Rapping Postmemory, Sampling the Archive: Reimagining 17 October 1961
2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09639489.2014.885004
ISSN1469-9869
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Identity and Heritage
ResumoAbstractOver 50 years have passed since the 17 October 1961 massacre and, though the event has gained wider recognition, it still occupies a tenuous place in French history. Scholars have turned to fictional literary and filmic representations of the massacre that have appeared since the 1980s, but have largely overlooked its commemoration in music. In this essay, the author analyses two works: French rapper Médine's song '17 octobre' (2006), which reimagines the massacre from the perspective of a witness who dies, and an Internet montage video (2008) which sets Médine's song to archival and non-archival video clips. Both the song and montage highlight the limits of official historical discourse through a variety of practices, including manipulating perspective, sampling and putting 17 October into dialogue with other obscured histories. The historical and historiographical work these texts accomplish illustrates the potential of such media to construct a postmemorial archive that blurs boundaries between archive and fiction, creative works and history.Plus de 50 ans se sont écoulés depuis le massacre du 17 octobre 1961 et, même si récemment il a été reconnu de manière plus officielle, ce massacre occupe néanmoins toujours une faible place dans l'Histoire de la France. Des chercheurs se sont bien penchés sur ses représentations littéraires et filmiques (représentations apparues elles-mêmes seulement depuis les années 1980), mais ils ont largement ignoré sa commémoration dans le domaine musical. Dans cet article, l'auteur entend analyser deux œuvres: la chanson « 17 octobre » (2006) du rappeur Médine qui narre le massacre du point de vue d'un témoin qui meurt, et un montage Internet (2008) qui reprend la chanson de Médine en l'illustrant par des images d'archives alternant avec celles d'un autre clip musical officiel de Médine. Ces deux artefacts soulignent en effet les limites du discours historique officiel en employant plusieurs stratégies, y compris en maniant le point de vue, en produisant différentes réalisations musicales et visuelles, et en mettant le 17 octobre en dialogue avec d'autres histoires marginalisées. Le travail historique et historiographique accompli par ces artefacts, illustre ainsi le potentiel de ces médias à construire un archive post-mémoriel brouillant les frontières entre archive et fiction, Histoire et œuvres fictionnelles. This article is part of the following collections: France and Algeria Sixty Years On Notes [1] An incomplete list includes novels such as Didier Daeninckx's novel Meurtres pour mémoire (1984), Leïla Sebbar's La Seine était rouge: Paris, octobre 1961 (1999) and Mehdi Lallaoui's Une nuit d'octobre (2001) and films such as Michael Haneke's Caché (2005), Alain Tasma's Nuit noire (2005) and Yasmina Adi's Ici on noie les Algériens: 17 octobre 1961 (2012). For an overview of the fictional literary works, as well as a detailed analysis of Sebbar's La Seine était rouge, see Donadey (Citation2001) and Rothberg (Citation2009); for an insightful analysis of Daeninckx's and Lallaoui's novels in relation to the archive see Brozgal (Citation2014). [2] Among the songs in which the massacre is evoked, those that speak most extensively about it include 'Paris, Oct. 61' on La Tordue's Les Choses de rien (1995); 'Octobre 61' on Brigada Flores Magon's Brigada Flores Magon (Citation2001); 'Des Fleurs dans la Seine' on La Varda's Les Chemins de l'errance (2005). The French rap group La Rumeur, among others, also evokes this event in live performances. [3] As of January 2014, the montage video is available at http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x484ef_medine-17-octobre-1961_creation. [4] The next song in the series, entitled 'Enfant du destin (Petit Cheval)' released on Médine's second solo album, Jihad, le plus grand combat est contre soi-même (2005), describes how a young Native American boy returns to his village to find his entire tribe massacred by white settlers. The series continued on Médine's fourth album, Arabian Panther (2008), with 'Enfant du destin (Kounta Kinté)', which revisits the history of the main protagonist from Alex Haley's Roots (1976). The fifth instalment, 'Enfant du destin (Daoud)', appearing on Médine's most recent album, Protest