefore, the investigation of existence, or the investigation of being.

Existentialists such as Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, all pondered on the problem of existence. These existentialists, having settled that ‘existence’ is a phenomenon primarily experienced from the particular and individual to the external and collective, soon faced the myriad and diverse possibilities through which the individual could select an experience, and commit his or herself to that experience. And at the heart of this experience arose the question of grief.

How does the individual existentialist manage grief, having cut himself loose from the institutional backbone of religion and existence in the afterlife? In what supernatural entity could the existentialist find respite from the anguish of existence? This question soon seeped into expression, in novels, like Albert Camus’ L’Étranger, in paintings such as Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’, in music, and even in architecture. Films like Fantastic Planet, The Seventh Seal, Waking Life, explored existentialism through motion pictures. They had in common a yearning for understanding by creating a reality within reality, while employing themes of anguish, colonization, tradition, spirituality, and death.

The opening scene of Mosese’s film introduces a face full of anguish and from its lips plays the lesiba, a traditional wind-stringed instrument of Lesotho’s Basotho people. An ancient storyteller squats within the confines of a decaying urban jungle in the ‘future’. In between cutbacks, his haunting tune sets the mood of the film while the camera sets the pace, slowly revealing the isolation of this antiquated existence straddling two worlds.

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This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection

ANGUISH THROUGH AN EXISTENTIALIST LENS

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