Editor’s Picks: Mati Diop’s Oscars Contender ‘Dahomey’

Frieze Editor’s Picks is a fortnightly column in which a frieze editor shares their recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to.

Mati Diop, Dahomey (2024)

Last year, I was invited to Accra to participate in a conference on cultural restitution, ‘The Global Convening for the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage’. From African museum directors to community leaders, key stakeholders engaged in impassioned debates and presented successful case studies to illustrate the scope of the task ahead and, most importantly, what it means for such cultural markers of identity to be inaccessible to those on the African continent.

Mati Diop’s latest release, Dahomey (2024) – which focuses on the 2021 restitution of 26 objects plundered from the Kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin) by France in 1892 – therefore feels both timely and pertinent. Diop shows us the careful packaging of the objects at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris as they are prepared for transportation, while also lending a different perspective by giving one of the objects – a wooden statue of King Ghezo of Dahomey – a voice and a narrative, warping the viewer’s sense of reality. In the most moving part of the film, recently put forward as Senegal’s selection for the 2025 Academy Awards, Beninese students debate with emotional depth and rigour about the importance of the objects’ return to the country. Their impassioned arguments felt similar to those I participated in at last year’s conference. When such artefacts are violently plundered, as Diop movingly illustrates, the aftereffects can take many years to recover from, until a new generation determinedly seeks to right historical wrongs.

Dionne Brand, Salvage: Readings from the Wreck (2024) 

I have long admired Dionne Brand’s writing, which has been constantly in conversation with theories of racial politics, diaspora and belonging. I first came to her work through A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2001), a deeply moving meditation on intergenerational trauma and memory through reckoning with the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade and what she calls the ‘fissures of the past’. In her latest non-fiction book, Brand continues that important work by exploring the politics of a life spent reading, revisiting and closely analyzing some of the canon texts of European and Anglo-American literature, such as Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Brand reveals how our worldviews are influenced by these significant bodies of work and looks to expose what may have been concealed by the dominant colonial perspectives of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

Brand unpacks the word ‘we’ – used liberally in both literature and journalism, but particularly, the author notes, in op-eds and essays about the COVID-19 pandemic – as speaking to a white experience that has been ‘summoned through the bourgeois life of 19th-century England’. To counter this, Brand promotes other perspectives, from Black writers such as Gwendolyn Brooks and John Keene to artists including Roy DeCarava, Torkwase Dyson and Fred Wilson. Brand elucidates beautifully what a Black literary tradition means to her, one that refuses, in her words, to reproduce ‘white bourgeoise tradition as “meaning”’ and, instead, signposts how ‘writers from the geopolitical South [can] find a way through and around the glutinous “we”’.

The London Review Bookshop podcast 

While at a writing group recently, I realized how important it is to speak to peers about the nuts and bolts of the medium: the processes, structures and influences that often are obscured from the reader’s view by numerous edits and revisions. This is one reason why I love the London Review Bookshop’s series of talks by authors, who are invited to speak about an upcoming or newly released book with a chosen interlocutor – often a fellow writer. Expertly curated by the bookshop’s Claire Williams, these intimate and revealing conversations – featuring authors and artists such as Ed Atkins, Brian Dillon, Deborah Levy and McKenzie Wark – are also accessible via the podcast archives.

Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to attend a fascinating conversation between Lara Pawson and critic Jennifer Hodgson, which coincided with the release of Pawson’s Spent Light (2024), a brilliant hybrid text on how capitalist consumption and acquisition is deeply intertwined with labour and economic extraction via the most basic household objects. Not only was it wonderful to hear Pawson speak so passionately about how she came to write the book, it was also illuminating to hear her take on the contemporary publishing infrastructure and what kinds of texts publishing houses currently deem commercially viable. As much as I love the act of reading, I also think it’s important to understand how books are written, published and distributed: the intimacy of the London Review Bookshop, with audience members often squeezed tightly into its Bloomsbury space for sell-out events, offers a backstage pass into what it means to be a writer today.

_{Main image: Mati Diop, Dahomey, 2024, film still. Courtesy: Mubi}