Song (2013), returns to the same story as the 'Enfant du destin (David)'—this time from the perspective of the suicide bomber that kills David. [5] Whereas conservative estimates such as that proposed by Jean-Paul Brunet in Police contre FLN: Le drame du 17 octobre (1999) suggest that a maximum of 31 lives were claimed during the massacre, more liberal estimates, such the one Jean-Luc Einaudi proposes in La bataille de Paris: 17 octobre 1961 (1991), place the number of victims around 200. The governmental inquiry into the case, which culminated in the Mandelkern report, concluded that seven victims definitely perished at the hands of French police on the night of 17 October and that as many as 88 victims were possible, though a more likely estimate was a few dozen victims. See http://www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/var/storage/rapports-publics/984000823/0000.pdf. [6] House rightly cites the widespread and varied nature of the protest and its repression as fundamental obstacles to identifying one concrete locale as a memorial to 17 October (2001, 358). In 2001 Paris's mayor Bertrand Delanoë inaugurated a plaque commemorating the massacre on the Pont Saint-Michel. [7] Though the Charonne massacre took place just four months after 17 October, it received much more media coverage at the time (House and MacMaster Citation2006, 247–252). [8] Journalist and conseiller municipal Claude Bourdet, for instance, demanded that Maurice Papon clarify whether or not the figure often repeated in print media—that 'cent cinquante corps [ont été] retirés de la Seine entre Paris et Rouen'—was accurate and called for 'une enquête de la police sur elle-même … avec la participation d'élus' (1961, 6). [9] Both Daeninckx's Meurtres pour mémoire and Sebbar's La Seine était rouge underscore this connection. [10] Written by a Jewish New York high school teacher, Abel Meeropol (who often used the pseudonym Lewis Allan), following the lynching of two men and first published as 'Bitter Fruit' in 1936, 'Strange Fruit' has become known as one of the first and most important protest songs against the treatment of blacks in the pre-civil rights era in the United States. The song was originally released on the Commodore label in 1939. Credit for the song's lyrics and music is often attributed to Holiday—owing in large part to the first edition of Holiday's autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues (Holiday and Dufty Citation1956), where she asserted as much. William Dufty, the autobiography's co-author, removed this assertion from the second edition, despite Holiday's continued claims that she set it to music (Baker Citation2002, 56). For more information on the authorship battle see Margolick (Citation2000). [11] Scholarly works in French use both the English term 'sampling' and the French one 'échantillonnage' to refer to this practice. [12] Both Nora and Hirsch later acknowledge that such audio and video recordings (or traces) are attributed an aura of authenticity, despite this problematic move. [13] In fact, entire websites such as the-breaks.com and kevinnottingham.com have been devoted to this practice, as Sarah Hankins has pointed out (2001, 197). [14] As Nancy Virtue (Citation2011) has argued, such a strategy is also central to Michael Haneke's film Caché (2005), which 'mimick[s] the tricks of memory by repeatedly conflating, concealing and then revealing its own diegetic and extra-diegetic layers such that as viewers we are often uncertain as to whether we are witnessing firsthand the actions and events of the narrative or rather, a mediated representation of those events in the form of the anonymous videotapes' (287). [15] Larab's corpus of 36 videos is primarily composed of 'fan trailers', especially for Japanese manga comics and video games. The '17 octobre' montage video, however, remains Larab's most viewed. [16] Kagan's photographs of 17 October are housed in the Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine in Nanterre, but most are reprinted in Jean-Luc Einaudi and Élie Kagan's 17 octobre 1961 (2001). [17] 'Boulevard Vincent Auriol' samples a France 2 investigation into the overcrowded Boulevard Vincent Auriol housing development just months prior to the fire. The clip concludes with a foreboding conclusion: 'les habitants redoutent un incendie'. (See http://www.ina.fr/video/2909724001007/archives-sur-l-immeuble-du-boulevard-auriol-video.html.)
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