I.
In a ballroom in the Palais de Nation in Algeria, men remove shrouds from the tables and chairs. It’s as if they are unveiling antiques for an estate sale, or uncovering a corpse. Perhaps they are restoring the room to its original state, so that we see how it looked during the fourth conference of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1973. But really, why are they dusting off a forgotten building, and why are we now looking at a place and time long gone? The question remains unanswered for now—Naeem Mohaeimen’s camera floats through the room, sweeps past the men’s shoulders, and turns down a long corridor, leaving the men behind.
In Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), a three-channel film that Mohaiemen made in 2017 on commission from Documenta 14, the camera navigates space with a precision whose aim is wonder. As the camera stalks the curved exterior of La Coupole d’Alger Arena, we feel as if we are exploring a new planet or surveying the ruins of a lost one. Designed by Oscar Neimeyer and completed in 1975, the giant indoor sports complex is majestic even in its neglect.
The historian Vijay Prashad, who guides much of the film, walks alone onto the central court of the arena, which is painted in solid colors and demarcated by curved white lines. The gigantic La Coupole d’Alger Arena had once intended, perhaps, to project the power of Algeria’s post-colonial order, and its commitment to radical democratic inclusion. “Just like the Mayan ruins look like they came from outer space, so do these ruins,” he says. “They produced these giant buildings, they’re so hard to maintain, they looked shabby perhaps days after they finished constructing it…How were you supposed to maintain something so enormous?”
Prashad could just as well be asking about NAM itself. Created in 1961, NAM comprised a wave of developing countries emerging from imperialism, united to forge a path forward independent of US or Soviet influence.
NAM was fueled by the common struggle and successes of its member nations in the fight against colonialism. At the Bandung Conference in 1955—a meeting of African and Asian countries that helped lay the groundwork for NAM—Indonesia’s president Sukarno gave voice to the charged moment:
Irresistible forces have swept the two continents. The mental, spiritual and political face of the whole world has been changed and the process is still not complete. There are new conditions, new concepts, new problems, new ideals abroad in the world. Hurricanes of national awakening and reawakening have swept over the land, shaking it, changing it, changing it for the better. [1]
At NAM’s meetings, this feeling was molded into common principles and purposes. NAM advocated a radical shift away from its member countries’ colonial past, demanding “the redistribution of the world’s resources, a more dignified rate of return for the labor power of their people, and a shared acknowledgment of the heritage of science, technology, and culture.”[2]
However, NAM’s spirited period was short-lived; though it flourished in the 1960s, the Movement soon began to unravel, splintering into more powerful orders. In The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, Vijay Prashad argues that the “Third World project came with a built-in flaw”[3]—the fight for national independence in former colonies required a unity across class and political order that proved brittle after independence was achieved. Once the colonial powers were uprooted, a complex reality came into being in the newly sovereign states. Former social hierarchies reestablished themselves and the class of elites that had ruled before independence reasserted their control.
Early on, pressure from the working classes and the lasting spirit of national liberation tempered political elites. But by the 1970s, the ruling class “compromise ideology…that combined the promise of equality with the maintenance of social hierarchy” was broken.[5] The people suffered a shortage of basic needs, and war and corruption begat economic crisis. Newly independent nations were encouraged to borrow capital at disadvantageous rates, and were soon pushed into default. In exchange for rolling over their debt, the International Monetary Fund demanded that their governments agree to neoliberal structural adjustments, including welfare cuts and the privatization of industry. These changes only twisted the dagger further into the heart of the Third World project:
The assassination of the Third World led to the desiccation of the capacity of the state to act on behalf of the population, an end to making the case for a new international economic order, and a disavowal of the goals of socialism. Dominant classes that had once been tethered to the Third World agenda now cut loose…An upshot of this demise of the Third World agenda was the growth of forms of cultural nationalism in the darker nations…Fundamentalist religion, race, and unreconstructed forms of class power emerged from under the wreckage.[5]
Mohaiemen charts these shifting waters in Two Meetings and a Funeral. His film is projected onto three screens side by side. In one sequence, he uses brief messages to describe how Western influence, global capitalism, and fundamentalist religion washed the Third World project away over time, and then took its place; on one screen is a title, another the year, and on the third an event:
Season of Tigers. 1975. Bangladesh’s president and family murdered in Islamist-allied coup, with alleged CIA backing. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia first to recognize new military regime in Bangladesh. 1977. As his Socialist alliance collapses, Pakistan’s Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto overthrown in CIA-backed coup. / Funeral Pyre. 1982. Bangladesh chosen as host for Nonaligned summit, starts building conference center. 1990. Nonaligned summit postponed…2013. Bangabandhu Center available to rent for events, celebrations, and trade fairs.
II.
Two Meetings and a Funeral considers how the buildings in NAM’s orbit bear history. The colossal structures that Vijay Prashad visits seem out of place, their motivating ideology abandoned. Rows of catalogue drawers at the United Nations once filled with information are now neat and hollow, and buildings like the Bangabandhu International Conference Center and the Palais de Nation are used for commercial purposes or visited as historical relics. It is uncanny to look at places designed to elevate meetings of great purpose now sitting lifeless.
How did we get here?
In conversation with Prashad, the archaeologist and writer Samia Zennadi reflects on the transformation Algeria has undergone since the era in which NAM thrived. For her generation, who lived through the charged period of anti-colonial struggle, it is now as if the ground has fallen from under their feet. Where did the Movement go? Its language remains, but the world looks so different. The older generation is split off from the younger one.
Mohaiemen’s film is split into three channels. Like the delegates of NAM—who saw their colleagues speak at the podium, but who understood their words by translation in their headsets—the audience of Two Meetings and a Funeral experiences a similar dissociation of image and language. The image of the speaker appears on one screen, and their words appear in English on another. Mohaiemen literally shapes and colors his subjects’ words, transforming them from subtitles into symbols. Language is spectacle in the NAM conferences, and in the present Algerian political discourse that Zennadi describes—so too in Mohaiemen’s film.
Zennadi points to language as an example of the stunted political discourse in Algeria. “[I]n the 1970s Algeria was a nation of Africans. Sub-Saharan Africans were present in literature, cinema, theater. But now things have dissolved into nonsense, a void. And what’s left? Yes, we still chant “Pan-Africanism.” But…[y]ou often hear Algerians say: ‘We’ve never been to Africa.’ They forget we’re on African land.”
Two Meetings and a Funeral inquires about the nature of residue. What do we make of linguistic or physical structures when they have been emptied out? When language and architecture that once burst forth with a popular anti-imperialist movement in Bangladesh, or Algeria, are now empty, or swelling with capitalist enterprise?
At the end of the film, Vijay Prashad muses that the film might bridge the gap between the old generation of NAM that built a vigorous liberation movement, and the young generation that knows little of it. And maybe it will. However, the first aim of Mohaiemen’s film is not to bridge any gap, but instead to look closely at the residue of a movement that has practically died.
Perhaps in the ballroom in the Palais de Nation, under a chair or behind a curtain, the men cleaning will find something left behind from the fourth conference of NAM. Or, in footage of Fidel Castro applauding Arafat at the 4th NAM conference, in the curve of La Coupole D’Alger Arena, we might suddenly catch the glimmer of life that animated the Third World project. In Two Meetings and a Funeral, Naeem Mohaiemen trains his eye on the drama and spectacle of history, its unexpected twists and moments of personal grace. In so doing, he draws us closer to the embers of the Third World project and asks us what it would mean to kindle them again.
Notes:
[1] Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press: New York, 2007), p.33.
[2] Ibid., xvii.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., xviii.