Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Nayola, by José Miguel Ribeiro: when an animation film opens up forbidden memories

This review was originally published in French in Politique Africaine (n°171/172, 2023-3). A shorter version was sent for publication to the African Review Journal.

“Here, even the past is unpredictable,” under this provocative title Christine Messiant (1998) highlighted the obstacles faced by historians in writing a history of Angolan nationalism that was not simply a perpetuation of the official historiography of the hegemonic ruling party MPLA (Movement for the Liberation of Angola). Writing at a time when the cease-fire signed in 1991 had burst into pieces and the civil war opposing the MPLA to its sworn enemy UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) raging again in the highlands of Angola, Messiant had experienced at the first person the rule of silence, made both of the brutality of censorship and of the subtle consent of selfcensorship.

With his film Nayola, José Miguel Ribeiro echoes Messiant’s (p. 178) quest for the “truth of the facts”. He plunges us into the lives of three women who, each in their own way, struggle with the silences of a story that cannot be told.

Yara, the daughter, cries out in sharp rap lyrics her anger at the corruption and impunity of those in power. Chased by the police during the hustle and bustle of Carnival in February 2011 (at the dawn of the Arab Spring, soon to be felt in Luanda), she takes refuge in her teenage bedroom at the back of her grandmother’s house. The old woman hides her grief under an imperturbable mask. She lost her husband and brother in the war against the Portuguese, then her daughter and son-in-law in the civil war. Nayola, finally, the mother, lives in the Angolan bush in 1995. She abandoned her two-year-old daughter Yara to find her husband, who “disappeared in combat”. “You don’t just disappear,” she insists. But the resigned wisdom of her comrades-in-arms gradually gets the better of her: “Here, people disappear very slowly, sometimes even before they die”. Like Messiant, Nayola explores the grey areas between memory and oblivion.

“Here, people disappear very slowly, sometimes even before they die”

But whereas Messiant’s approach was to delve into the archives of the Portuguese political police and gather first-hand documents and testimonies, Ribeiro proposes fiction, engaging his poetry in all the dimensions permitted by an animated film: poetry of drawing, with aesthetics ranging from quasi-photographic reproduction to calligraphic brushstrokes; poetry of music, thanks to an electrifying soundtrack blending iconic tracks from the revolutionary music of the 1960s with the most contemporary Angolan rap; poetry, finally, of a screenplay, written by Virgílio Almeida based on a play by two monuments of contemporary Luso-African literature: José Eduardo Agualusa (Angola) and Mia Couto (Mozambique).

From a filmic point of view, Nayola is a gem of inventiveness. Each heroine is drawn in a different style: Lelena, the grandmother, with her gray complexion and geometric face crossed by wrinkles that tell us as much about her age as about her worries; Nayola, the mother, with her angular, highly stylized face and sharp colors; and Yara, the daughter, whose light-blue eyes inhabit cheekbones drawn in the manner of a Tchokwe mask.

Nayola, Yara and Lelela, three drawing techniques for three different ways to cope with the forbidden memories of the Angolan war. From the pedagogical pamphlet accompanying Nayola (2023).

This graphic research is placed at the service of the story, which straddles two eras. Nayola’s itinerant journey in the late 1990s, when she joins a battalion (whether it is MPLA or UNITA is never revealed), takes place in two-dimensional natural landscapes, painted in broad strokes on brightly colored backdrops. Yara’s urban wanderings in 2011, on the other hand, are treated in a more realistic three-dimensional animation, teeming with details familiar to anyone who knows Luanda.

Between the two worlds, Ribeiro ventures into striking graphic experimentation, blending documentary and fiction. A magnificent musical interlude seizes on original archive images (photos and videos) in which Nayola’s silhouette has been embedded, strung along columns of war-displaced people, caught by soldiers with guns on their shoulders or crossing minefields. A little later, in a burst of liberating rage, Nayola destroys some exoticizing and racist azuleijos which, for the purposes of fiction, appear to be buried in the ruins of a half-destroyed palace, but which in fact still hang in a room in Luanda’s military history museum.

Nayola mobilizes all the resources of animated cinema to explore the constant shifts between past and present, fiction and reality, and the unspoken and the unseen. The film follows in the footsteps of the magic realism so prevalent in Angolan literature, which is gradually taking hold in the cinema, notably in the productions of the Geração 80 group, which has established itself in recent years as one of the leading production companies in African auteur cinema (notably with the films Ar Condicionado, by Fradique, released in 2020, and Nossa Senhora da Loja do Chinês, by Ery Clever, released in 2022). In fact, this is one of Nayola‘s feats: to establish itself as an Angolan film, even though the production is technically based in Europe.

Agualusa, Angolan writer and co-author of the play that inspired the film, says: “I suspect that most Angolans will feel a similar emotion when they watch the film. The images of Luanda, the characters’ voices, their accents and language, even the way they move, evoke an immediate recognition: this is, without a doubt, an Angolan film.” (Nayola, press kit, p. 7). This is partly due to the fact that the actresses who lent their voices to the characters were free to say the text in their own words. Recorded at the Geração 80 studios in Luanda, the dubbing is effectively imbued with the linguistic mannerisms of Angola today, far removed from the stereotypical Lisbon accent that dominates mainstream Portuguese cartoons.

Over and above the question of blocked memories and intergenerational taboos, it’s the issue of speech at its most political that pierces every scene: how can we invent a language to convey the untransmissible?

“I’ll tell you if I ever remember anything”

So when Nayola holds up a photo of her missing husband to one of her comrades-in-arms, and the latter replies “I’ll tell you if I ever remember anything”, it’s not an admission of a failing memory, but a challenge: “I’ll tell you what you want to know when I deem you trustworthy”. How many times have I heard versions of this phrase during my interviews in Luanda!

Sometimes the humor is more direct: Nayola and his comrades-in-arms have been taken prisoner. Tied to a tree trunk, they realize they are about to be executed one by one when one of the soldiers recognizes his captor: “-My nephew? -My uncle? After the surprise of finding themselves enemies on a battlefield, the nephew finally delivers his uncle. The soldiers in charge of executions are about to return, but the uncle doesn’t run away, he slaps his nephew across the face: “-And now you’re going home with me!” The good-natured gesture elicits a wry laugh, as all the absurdity of the Angolan civil war seems to be contained in this slap.

This funny yet terrible discrepancy continues in the contemporary scenes. When Yara discovers her grandmother serving soup to the burglar who has broken into their home, the old woman lies without batting an eyelid: “Who is this man, mamã? -He’s a neighbor from the old days.” But is it really a lie? In Nayola, memories intrude on the present like masked burglars. A photo stained with nail polish symbolizes the memory that is maintained with nail varnish remover, while Yara’s rap CDs, for which she is hounded by the police, scatter across the floor like her grandmother’s dreams of independence,

Because its political charge never evaporates, the film avoids the risks of aestheticizing war, and takes its place in the great library of Angolan fiction that transforms political sociology into a work of art.

Messiant, Christine, 1998, " Chez nous même le passé est imprévisible " L'expérience d'une recherche sur le nationalisme angolais, et particulièrement le MPLA ; sources, critique, besoins actuels de la recherche, Lusotopie, V, pp. 157-197.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Chloé Buire (December 17, 2024). Nayola, by José Miguel Ribeiro: when an animation film opens up forbidden memories. Luanda Micro Lab. Retrieved April 19, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12xy2


You may also like...

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.