Earlier this month, I made a list of films. They were works I had never seen before, pieces from around the world that I wanted to watch and write about. Near the top of that list was Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen (1987). A film deeply rooted in the myths and histories of Mali, Yeelen felt like a prime example of the kind of work I wanted to experience and critique.

It meshed with the purposes of my column — to track my encounters with films outside the legibilizing functions of Euro-(US)America and/or English. Simultaneously, it was from a region of the world I had never seen narrativized on screen. I, who grew up in a household obsessed with movies, with shelves creaking under the weight of DVDs and heated dinnertime arguments about Bergman’s shot selection in comparison to Fellini’s, about the relative merits of Ray and Kurosawa.

I was excited. I patted myself on my back for the critical eclecticism I was displaying, going out of my way to engage with a film even an aficionado might be unfamiliar with. My “discovery” of Yeelen, I thought, was cause for celebration. Here was one of the “hidden” gems of world cinema. It felt good to hear Martin Scorsese sing Cissé’s praises on YouTube.

Who was Souleymane Cissé, I wondered? What is this enigmatic film, whose sparse Wikipedia entry calls it “the greatest African film ever made,” about? I read some reviews — some vague criticisms, a bunch of praise. I hit play. It was time for me to experience this “African” masterpiece and come out all the more sensitive to diversity on the other side. I was well on my way to gaining new competencies in the rhythms of Malian myth and meaning-making.

The little I will say of Yeelen can be summarized in this — it is a beautiful film. It is so achingly beautiful. A story about faith, family and our relationship to time, Cissé paints a world of people trying desperately to cling to power, their senses of identity and position in a cosmic order of things. They fail, with heartbreaking intensity. They fail, they burn, they render uninhabitable spaces physical and psychic. What, Cissé seems to ask, does a mother owe a son, a son a father, a king his subjects, a higher power its earthly channelers? And a parent to their unborn child at the hour of their death?

Everything, one might argue. Amidst the bitter passions of the human heart? Often, nothing at all.

In its landscapes, its interpersonal dramas and articulations of intergenerational conflict, Cissé’s film stands amongst my favorites of all time. Its scenes are so textured I could touch them with my mind's hand, so palpable, they now sit next to Tarkovsky in my image bank.

And the central thrust of the protagonist Nianankoro’s journey? A boy who would be man, king, savior and destructor. A boy fleeing from the threat of murder by his father. You feel for him, his unbearable burden, his guilt and shame, forced to grow hard-edged by circumstance, blooded before his time. I wept as he asked the question so many wonder about so often: “Before killing me, tell me the reason.” A reason. A reason for the pain. As if any logic could ever suffice for the things that leave us broken and scarred. In Cissé’s cinema, as in life, there is no answer from the father. All we get, a careless whisper — “never mind.”

I think I have presented a decent summary, giving an impressionistic account of a film that has, obviously, affected me deeply. In doing so, however, I have lost a lot of the cultural specificity and cosmological structurality that color, flavor and locate the story in and against a Western canon.

This is in stark contrast to the beginning of this contemplate, where I made a note of how regional origin was part of what drew me to Cissé’s masterwork. Now, having written down my thoughts, a lot of what makes Yeelen distinct feels lost, reduced so that I can make a case for its wide-ranging, human appeal and convince others of its spectacularity without resorting to spoilers.

My problem with my encounter with Yeelen, and this subsequent processing of that encounter, is how I easily fell into a discursive trap. So far, I have been reperforming the very ideologies I wanted to initially subvert.

I believe that I am genuinely invested in expanding my artistic view of the world. But I cannot overlook the fact that it felt good, that I felt as if I was doing something out of the ordinary, in deciding to view a film by Cissé from Mali. Socialized to celebrate a particular field of directors telling certain kinds of stories, from specific parts of the world, I deployed the same erasive, anglo-ethnocentrism to analyze Yeelen that I was trying to escape.

Magic, precognition and languages I do not understand; there was also a very specific musicality to the dialogue. I think I should have wondered with more rigor the structures that go into making certain cinemas feel novel and surprising. Why was this a breath of fresh air? Against whose yardstick, stale air, was I choosing to contextualize this film?

I cannot hope to understand the nuances and complexities of the Komo or comprehend fully any of the many traditions that suffuse Nianankoro’s tale. But perhaps approaching a film from outside one’s ken without a self-congratulatory, extractive intensity is one way to start decolonizing our critical orientations.

I did not take months to formulate a coherent critique of Yeelen. It deserves this, but I wanted to share how it moved me as soon as I could. A hard sell, but I am willing to take a risk. To write without shallow exoticization or recuperative oversimplification will always be difficult, no matter the time frame. So, let me say how I marveled at this film, even as it exceeded me. And I believe that there is great beauty in not having the words to express why you love something. That is what art does, from time to time, slipping in, in your skin, tingling delights you cannot jot or pin.

Inarticulacy, however, is not an excuse to be careless. Never. So this piece is my way of mapping one approach to the foreign, one trying to grasp with care. I did not discover Yeelen. That I ever thought I did is something to consider, question and draw attention to. And maybe my summary tries too hard to appeal to you, the reader. In any case, I am letting you know what went into my inarticulate love and its inadequate appeal — watch Yeelen! And I hope, one day, this injunction has lost all its charge — knowing Cissé’s oeuvre, as ordinary as the wind.