A poetics of opacity: disability, race and gender in Khady Sylla’s Une fenêtre ouverte

Abstract

ABSTRACT Une fenêtre ouverte/An Open Window (2005), a documentary by the Senegalese writer and filmmaker Khady Sylla, offers an intimate, unsettling portrait of the mental health difficulties suffered by both Sylla and her friend, Aminta Ngom. This article reads Sylla’s film as embracing Black female disabled subjectivities that have been historically constructed – through intersecting patriarchal, colonialist and ableist regimes – as abject or aberrant. While scholarship on Sylla’s film has addressed ideas of female madness, it has not engaged with (Black feminist) disability studies – a critical lacuna addressed here. Drawing on ideas of opacity (Glissant), ‘mad methodology’ (Bruce) and Black feminist disabled perspectives that question emancipatory or healing coherence (Pickens, Nack Ngue), the article reads Sylla’s film in terms of a poetics of opacity that opens to a cripping of cinematic time and space. While focusing on a relationship of female friendship, solidarity and care that offers refuge from fraught familial dynamics, the film’s empathy is capacious, extending to Aminta’s mother and daughter too. As Une fenêtre ouverte traces the tensions that structure these various relationships, it reveals its feminist approach, its mode of feeling in solidarity, to be one that embraces strategies of opacity and ethical ambiguities.