Foresight and Aftermath: Matthew DeBord on Salem Mekuria's Ye Wonz Maibel (Deluge)
By now, the narratives are familiar: depictions of suffering, essays on shattered hopes and unchecked violence, hopeless pleas for Utopia, warfare and skirmishes, starvation, Western intervention. Skeletal memento mori. Mass graves. Empty landscapes. Roads decorated with the hulks of trucks and tanks. Even the usual cast of characters, within the context of this artificial legend, remains consistent, whether the film comes from deadpan moralist Werner Herzog, or from the more straightforward PBS Frontline recounting of the 1993 American military debacle in Somalia. Citizens of the bush vie for space with imperial kitsch (the former supply the Western cliches, the latter expose the absurd pomposity of tinhorn African oligarchs); exchange students dressed like Midwestern overachievers compete with martial junta drones in fatigues. Everyone looks sadly corsetted by circumstances, preserved in celluloid amber by the filmmakers' imposition of a unity on the story of events. Their afros date their politics, their naivete ensures their remorse. Salem Mekuria's recounting of her and her family's involvement with the overthrow of Hallie Selassie's Ethiopia in the late 1960s and 1970s falls into any of a number of documentary traps, but Mekuria manages to evade most of the usual charges—that her project is illustration rather than analysis, that her work has already been done by the news media—by relentlessly imposing her personal motives on what is essentially a very objective retelling of a now miserably common tale. At the core of her story is her relationship with her brother, who while Mekuria was in the United States, participated first in the revolutionary ferment that abruptly vanquished Selassie from his Empire in 1973, then in the increasingly divided effort to establish a new state in Ethiopia's ancient geography. Soft coup— as anyone acquainted with the basic progressions of African post-colonial politics will anticipate—is followed by hard coup, military dictatorship, a splintering of the socialist ideal that drove the revolution, and a gradual buildup to