Derivas Analíticas Journal - Nº 20 - March 2024. ISSN:2526-2637

Fatoumata Diawara’s obscure clarity

Raquel Guimarães Lara
Psychoanalyst
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With an established musical career in Europe, but still little known in Brazil, Fatoumata Diawara, Malian actress, singer and songwriter, has stood out as one of the most recent African revelations. Her work expresses the creative pulse of a woman who combines in her voice the Wassoulou tradition, a musical genre originating from Malian folklore and led by women, with afrobeat, jazz, pop, rock, electro and even hip hop.

 On the artist's official website, she says she is one of eleven children born to Malian parents in Côte d'Ivoire in 1982. Fatoumata grew up in the 1990s in Mali's capital, Bamako, as an independent child from an early age, having become a famous child actress. In 2001, she starred in Sia, The Dream of the Python, a film by Dani Kouyaté based on an ancient myth about a young girl who runs away from her family.

Real life followed fiction and, against the wishes of her parents, who wanted her to get married, Fatoumata fled Bamako at the age of 19 to join the French street theater company Royale de Luxe. There, during rehearsals backstage, the artist sang for fun and ended up being heard by her director. Enchanted by her talent, he asked Fatoumata to sing during theatrical productions and her singing became a feature of the company's performances. Also encouraged by the public, the singer began to perform in cafés and clubs in Paris, during breaks from tours. From there to the debut of her first album, Fatou, in 2011, it was just a few steps, launching the Malian singer and guitarist as one of the biggest names in African music.

Some years later, Fatoumata Diawara released Lamomali (2017). In 2018, she released her third album, Fenfo, described by critics as “a crossroads of cultures”. The album is also accompanied by photographs and a video filmed in Ethiopia by Aida Muluneh.[1] Her most recent work was released last year, the album London Ko (2023).

Music as a language that goes beyond meaning is what marks Fatoumata Diawara's work. The artist, whose performance has already been described by Rolling Stones magazine as “hypnotic and captivating”, says she works to create beautiful melodies to convey her messages. In her songs, she addresses themes of empowerment, feminism and controversial issues such as female genital mutilation and the sale of black migrants in slave markets. Standing out as a social activist, Fatoumata is an important voice in the struggles of African women, with a trajectory that highlights her resistance as a black woman, in the face of conservative customs and impositions on the female population of her country.

Her songs are mainly sung in Bambara, her native language. On her official website, the artist explains: “I didn't want to sing in English or French because I wanted to respect my African heritage”.[2] And in an interview with the website Dirty Rock, she adds: “People connect with my music. It's amazing to see how people get so excited about certain melodies without knowing the meaning of the lyrics. But that's the magic of music. After all, music is, in itself, an international language.”[3]

Wisnik (2017) in his book Sound and Sense points out a threshold of music that places it inside and outside of history; music speaks at the same time to the horizon of society and to the subjectivity of each person, without allowing itself to be reduced to other languages.

Music does not refer to or name visible things, as verbal language does, but points with all its own strength to the non-verbalizable; it crosses certain defensive networks that consciousness and crystallized language oppose to its action and touches effective points of connection between the mental and the corporal, the intellectual and the affective. For this reason, it is capable of provoking the most passionate adhesion and the most violent refusals. (WISNIK, 2017, p. 30)

Music as sound that holds something unspeakable is what articulates Fatoumata's work to the dark continent of femininity, a different territory that does not translate into any shared path of meaning. When commenting on Freud's expression (1926/2017, p. 240) that “the sexual life of an adult woman is a dark continent for Psychology”, Clotilde Leguil (2019) highlights the relevance of the Freudian metaphor of the dark continent, even though the contemporary presents itself as an era of knowing all. She finds that this dark continent does not refer to a question of failure of psychoanalytic knowledge, but to the encounter with a different territory. She says: “It is this obscure clarity of femininity, its brightness and its irremediable opacity that present themselves to our eyes” (LEGUIL, 2019, p. 6).

Fatoumata's music presents to our eyes and ears the encounter with a different territory, which, however clear it may be, is invisible and impalpable:

Music, being an order that is constructed of sounds, in perpetual appearance and disappearance, escapes the tangible sphere and lends itself to identification with another order of reality : this makes people attribute to it, in the most diverse cultures, the properties of the spirit itself. (WISNIK, 2017, p. 30)

In Fatoumata Diawara's work, the melody arrives first, mesmerizing the audience. But her lyrics and the images in her music videos indicate a reality from which it is necessary not to retreat, as they embody a strange, uncanny real, calling on her listeners to think about Africa from a different perspective, in a transmission of the ungraspable that presents itself in the customs and experiences of the African people. What the artist teaches us is how not to retreat when faced with the feminine, “the place of that Other thing, littoral, open sea without limits that inhabits us” (FUENTES, 2020, p. 3-4). The music video and song in this issue of the magazine feature NTERINI, from her album Fenfo, which translates as “something to say”.

References

FREUD, S. A questão da análise leiga. Conversas com uma pessoa imparcial. In: Obras Incompletas de Sigmund Freud: Fundamentos da clínica psicanalítica. Vol. 6. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2017. (Trabalho original publicado em 1926).

FUENTES, M. J. F. O feminino e o infamiliar. Disponível em: https://www.encontrobrasileiro2020.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Sota-Fuentes-O-feminino-e-o-infamiliar.pdf. Acesso em: 20 fev. 2024.

LEGUIL, C. Lacan, messenger de la féminité. Ornicar?: Dark Continent, n. 52, jan. 2019. 

WISNIK, J. M. O som e o sentido: uma outra história das músicas. 3. ed. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2017.

Notes

[1] About this artist, see the Editorial in this issue of Derivas Analíticas.

[2] Cf.: https://fatoumatadiawara.com/la-biographie/

[3] Cf.: https://www.dirtyrock.info/2023/10/fatoumata-diawara-jazzmadrid-villanos-entrevista/

English version by Ana Helena Souza.